Your wish list for ES in 2024

I never, ever use those services as they are simply data harvesting aggregators.
While I mostly agree, that partly depends on the setup of the linked service. I would hope if we offered this we would not just harvest excess info. How much control we have over that I don't know.

Cheers
 
While I mostly agree, that partly depends on the setup of the linked service. I would hope if we offered this we would not just harvest excess info. How much control we have over that I don't know.

The problem:
Users don't have normal accounts on our system. If the third party provider goes out of business or changes their terms, we have to devote significant resources to find a way to get those users back.

We and our users don't get anything out of the deal except for dependency on these platforms and a very small reduction in signup friction ( it still exists ).
 
No idea what ya'all are using for back end hardware (leased, rented, own your own whatev) in any case if it comes up useful...

I have a pallet of Supermicro server chassis that I am never going to use. These are open chassis (no mandatory power supply etc) which support 48 internal mount external access hard drive bays. So 48 available hot swap bays. These mirror up to a few cards very well and basically any hot swap compatible raid cards will work, just a matter of making sure you can make cabling work. It supports port to port, port to bay or port to bay grouping cabling and I think I have all of the above that works with Areca cards (I may even have a spare Areca I can toss in if it is useful)

I have one of these humming away and swapped out the mb to a low poer Supermicro server board that dropped the concurrent draw to about 150w but that is because I have it mounted in a rack at my house, wanted to keep from over-loading the service here.

If you have use for such I will donate it shipped to the lower 48 my cost. Consider it sheer gratefulness for being accepted into an awesome group.
 
No idea what ya'all are using for back end hardware (leased, rented, own your own whatev) in any case if it comes up useful...

I have a pallet of Supermicro server chassis that I am never going to use. These are open chassis (no mandatory power supply etc) which support 48 internal mount external access hard drive bays. So 48 available hot swap bays. These mirror up to a few cards very well and basically any hot swap compatible raid cards will work, just a matter of making sure you can make cabling work. It supports port to port, port to bay or port to bay grouping cabling and I think I have all of the above that works with Areca cards (I may even have a spare Areca I can toss in if it is useful)

I have one of these humming away and swapped out the mb to a low poer Supermicro server board that dropped the concurrent draw to about 150w but that is because I have it mounted in a rack at my house, wanted to keep from over-loading the service here.

If you have use for such I will donate it shipped to the lower 48 my cost. Consider it sheer gratefulness for being accepted into an awesome group.
WOW :)

Way back in the beginning of the internet, My web friend had all his own servers and a $$$$$$ phone line as big as your arm. He was always updating, fixing, and complaining what it cost to run his own servers. It all reminded me of buying a cow or letting someone else deal with the cows and farming and just buying a gallon of milk. He finally took my advise and he now uses other companies BIG server farms.

Might be fun to own a cow?
 
I appreciate the offer, but we use amazon web services because i cannot beat their uptime. :/
 
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Could a banner be added to the account name that shows who the original tread poster is? Sometimes when I'm deep into a thread I lose track of who started the conversation.
 
Could a banner be added to the account name that shows who the original tread poster is? Sometimes when I'm deep into a thread I lose track of who started the conversation.

We had a plugin that did that but it broke our statistics and froze them in time..
It would def be worthwhile to find another plugin that does that.

And also, find some way to permanently fixate the thread title in the top bar... hopefully a reminder to stay on topic, lol..
 
Do you have any idea, even a tiny one, of what could break the statistics like that?

If you do, you could point me at the plugin's source and I could skim thru it to see where it might have stuff that messes with that. I don't know how to write this code (or really anything modern) but sometimes I can recognize things, if I know what I'm looking for. If I found that "stuff" perhaps you'd have a *slightly* easier time of finding and fixing the broken stuff?
 
I appreciate the offer but Xenforo's code is extremely complex and it would take a number of years of working with PHP to read/understand it, as well as a dozen IDE tabs open and mentally stitching together what's going on.

We have to use special debugging tools to step through execution because there is little hope of following what the code is doing by reading the code.

It's nowhere near PHPBB where a novice could look at one file top to bottom and understand what's going on at least.


But there exist gazillions of plugins for Xenforo as it's became the most popular message board software in the last couple years. If you'd be interested in browsing their plugin catalog and throwing me a list of things to check out, that would be really helpful!
 
If it comes to a break point do let me know. My buddy who is in Chemo currently is about 20 feet from me. He is a premiere level PHP coder. Premiere level essentially means that in a consulting service you have your list of "best in the industry" people, you always hope that you can entice them into working with you because then you get the fat loots contracts. In any case, Chemo Boy was premiere level for 3 dif agencies, so even feeling cruddy and dealing with Chemo, odds on if you get stuck, he can unstick ya.
 
Thanks but we don't have skill issues, we have a system that just takes a long time to work with as a consequence of it's mid-high complexity and huge dataset.. therefore we have to prioritize what we are doing under the hood for maximum bang/buck.

That being said!

I'm still interested in hearing requests so i can figure out which ones can be stuffed into the next work round!
 
I have 3 deliverables by Wed. Hence up late, gonna final out one of those today, Wed Night I should have the code I promised off to you, and will toss in the list of things I have found useful/desireable on sites. I am just not a web guy so my skillset ends with things I found cool, and offering the loan of some coder time. And for the record, that was not an unsolicited loan, We have both benefitted from this site and always strongly believe in giving back.
 
Cool... what code did you promise me?
 
Search system that we built using the google local archive system. It does a fairly good job and per Cancer man, it actually will work as a bulk plugin for any search system that allows and I drifted off.. actually had to do work stuff, but yeah, I know we put a lot of effort into it for a client.. who then decided to just keep running the software that was so old the hardware it was last validated has been out of service for 15 years.....
 
Interesting. Send me a PM about this when you get a moment.
 
Here's the list so far. I'm going to add a few items i think will be non-controversial.

User requests:
  1. Way better search ( a project of it's own )
    1. Add google option first
    2. Easier search inside thread capability
    3. Rework engine for way better results
  2. Dark mode : light mode feature parity and improvements
  3. AW's moderation feature list ( needs discussing internally )
  4. Knowledgebase system ( users wanted this more than a store )
  5. Find a way to return the first poster indication

    My adds:

  6. Hire a professional to help us make a new color scheme that riffs off the existing one
  7. Finally launch the categorization improvement software & project
  8. Necroposting warning and confirmation near reply box
  9. Low seller reputation warning near reply box in online market
  10. More prominent display of topic in threads

    Justin's adds from the past that would fit in this design:

  11. Search for posts by a user in given thread
  12. Customized forum icons ( neptronix makes the vector set )
  13. Category images ( neptronix makes the vector set )
  14. Require setting a country flag at signup / when logged in and display flag in posts for context, autodetected via geoip initially
  15. Force first post in sales category to require confirmation of selling rules
  16. Force new users to read rules on signup


Anything else in our user list? speak now or keep your peace!
 
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So …. I can come up with a long list of ideas …
(Pretty dames, and lots of ‘em!!!)

…but:

Isn’t the best solution to adopt the best existing off the shelf solution and configure it as well as we can, and avoid customization as much as possible…

I’m reading about PHP coding and other items and worry about sustainability and costs.

In the end, user preferences rarely equate to needs. We will adapt …
 
Isn’t the best solution to adopt the best existing off the shelf solution and configure it as well as we can, and avoid customization as much as possible…

That's what we're currently doing however we want to tick off the most effective customizations we can make and stop there.
Xenforo has a lot of problems stock, esp the search..

I’m reading about PHP coding and other items and worry about sustainability and costs.

PHP is the least expensive programming language to hire programmers for actually, and also it's fast enough you don't have to spend much if any time optimizing. Anything else takes more hours at a higher labor rate.

That's because it's the only programming language designed specifically to build web backends. Everything else is adapted after the fact and the fit to the domain is nowhere near as smooth.

Source: i manage 3 dev shops and we've experimented with everything.

The problem is how modern software is structured ( insane ).
But it's still *a lot* cheaper to buy and customize than building a platform from scratch even considering this bloat.


Anyway what are your suggestions?
 
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