How can we improve the IPFire Forums?

[MichaelTremer]

If we are talking about software only, one candidate is Discourse: http://discourse.org/
...
Has anyone ever used this and is happy with it?

I've used a discourse forum for the past two years and am very happy with it. I’ve been very impressed with the discourse functionality, their good customer support and lots of useful updates.

The OpenEnergyMonitor (OEM) community moved from a drupal based forum to discourse in 2016. The old forum still exists as a read-only reference. I am a moderator there and I'd be happy to answer questions or pass on any questions.

Recently Node-RED has moved from google-groups to discourse in May 2018.

Thanks for that your comments. I really would like to migrate I think.

I am not a fan of that Docker image installation and I think Discourse is quite bloated on the backend. But on the other hand it has some great new concepts which phpBB doesn't have since it was written a few decades earlier. Patching phpBB to make it nice is a lot of work and some things are already done on Discourse.

However, there is no migration path from phpBB 3.2.x and they quoted us a could of thousands of dollars to do this. Basically that is where I am stuck right now...

[neolithic]

I'm fairly new to ipfire, having tried pfsense, untangle, and others in the past. I really like ipfire and would like to stick with it. I'm a longtime Linux/open source user, but not an expert at firewalls, and ipfire has been pretty easy for me to install and configure.

It seems like the forum isn't super active, and that's concerning to me, as I have had trouble finding answers to some of my questions on the web, so I realize that I will have to rely on the forum. But if I can't get prompt help there, then I will be frustrated as I try to use the software.

I am willing to contribute to the project, as I truly believe in the open source model and am very glad that people such as yourself are willing to invest time and energy to make a great product. However, support is vital for a successful outcome.

My question is, could you set up a Discord server, and just create a channel for each language? I set one up, of course no one is using it, because I'm an unknown, but you could certainly do the same, and if you could get people to sign up there we could have instant communications. I'm not saying to replace the BB, which serves as a knowledge base, but as I said, it would be nice to have real time chat, and I think it could also help in the community building aspect.

What are your thoughts, or have you already considered this?

[MichaelTremer]

I'm fairly new to ipfire, having tried pfsense, untangle, and others in the past. I really like ipfire and would like to stick with it. I'm a longtime Linux/open source user, but not an expert at firewalls, and ipfire has been pretty easy for me to install and configure.

It seems like the forum isn't super active, and that's concerning to me, as I have had trouble finding answers to some of my questions on the web, so I realize that I will have to rely on the forum. But if I can't get prompt help there, then I will be frustrated as I try to use the software.

I am willing to contribute to the project, as I truly believe in the open source model and am very glad that people such as yourself are willing to invest time and energy to make a great product. However, support is vital for a successful outcome.

My question is, could you set up a Discord server, and just create a channel for each language? I set one up, of course no one is using it, because I'm an unknown, but you could certainly do the same, and if you could get people to sign up there we could have instant communications. I'm not saying to replace the BB, which serves as a knowledge base, but as I said, it would be nice to have real time chat, and I think it could also help in the community building aspect.

What are your thoughts, or have you already considered this?

Realtime chat is available here: https://www.ipfire.org/chat

[JonM]

However, there is no migration path from phpBB 3.2.x and they quoted us a could of thousands of dollars to do this. Basically that is where I am stuck right now...

I wouldn't migrate, just turn off the ability to post and leave it for reference. It is not worth the extra money.

We got too much spam...

discourse has a very good spam system. On the OEM forum we see very few spam posts these days.

[MaDa]

The Forum-Benchmark is the Pi-Hole Forum https://discourse.pi-hole.net:

• SW: Discourse

• well structured

• well supported by support team (no unanswerd question like here often)

• fast response

• actively moderated by team to seperate/merge threads

• many howtos developed from forum input

best regards, Marko

[MichaelTremer]

Hey,

so I wanted to give you all an update on this on a decision that has been made by the IPFire Team:

We are going to migrate to Discourse and will hopefully be able to do that soon. I have already installed it and it is now running on a beta version which has a couple of obvious bugs that need to be sorted out. But as soon as that is done we would be ready to go. We feel that the new software will change the flow of conversations and debate a lot and that we hopefully grow more into some active community.

When I say we will migrate, I actually mean that we won't migrate any of the posts. The old forum will be online for maybe another in read-only operation and we will shut it down afterwards. Migration is just not feasible and we see other advantages in a fresh start.

That mainly is that the new forum will be English only. After much thinking about it, we concluded that it is the most-inclusive way to provide the best support. The language of open source forums is English and we would like to welcome everybody into our community. That is only possible when we speak English. Also everything else in this project is converging there because our team is becoming more international, our users are becoming more international. This is the way to go.

We also have too many "how-tos" on here. They are supposed to be on the wiki but unfortunately are not. To not loose this forum as a knowledge-base, we will leave it online for a while but need everyone to help out on transferring the information into the wiki. That is where it is supposed to be. There will also be an update on the wiki soon to make this actually work.

These are the major points and I would like to thank everyone who gave their thoughts!

-Michael

[Hellfire]

Sorry to hear that, I mean sorry you have chosen the wrong forum software IMHO.

I was an active forum member at the English Synology NAS forum some weeks/months before. This forum was perfectly readable, searchae and well organized into subforums. I think they used the same software for their old forums, too https://forum.synology.com/enu/

Synology then decided to switch to a forum like Discourse, too, a now cluttered, unreadable forum, unorganized by tags instead of subforums. Not very well visited since Synology's wrong decision. Discourse is in no way a forum but more or less chat.

Please see yourself what users think about this type of forum and how they will abandon it: https://community.synology.com/forum/1/post/119298 and https://community.synology.com/forum/1/post/119662

Guess, the same will happen if you actually switch to Discourse.

Just my 2ct of course but I'm already at the door to open it and jump off as I did at Synoloy's new forum.

Michael

[MichaelTremer]

Hey,

I do not entirely want to get to the bottom of it because all the forums have upsides and downsides. But I do not really understand the criticism. The structure of the forum is the same and posts are threads as we know them. There is not a big change here for me. What am I missing?

[JonM]

Synology then decided to switch to a forum like Discourse, too, a now cluttered, unreadable forum, unorganized by tags instead of subforums. Not very well visited since Synology's wrong decision. Discourse is in no way a forum but more or less chat.

To me Subforums are Categories in the Discourse world. And the same subforum names can exist in the Category form. And there can be subcategories if needed.

I too am wondering what is missing.

(for what it is worth the Synology forum doesn't look like Discourse so it may have been customized or configured much different then I've seen in the past)

For the Node-Red forum there are these categories (sub-forums):

EDIT: to me it looks like Synology substantially changed all of their forums/categories. They went from this:

to this:

and all of the sub-forums (subcategories) are gone. Or maybe they were changed to tags.

[JonM]

Is Discourse still in the plans? Or maybe a move to a different forum? Just curious!

[Hellfire]

Hi,

just wanted to report spam in forum and again got a wrongly formatted web page. This is a long time show stopper and always stops me to report any spam activities in forum.

Spam: viewtopic.php?p=128303#p128303

Btw, no matter if I use Chrome, Firefox or anything else. It also does not matter if I try to report from out company internet connection or from home.

Any chance to get this fixed sometime?

Michael

[DJ-Melo]

+1

[MichaelTremer]

Hi,

Hi,

just wanted to report spam in forum and again got a wrongly formatted web page. This is a long time show stopper and always stops me to report any spam activities in forum.

Spam: viewtopic.php?p=128303#p128303
2019-10-30_143852.png

Btw, no matter if I use Chrome, Firefox or anything else. It also does not matter if I try to report from out company internet connection or from home.

Any chance to get this fixed sometime?

Michael

I cannot reproduce this at all...

We are going to switch to Discourse next Monday: https://lists.ipfire.org/pipermail/deve ... 06568.html

-Michael

[Hellfire]

Perfect! Just visited the new community.

Looks good and since I'm registered on some more discourse-like communities, I'm already accustomed to this type of "forum".

May I suggest to add a link to the old forum within the new community somewhere?

Btw, why can't I register with name Hellfire but hellfire works?

Michael

[MichaelTremer]

May I suggest to add a link to the old forum within the new community somewhere?

Yes you can suggest that, but the answer is unfortunately no. The forum is going to be taken offline as soon as we can and we should not use it as a reference because those will all be pointing into the dark.

Btw, why can't I register with name Hellfire but hellfire works?

They have to be conforming to the POSIX standard. You can assign a nick name in your profile if you want to.

I personally prefer to get to know people by their real names