Would you be willing to crowdfund ES development?

mettleramiel said:

Just looking at the number of views this thread has, I'm curious if you might get a better response pinning this thread to the top of each page rather than making it a sticky. I know, personally, I skip right over all stickies and only found this by accident.

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Sticky? Does anyone read them? IMO they are overlooked by most. I like them but do believe that most miss them...

neptronix said:

I never considered that. What makes bbpress/buddypress better than phpbb?
Do you have an example forum you can show?

Wordpress is also a monoculture and usually has serious unpatched security issues at any given time. Something that sits on it would have to be REALLY REALLY good in order for me to consider moving us that way.

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I can't speak to the security issues in WordPress, but I've seen a good number of plugins that can help make the system stronger. I figure with half the websites on the internet running on WordPress, it can't be that hard to secure it and keep it safe. It's not as bad as Drupal anyway :lol:

As for the plugins, BuddyPress is nice in that it has all the modern features of any social network (which you can turn on or off depending on your preferences). It can also use bbPress to implement a forum within the larger social network. bbPress can natively import phpbb v3.x data without any additional plugins or utilities. Of course you can run just bbPress on WordPress without BuddyPress, but I think the features in BuddyPress are worth it. Both plugins are made by the folks who make WordPress so they are highly stable and integrate smoothly with WordPress.

One advantage to going this route is that you can have a public-facing site that has a blog, events, store, whatever you want. Then you have the community and forum features—that can be behind a login if you want—that also uses two-factor authentication or captcha (if you want to add additional security to the user-side of the site).

I even own licensing for a really feature-rich front-end theme that I had originally purchased for one of my websites (ebiker.co) which I am no longer using. Since it's not running on my site any more, if you like the theme, I'll transfer the license codes to you for free for use here.

Okay, i looked over bbpress.
The site doesn't do a good job of selling it's attributes, that's for sure.

One thing that does seem to stand out is that maybe it has a wysiwyg editor.. a plus.
And now, we read the fine print about phpbb importation..
https://codex.bbpress.org/getting-started/importing-data/import-forums/phpbb/

No File attachments are imported.
User 'Personal Messages (PM's) are not supported or imported
User 'Avatars are also not supported 'out of the box' by either WordPress or bbPress..
phpBB Signatures, location, occupation, and interests custom profile fields are also not supported by wordpress or bbpress 'out of the box'

This is the problem we've had with every other forum software. One critical piece is always missing.
Vanilla forums and discourse come closest to properly importing our data. Basically a prerequisite to using them is to reverse engineer both database formats and fix the convertor. That's a mega nasty programming job i'd like to avoid doing.

Also wordpress is a monoculture and so it has the most exploitation attempts by far. In our server logs, i see shit tons of attempts to attack wordpress every hour, and we don't even have wordpress installed. Actually, wordpress has a bug that's been outstanding for 7 months, where anyone with an 'author' or higher authentication can go and delete any file that the apache/nginx/etc has access to. Brilliant, huh? :lol:

Okay, with the virtual pledges i see today, i see that we could at least cover the hosting bill, but not that plus develpment.
Our hosting bill is rather high due to the sheer amount of content we have. ( almost 11 years worth! )

I am going to work on reducing our storage needs and have decided to fork phpbb with the next revision to add some features while we wait for *crosses fingers* vanilla forums.

I will address what changes are coming this year in a future thread.

neptronix said:

Okay, with the virtual pledges i see today, i see that we could at least cover the hosting bill, but not that plus develpment.
Our hosting bill is rather high due to the sheer amount of content we have. ( almost 11 years worth! )

I am going to work on reducing our storage needs and have decided to fork phpbb with the next revision to add some features while we wait for *crosses fingers* vanilla forums.

I will address what changes are coming this year in a future thread.

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How about actually setting up a pledge link and then you can find out directly what kind of funding you can raise? (Or is it posted and I've missed it somehow?) What people say and what they do aren't always the same thing. Polls have limitations.

I can't make such big changes myself without approval.
I also wouldn't want to take anyone's money without providing a solid plan.

Just testing the waters.

neptronix said:

I can't make such big changes myself without approval.
I also wouldn't want to take anyone's money without providing a solid plan.

Just testing the waters.

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I suspect that most people who would donate would be fine with a general outline of the intent and use and trust your's and "the powers that be's" judgement.

I'm totally willing to donate as required, but I'm also not a fan of monthly payments. This is an important resource to me and many others though, so I may be willing to bend on that in this case.

As for hosting costs, I may be able to help with finding a good deal on that, especially as this is a not for profit venture. If you can let me know the hosting requirements here or in a PM I'll ask around, hopefully some money can be saved there that can be put to use elsewhere.

Just put some harmless ads in the site and get it over with. Most people have ad blockers anyways.

Hurry the frock up and decide while summer is on and we’re making money...

This has got to be the tightest wadbunch offolks I’ve ever met. Hiding behind DYI to keep from paying the price they would expect for their work. The sort thatbuy abeerin a tavern and lease the 25 cent change. 20% is just to much. Every tip,dependent and every committed resellers nightmare. Jeebus. You can’t take it with you.

tomjasz said:

This has got to be the tightest wadbunch offolks I’ve ever met. Hiding behind DYI to keep from paying the price they would expect for their work.

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I'm not sure how you conclude that. Please explain.

Hi, I came to this topic as it mentioned moving to Discourse platform..

So, as I understand the current problems are that some data gets lost in the process?

Also - How much extra cost does it add to yearly expenses, when whole forum is based on Discourse? As I understand .. it works in a way that there is a fee / royalties to pay, to use the discourse platform, right?

Non the less.. Would be really interested in seeing this forum grow and adapt improved platform layout and interface.

This forum works as it is now.. but the current style of PHP BB forum layout just makes finding and searching for info cumbersome, at times..

I'm down for $5/mo, send me an email when you start.