Song Fight Forum Update, opinions wanted

[jb]

The version of PHPBB here is a few point releases old.

But it's a pain in the ass to upgrade, most likely. (They claim it's a button-click but in my experience that is lies because software.)

Also, I haven't checked to make sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if an upgrade would break the weekly fight review script too, so that's more of a pain in the ass to put back into place. That is, assuming folks want to keep that script (I *think* a few people use it. I didn't build any logging in of course.)

There's also other software for running boards, most specifically discourse.org.

This is your chance to weigh in, if you care, on whether, when, how, and what to change/upgrade/whatever on the Song Fight message boards. Act now while I'm paying attention to this, because it comes in waves and next week I may not be able to be arsed.

I'm putting this in Monkey Business so that you get the correct expecation-- this is conversation and ideas, not direction or imminent change.

Oh, and if this prompts you to go all "LET'S BUILD A NEW SITE COMPLETELY" on me, well, you have fun building your castle in the sky while I stay down here on earth.

Ok, go.

JB

[Paco Del Stinko]

What's wrong with this? I'm sure the Fluffy types can get all codey and shit, but this works alright, doesn't it? Of course, I still don't know how to post pictures and stuff, so you get where I'm at. I'll step aside saying "works for me!"

[JonPorobil]

I don't use the review script, and I'm not that familiar with any of the background software that PHPBB depends on, so I'm not sure any of the possible changes would affect me.

Nonetheless, coming from a tech support background, I get the appeal of the "If it ain't broke" approach.

What would be some of the upsides of bringing the board current? What new features are we missing out on?

[jb]

I dunno man, we're at 3 oh 9 and the latest is 3 oh 12. feel free to go look

[Lunkhead]

I think switching to Discourse would be super awesome. However, it looks very non-trivial to set up an instance of that. Currently you can't just sign up for a hosted version either. But maybe they would make one for us since we're special, or if we asked nicely? They did it for BoingBoing. Maybe we could try to play up Song Fight's connection to folks semi-regularly featured on BoingBoing (e.g. MC Frontalot and Jonathan Mann)?

[Niveous]

I'll defer to the more technical folks.

For me, as long as there is a house, I'll come over to visit.

[jb]

I think switching to Discourse would be super awesome. However, it looks very non-trivial to set up an instance of that. Currently you can't just sign up for a hosted version either. But maybe they would make one for us since we're special, or if we asked nicely? They did it for BoingBoing. Maybe we could try to play up Song Fight's connection to folks semi-regularly featured on BoingBoing (e.g. MC Frontalot and Jonathan Mann)?

If you're a non-profit (which we are, though not legally recognized as such), they'll set up one for you on Digital Ocean for $200, and you get a good discount on a Digital Ocean server of $10/month. But that's an investment. I'd much rather be able to install it on Dreamhost, y'know. Dunno if I'm up for that expense for a forum.

Someday perhaps if there's a working tip jar. I've wondered off and on how to perpetuate internet things when you die, if there's nobody available or willing, or financially able to keep them going. Seems unwieldy, for sure.

JB

[AJOwens]

I've wondered off and on how to perpetuate internet things when you die, if there's nobody available or willing, or financially able to keep them going. Seems unwieldy, for sure.

JB

Don't die, JB!!!

[glennny]

There's no Led Zeppelin without JB, there's no Song Fight without JB.

[josh]

Every time I update software on my computer it bites me in the ass... but it's so damned tempting.

[Caravan Ray]

I'll defer to the more technical folks.

For me, as long as there is a house, I'll come over to visit.

Yeah. I'm with Niv and Paco

[fluffy]

The thing that concerns me about sticking with old versions of phpBB is that most of the reasons for upgrades are to fix security holes. Older phpBB installs are just a ticking time bomb waiting to happen, although Dreamhost does mitigate a lot of that with their security infrastructure (both proactive and reactive).

I don't know of any better freely-available forum software out there though, certainly nothing as flexible or usable as phpBB. There's a lot of pet projects out there that have either languished in obscurity (and probably have even worse scaling and security problems) or require some pretty intense hosting mojo (i.e. moving to a VPS, which immediately increases the hosting costs about 20x) or just have generally shitty interfaces. The only other forum I've seen that's even remotely as good is SMF, and it has constant security problems and an incredibly shitty UI as well, especially with regards to attachments and PMs (although I do like its notification system a lot better than phpBB's).

For a while I was toying with the idea of writing a new, clean, security-focused, embeddable forum system, but I just kept using phpBB. And for what it's worth, the version of phpBB I run on my site is way the fuck older than the one on Song Fight (although I've kept up-to-date with security patches on it, and I have a lot of custom glue with my blog that I really don't want to break).

I do kind of like the idea of something that has built in "like this post" functionality, although I would definitely not want it to go full-on Reddit because that shit doesn't scale, destroys conversational flow, and turns everything into a dogpile where everyone's competing to be circlejerk-funnier than everyone else instead of actually trying to have a goddamn conversation (see also: Slashdot, Digg, and Tumblr). I have mixed feelings about threaded conversations, too, and still generally lean towards flat threads with good quoting.

tl;dr I think just keep the forum the way it is, although mmmmaybe back up the database and upgrade to something newer and see if that works, just to get whatever newer features and security fixes are useful.

[jb]

I would also like a "Like" mod, but I've never found one that seems... baked.

[HeuristicsInc]

as far as switching to some other forum software, we'd lose all our history (cf when we left dumbrella, all the forums they went away) so i would not recommend that. who wants to lose our scintillating reviews of fights from 10 years ago??? or the "My Life" thread? but seriously, a little bit of the community dies when the old threads can't be found. we have this problem at work too, when we switched from ClearCase to Team Fortress, I mean Team Foundation Server. Who knows who made that code change if it was earlier than 2009...
upgrading this forum sw.... i'm not the expert.
-bill

[fluffy]

Most forum software I've seen has a phpBB import function, because most forum software is written with the goal of replacing phpBB.

[jb]

Preserving the history would be a requirement of any such software change.

[Manhattan Glutton]

If things change, web service support would be nice.

[fluffy]

What do you mean by web service? Like, an RSS/JSON/whatever API? I'm pretty sure there's plugins for that in phpBB.

[Manhattan Glutton]

Yep. I private messaged you about that July 2012. Check your messages.

I made my own scraping API, but that'll get hosed in any upgrade/theme change.

http://api.sfbase.net/forum-index.php
http://api.sfbase.net/forum-viewforum.php?f=6
http://api.sfbase.net/forum-viewtopic.php?t=9421

[fluffy]

Well I thought maybe you'd want the ability to post messages via API too or something.

[jb]

I'm ok with people hacking on the forums if they want, as long as we have a rollback plan. Just FYI.

JB

[Manhattan Glutton]

A post/messages/etc API would be super-sweet. There's only so much scraping I can do.