Recent Forum Down Time

Recent Forum Down Time

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: LocalBitcoins.com — 404 and we are wondering what you think?

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)

[quote="Ean

The system I am considering is in use on this website: [url"]
LocalBitcoins.com — 404 and we are wondering what you think?
[/quote]

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 ?

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…

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.

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

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.

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.

I’m working with muut for my dutch MMA fantasy league community called Just Bleed.

Uploading images is easy as pie.

When posting, a round image with a camera is displayed on the right side of the answer box. It is even easier than the cumbersome attaching of images on this forum board.

Is that because of the, as good as real time response that is shown?

The platform used is quite awesome. It’s easy to integrate with a blog, as that you can use this instead of Disqus. (Snappier response, faster rendering time etc.)
Users are able to login using their facebook or google+ credentials.
And it also comes with API development and API posibilities.

True not all options are available when using the free, but when using a paid version, you are able to configure Single Sign On(SSO), URL customization, showing feeds on your blog, etc etc.

Discourse is awesome, though it uses postgres.

I love discourse, it comes close to creating a style similar to the Kinja platform.
When rolling out properly, you will be able to use it as a midst of a wiki on steriods with commenting.

But again: postgres, if you’re using a mySQL platform, most of the times, you will not be able to run both database systems on the same server. (Not on hosted servers)
And switching your Wordpress to postgres isn’t that good an option, if you look into PostgreSQL for WordPress (PG4WP) doesn´t work with WP 4.2.2 .

Hey Traxus,

The biggest thing we need is a more mobile friendly site and a some fresh new features to make it easier to use. Could you help us improve the site?

The big thing with Muut is that it would replace our comments and the forum with a single user base. Imagine having the same identity and credit for participation on the blog and the forum. That is very attractive to me personally

Have you checked out BBpress… you can use that plugin in wordpress to implement a forum easily

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. No worries.

I would love a more mobile friendly format. I’m curious enough to want to try real time discussions.

The credit for “real” participation is intriguing…and I’d like to know more.

Keep up the good work, and thank you for building a playground for the rest of us to explore.

Further mobile friendliness in regards to the entire site, or the forum in particular?

I’ve looked into this issue quite a bit as well, and there is quite a bit to say in either direction. In the past we’ve settled on the vBulletin(4) blog software to maintain the joint user base and management but it is no WordPress.

Your WordPress vBulletin hybrid isn’t uncommon and has its merits; its like having an Allen & Heath plus whatever controllers/decks and soundcard you prefer. You’ve hand selected gear by people who build things to do one specific job very well versus something like an all in one controller that will do most of the things you want pretty well with the added convenience of not having to wire it all together etc…

Anyway check your private messages in a bit, I will send you some contact information

Hi! Ean! I am a “big friend” of DigitalJockey.it that recently changed the Forum Site. Now is more stable and is easier to post also with the smartphone. Is very light, the navigation is easier than before and looks good

I’m not a web designer but i can give you the contact of our webmaster

QA Engine or Forum Engine (or both) might be worth a look at, both Wordpress.

The biggest issue would seem to be converting the existing forum database to a new structure.