today, I would like to start a discussion about the IPFire Forums. This forum, that you are reading at the moment.
Personally, I have been quite unhappy with it for a little time and I know that I am not alone. I would like to collect some ideas on how we can improve the forums. Those ideas can be across the entire field. Please be creative.
Here is why I wanted to start this discussion:
- The IPFire Forums are the place for our community to engage in conversation. About problems, ideas, support and many many other things... It seems that it has gotten a little bit quieter lately. Not sure why that is, but I would like it to be a bit more vivid here again. One of my theories is that since the previous design is broken, this forum isn't that much fun to use any more and certainly is not great on mobile.
- The forum software (phpBB) is also creating loads of problems for us: We got too much spam, it is hard to update, full of bugs, doesn't really support our database that well. It can also be kind of slow and I think the design isn't clean enough to make the forum easy to use. I would like to move away from it, but none of the alternatives have been very convincing or easy to migrate to.
- Then, the forum can be a little bit chaotic because there are posts in multiple languages here. Please let me know how you feel about that. So far, I don't know any other software that supports this really well and is able to hide the German posts for people who don't speak German, etc. I really like that we have a platform in different languages here although English is the primary language.
Looking forward to hear your comments!
Best,
-Michael