The future of our forum - facebook versus web forums

[marty]

Out of courisoty went here:
http://neptronix.org/
Saw this picture.

cropped-57cdd9b81573a02e5c5540ac4b26ac9c1_1000w.png

That must be the linux server at AWS that runs this forum.

Then I see a link to a Youtube page.
See a video.
How circumcision has hurt my relationships & why i'm restoring my foreskin.

Watched a few seconds. God please help you! Really I don't think it will grow back

Me I am also circumcised and I love my wiener just the way it is. Also been looking at different forums on the internet. phpBB forums are a lot like my penis. I love them just the way that they are.

Arguing about different forum software is like comparing Fords and Chevy's. If you got a Ford? Just drive it. Maintain it. And BE HAPPY!

[neptronix]

Please keep further comments about me as a person to another thread. That's neither appropriate nor useful to this discussion, Marty.

[Slipstream]

Hi all ... Please... not arsebook.

[Dauntless]

Worry not, he didn't seem to LITERALLY mean Facebook, he was talking about the evolving formats best illustrated by, YIKES! If you don't like the FORMAT, then say 'Not Like Facebook.' But I'm sure there was no intent to flush us all over to there.

On the off chance there WAS serious thought of just going there, you just got a tip off on how the "Courier-ousity" seeks can behave, yeah, you can't talk about anything there without huge numbers being ridiculously entertained about serious matters. I can think of the things that it's not good to bring up on Facebook because of the stupid comments that might go on for years. Everyone just has to say something, especially when they've been drinking.

Let's just say some of the nonsense of nearly 3 months with too much time on the hands of too many people really has me thinking about just how bad Facebook must be right now. YIKES!

[neptronix]

FYI, the vanilla forums team hasn't responded to my requests for a while. Unfortunately this is stalled for now.

[aluminumwelder]

facebook sucks, keep the forum here. Unless you find a way to make every facebook book come up here and vice versa.

[neptronix]

I checked out xenoforo recently and it has a nice wysiwyg editor.
I think actually this would be a good platform for ES to move to although it costs actual money..

Vanilla forums and flarum are both out as candidates :/

Any opinions on xenforo?

[marty]

I checked out xenoforo recently and it has a nice wysiwyg editor.
I think actually this would be a good platform for ES to move to although it costs actual money..

Vanilla forums and flarum are both out as candidates :/

Any opinions on xenforo?

Would it be possible to transfer all content, text, pictures, members, passwords, etc from this phpBB forum to a new XenForo forum?

Wow with the internet I can answer my questions before I ask them.
https://xenforo.com/xf1-docs/manual/importing/

Docs » Importing

Importing

XenForo has the ability to import information from other forums, including users, forums, threads, posts and private messages, along with various other data.

This can be extremely useful if you are migrating your forum from another software package, or if your forum needs to merge with, or absorb another forum site.

At the time of writing, XenForo 1 supports importing data from the following sources:

XenForo 1.2+
vBulletin 3.6, 3.7/3.8, and 4.x
IP.Board 3.1, 3.2/3.3, 3.4, and 4.0/4.1/4.2
phpBB 3.0.x, 3.1.x, 3.2.x
MyBB 1.6/1.8
SMF 2.0

To see if I like XenForo, I would have to join a forum like this one.
https://xenforo.com/community/
And see if I could figure out how to make a post. First impressions are that the one XenForo forum I looked at is not much different then this phpBB forum. I like free software.

[neptronix]

I have not done a test on XenForo to see what % of our content translates ( i'd have to buy a license ), but i imagine the % is very high because it appears to be a very refined platform.

Things that i am very sure won't translate:

1) captions on uploaded images
2) the ability to change the thread title after posting
3) the ability to change the thread title on a per-post basis
4) 100% of the backend settings
5) Those little 'post icons' for threads/posts.

Things that might be lost in the translation, but might be able to be reconstituted:

1) PMs - if these cannot be translated then I will come up with a way to archive and review them, since this forum has 14 years of those!
2) Avatars
3) Signatures
4) User profile fields such as location, your website, etc..
5) Your user ranking, IE whether you are a AAA battery or basically the sun

What i know would HAVE to be reconstituted and CAN be reconstituted:

1) Our custom smilies - fixable with some database/regex-fu
2) Youtube embeds - also database/regex-fu
3) Special formatting/BBCode - do i get to translate this? hopefully not!


XenForo is very promising and i am in the early stages of investigating it. If it lives up to the hype, it's a slam dunk for what will become endless sphere 2.0. I'm quite excited about it and will be taking a crack at it soon. If things go well, there will be a lot of exciting things in store for 2021.

[neptronix]

So my own business has been out of control busy lately and i have not had time to play with Xenforo.
I'm looking to clear off my plate of non-urgent requests by the end of the month so that i can get cracking on the testing part of Xenforo for ES in early January 2021.

Just wanted to leave a little note that i'm still on this.

[nicobie]

Cool! Thank you.

[neptronix]

I have some good news to report.

I'm close to complete with a process of looking over plugins available for XenForo to make XenForo behave like what we are used to.
The phpbb developer community seems to have taken a liking to XenForo, and as a result, many features we have here are available as add-ons.. in addition to all the juicy stuff XenForo already offers.

Most importantly, the moderator tools are gazillions of times better. It allows a moderator to have a better overview of a user's recent activity before making a decision. That's huge, and will lead to more fair and clear moderation here.

We are still on track for a test conversion in February.