Our little comminuity: going forward

1

I don’t know about you guys but I’ve always felt phpbb was kinda bad. The searching is bad, the UI is just too much of everything, and it has so many features no normal person would ever need, while the basic functionality actually related to discussion is sorely lacking.

I think the time has come to move past it. And after poking around a bit I think Discourse is the only viable option: https://discourse.tt-rss.org/

Unfortunately (or not, I’m not sure) I can’t just bulk import our forum data into Discourse because it only supports mysql phpbb import for some reason. However, given the sheer amount of obsolete information here, maybe it’s for the best, really.

Therefore, the plan for phpbb is as follows: I’m going to set it as read only and block new user registrations. It’s going to stay up as an archive as long as it’s not that painful to keep it up. All new discussion and support requests should go through Discourse.

Old forums are going to be available at Tiny Tiny RSS - Index page, /forum URL is going to redirect to Discourse.

e: Current RSS feeds are going to point to Discourse.

3

The UI is so clean and responsive.

I think what I’m going to do next is spam the new forum by copy/pasting all of my previous responses to get my post counts back up. :slight_smile:

4

yeah rip my 6300 posts :frowning:

5

I thought you were trying to put your past behind you… :wink:

6

i was trying to put phpbb behind me, not necessarily my pointless achievements in shitposting!

7

well, I’m sure if you spend a couple of minutes, you could convert the old phpbb db into something that the mysql importer for this would digest.

8

That’s kinda sad. Years of shitposting gone down the drain.
On a serious note though, I think we are going to see a lot of questions being asked that have been answered on phpbb already. Let’s be honest here no one is going to bother to dig trough discourse and phpbb if they weren’t able to use the search in the first place.

Edit: Then again having discourse definitely is an upgrade.

By the way: Did you assign more resources to gitlab since tt-rss.org first moved from redmine to gitlab? It does feel a lot snappier now than it did back then.

9

There is a distinct lack of bears.

10

There’s always going to be some pain when migrating, but I think it’s worth it in the end. We can always link to the old posts or even copy/paste the content as questions come up.

To be completely honest, I agree with fox that the search in phpBB was horrible. It was pretty difficult to find issues that were less than common or not pinned.

11

True that.
I hope fox will be able to bear the amount of user coming to the forums crying.

Maybe we should skim the old forums and start threads regarding the topics most commonly asked.

By the way I don’t see categories for Tiny Tiny IRC. Is it dead?

12

Fox mentioned he’d upgraded gitlab too. the new version was supposed to be better performing.

13

[quote=“randompherret, post:9, topic:18, full:true”]
There is a distinct lack of bears.[/quote]

well, get to work fixing that… chop chop.

14

Re: search, I did notice that Google results are obviously still pointing at the old forum URL, which will now drop you to the front page of this forum. An intelligent user will just grab the URL and change it from /forum/ to /oldforum/, and those are the only ones that come here. :slight_smile:

Looking forward to the flurry of bear posts in the near future.

15

Good point. Maybe fox can update Nginx to something (roughly, requires tweaking) like:

location = /forum {
    return 301 [... discourse...];
}

location ~ /forum/(.+) {
    return 301 /oldforum/$1;
}

That should keep the site in Google’s good books while still redirecting people who may have bookmarked the old forum to the new URL.

16

I like the extra huge emoticons in the rss feed

17

even the emoticons are HD, welcome to $current_year!

18

Maybe fox can update Nginx to something (roughly, requires tweaking) like

not sure if it is the best idea tbh, old forums are here when we need to reference a post or something, but people should be directed to discourse first

i can easily imagine someone opening a google search result, never noticing the url changes or stickies pointing to discord because phpbb UI is terrible and it’s impossible to find anything in the UI overflowing with random blue shit, trying to reply or register or whatever and realizing none of that is possible

in any case /oldforum/ is still linked at the frontpage and a sticky here, so it’s easy enough to find and for search engines to adapt, if anything i might need to block it in robots.txt so that it would gradually fade away from search results

i mean even if we suffer some extra posts here well it’s more bears to feed isn’t it

19

I, for one, welcomes the new and improved forums. It no longer feels like the 1990s! :slight_smile:

Thank you @fox.

20

Oh dear. Didn’t expect to see Discourse - we ended up having to move away from it for various reasons a while back.

Don’t think any of them will apply here though, so it should work for you.