Recent Forum Down Time

[EanGolden]

Hey everyone! We recently had 3 days of forum downtime, which was a bummer for everyone.

I didnt say much about the problem, mainly because we did not know what the fix was - and did not have a meaningful status update. Needless to say:

• We plan on keeping people more informed of the status should this ever happen again
• We are working on making sure that never happens again in the future!

So, what happened? The server became completely corrupted. Our main engineer was sick and our backup was in mexico. The server company (amazon) didn't reply for two days with a recommended solution. In short a perfect storm led to the extended downtime. Changes have been made and we are confident that it wont happen again!

On to the future.. We are exploring updating the forum to a new system that will breath life back into this space again. Things like realtime discussions, mobile friendly pages, credit for real participation and more.. The system I am considering is in use on this website: https://localbitcoins.com/forums/#!/ and we are wondering what you think?

[calgarc]

check out orangewebsite... I have been using them for years for hosting. back when i had a problem with my site they responded to my emails within an hour and replied every 5 minutes until 3-4am until the problem was resolved.

best service money can buy that and their amazing free speech laws (iceland servers)

[oddworld_audio]

https://localbitcoins.com/forums/#!/[/url] and we are wondering what you think?

It feels pretty snappy but not convinced otherwise, not seen any posts which include images etc embedded yet although I've only clicked on around 20 posts. Can you run them side by side for us to compare ?

[Nicky H]

Things like realtime discussions, mobile friendly pages, credit for real participation and more.. The system I am considering is in use on this website: https://localbitcoins.com/forums/#!/ and we are wondering what you think?

It doesn't feel very much like a forum - more a chat room tbh

[3heads]

On to the future.. We are exploring updating the forum to a new system that will breath life back into this space again. Things like realtime discussions, mobile friendly pages, credit for real participation and more.. The system I am considering is in use on this website: https://localbitcoins.com/forums/#!/ and we are wondering what you think?

Please don't. That looks absolutely horrible.

[robdquick]

It doesn't feel very much like a forum - more a chat room tbh

Please don't. That looks absolutely horrible.

I agree with the 2 posters above. I think the forums are perfectly fine as they are. It's laid out logically with everything in it's own categories. If you go changing it to something like that and people can't find what they are looking for they just won't come back. Maybe this one just needs a new lick of paint to keep it looking fresh....

[DJAdeSands]

If it's not broke, don't fix.. or err.. when it breaks, just revert back to where it was a 'like' option on posts would be nice.

[padi_04]

It feels pretty snappy but not convinced otherwise, not seen any posts which include images etc embedded yet although I've only clicked on around 20 posts. Can you run them side by side for us to compare ?

Embedded images and videos can be enabled, they will show as a smaller thumbnail and expand when clicked.

[Lanz the joiner]

It doesn't feel very much like a forum - more a chat room tbh

Is that a bad thing? What are the differences between them?

I'm not really a "real" member of this forum, so I guess I shouldn't try to argue one way or the other. But I am interested in the topic of forums vs chatrooms. I feel that chatrooms can have a more laid back "human" style of communication with quicker responses, and this could be seen as an advantage by some people.

[Traxus]

Ean, My company has been using vBulletin for internal projects as well as clients for years.

I've spent quite a bit of time developing plugins and products for vBulletin version 4. The largest being a smart default algorithm that generates a headline style page with the most popular topics on the forum; it looks at many factors such as who started the thread, how old it is, who has replied, user reputation of the various posters, etc and ranks them on that value rather than which thread got bumped... (http://www.detroityes.com/mb/atdasd_headlines.php).

The advent of vBulletin 5 means we either have to ditch that page entirely or rebuild it from scratch as the database schema has changed drastically.

I've become accustomed to the guts of vBulletin and as you might expect of 10+ year old software, it's a fucking mess. Coding colloquialisms layered atop of one another like various layers of rock in the grand canyon. Vbulletin 5 was supposed to be a ground up rewrite and was not.

I say all of this to say that, we have spent quite a bit of time shopping out the alternatives (http://www.discourse.org/ most recently), and nothing comes close. Many competitors take a slice of the vBulletin pie, and do that slice very well but lack in other features such as robust management for admins.

Keep that in mind while on the hunt.