The Gentoo Big Forum Upgrade Q&A

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Wed May 27, 2020 1:29 pm Post subject:

There is a chance to implement a sort automatic link with the wiki pages through keywords?
I try to explain myself, when I write for example wgetpaste the forum create a link to https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Wgetpaste.
Some other examples can be:

package.use || /etc/portage/package.use -> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/package.use
package.accept_keywords || /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords -> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/package.accept_keywords

and so on
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Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21853

Fully automatic linking could have confusing consequences if people who are unaware of it start triggering it accidentally. I think it would be safer to augment the quick-format buttons with buttons for the popular help pages (wgetpaste, etc.) to provide one-click pastes for the people who want to reference it and link to it.

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Thu May 28, 2020 5:56 am Post subject:

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3188

Here's another point on the wishlist:
Every now and then someone posts a poll. Polls currently implemented require the poster to come up with all the possible options up-front, which is OK when asking "which color do you prefer, red or blue?", but it does not let you get the answer to "what is you favorite color?"
Adding "other - post in a comment" doesn't really help that much either, it's difficult to collect the information scattered over many (bloated) posts.

Perhaps it would be possible to add respondent-editable polls. Like in: choose an existing option from the list or add your own.

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

audiodef · Posted: Fri Dec 18, 2020 10:28 pm Post subject:

Sometimes I'm knocking a couple of questions or answers out back-to-back. Although not allowing rapid posts is good anti-spam, it would be nice as a valid user to answer an unanswered post real quick and turn right around and post a question of my own.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:01 pm Post subject:

[sarcasm]
Silence!

We shall not discuss the forum upgrades again! It's never happening! HAHAHAHAHA!
[/sarcasm]
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Chiitoo · Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2021 6:37 pm Post subject:

We thought we were getting it over and done with finally around last December, but right now the process is in the hands of the Gentoo infra team. Well, one member of the team, and the forums upgrade isn't too close to the top of their priority tree.
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fedeliallalinea · Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2021 7:11 pm Post subject:

From council log 20210110

ezzieyguywuf · n00b Joined: 25 Feb 2010 Posts: 9

Dear forum users,

I have not read this thread in its entirety. Rather, I have had some conversations recently with antarus regarding the Gentoo [strikethrough]Council[/strikethrough] Foundation funds, and I've been brainstorming some ideas of how we might better spend the funds we have. One of the topics that came up was the forum upgrade/migration.

So, I have a few questions for this community:

1. how important is it to you that we continue to use phpBB?
2. What if we paid for a service such as vbulletin - this would be some short-term headaches in migrating everything over (I guess we're already experiencing these headaches anyway) with the long-term gain that "someone else" will take care of this for us

As an alternative to transitioning to a paid service such as vbulletin, another idea is to pay a contractor to execute the database migration and "other" stuff that is necessary to use the newer phpBB - however this is a short-term fix, and inevitably we'll end up in the same situation at some point in the future.

I should point out - some concerns have been raised about vbulletin and whether or not it requires javascript to work properly - at the moment, I can neither confirm nor deny if it requires javascript, however I can think of a third question:

3. How important is it to you that the forum works with javascript disabled?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2021 3:09 pm Post subject:

ezzieyguywuf,

The council has no funds. They are not a legal entity.
Gentoos funds are held by the Gentoo Foundation, of which antarus is a trustee.

phpbb3 and phpbb2 have quite different admin interfaces. As I don't have the skills to contribute to the update, the work done so far has been done by others.
At one time that, included a practice database migration. I'm aware that it took several attempts but I don't have the details to hand.

Personally, I'm not sold on phpbb3 but I'm against a paid service. Its just not the Gentoo way.
Paying for the migration is a well defined scope of work that the trustees could choose to let if they they determined it was a good thing.

These are my own views. I do not speak for the team.
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ezzieyguywuf · n00b Joined: 25 Feb 2010 Posts: 9

NeddySaigon,

Thank you for your response!

I (tried to - I guess our current forum doesn't have a strikethrough feature?) edit my post to fix the slip-up.

Regarding a paid service - can you elaborate more on why you are against it? In what manner is it not "The Gentoo Way?"

Someone mentioned the social contract when I brought the topic up in #gentoo-trustees, however from what I can tell it does not violate the social contract to use a paid service.

Furthermore - while I applaud and encourage the persistent and consistent use of free and open software whenever possible, I also think that this must be balanced carefully with usability, maintainability, and scalability. For example, it might be fun to build my own hot rod from scratch for driving around, or maybe even racing, but if I needed a whole fleet of vehicles for whatever reason, I would pay someone for that.

Same thing with the forum - perhaps it was fun to set up our own in the beginning, especially when we had folks around that could and did maintain it. But at this point, it has stagnated and is (in my opinion) detracting from the overall gentoo experience.

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21853

Speaking only for myself:

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2021 3:40 pm Post subject:

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2021 4:25 pm Post subject:

I might have sounded like I wanted the forum upgrade to occur but in reality that's not true, the old phpbb2 works just fine from the user side though I suspect whatever machine it's running on, be it a Gentoo box, I'm sure the dependency tree must be horrors to keep up to date.

My concern is that someone said something will happen and it didn't, and there weren't any signs saying it's not. So there's some unsatisfied anticipation going on with its expected downtime (since it will take time to convert over) along with the mess that will happen during the first couple of days as the bugs get cleaned out...

My wish?

"Forum upgrade will happen on XXXXXXX"

or

"We have ditched our plans..."

That would clear up some anxiety. Honestly it's phpbb's fault for not making the database backward compatible but the custom mods aren't making things any easier.

(I abandoned my phpbb2 forum that I was toying with when they stopped support of it... same problem, too difficult to upgrade, though since it was a toy project I could have just completely switched to phpbb3 and started from scratch with no real loss...)
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Zucca · Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:18 pm Post subject:

ezzieyguywuf · n00b Joined: 25 Feb 2010 Posts: 9

Thank you all for your replies and for voicing your opinions!

To answer some of the questions: I mentioned that the forums seem to 'detract from the gentoo experience'. This is, of course, purely my own opinion. And as you'll see from my profile I have not made use of the forums hardly at all since I signed up in 2010 - this is why I solicited input from you all

But nonetheless, my comment stems from the following - to me, the forums feel dated and clunky - any time I come across gentoo forum results in google searches, I tend to avoid them due these impressions. Rather, I am more likely to click on a gentoo wiki link, or even stackoverflow. My concern is involving new users - what if they have a similar impression, and a similar disinterest in participating due to the "look and feel" of the forums?

That being said, it sure seems like you all are quite happy with the state of the forums as-is, and if that's the case than truly I have nothing more to contribute to the conversation.

Again, thank you for your responses

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20090

Rather than "Here are my suggestions to fix things", I'd rather see "Here are some items I think could be improved, and these might be ways to achieve that."

Personally, I thought vBulletin was awful the first time it was discussed as an alternative (pre 2010?), and I haven't seen a version that seems better than it was then. Obviously whichever options exist is a subjective preference.

For me, I consider the lack of strikethrough to be a feature. It looks awful whenever I see it used, and it doesn't help. Just edited something and mention the correction if it is important. Such as Edited for clarity/typo or Edited to correct from x to y.

If the primary issue is a lack of javascript and / or mobile usage, I'm fine with that as an also supported feature, but js should not be required. Although I'm doubtful how "useful" an interaction could be with a mobile device, given the output needed to interact with most topics seeking help. Unfortunately, I think there is lost value when the important output is hosted externally from the forum itself.

Examples of what to not do would include: Discourse, Reddit, anything that conveys a message such as To use ..., please enable JavaScript, and anything that requires creating an account to read content (the few times I've seen a discord reference, an account was required).

As for improvements, the primary usability improvement I've wanted to see for a very long time is the elimination of dedicated topic forums and the use of keywords instead. That would allows exclusion filters as well. For example, I want GUI related threads, but not Wayland, etc.

As an aside, I've never though much of phpbb, so it isn't as if I'm an advocate for its usage.
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2021 6:50 pm Post subject:

ezzieyguywuf,

The social contract sticking point is always

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20090

reckor · n00b Joined: 18 Sep 2004 Posts: 42

Sorry, couldn't resist. But why Gentoo doesn't move to phpBB > 3? Current version is phpBB 3.3....

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2021 8:11 am Post subject:

reckor,

There is a problem with the migration which the Gentoo -infra team is working on.
We have had a test instance running.

-- Edit --

Moved above post from Gentoo forum search sucks which maybe illustrates the problem with the forums search :)
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reckor · n00b Joined: 18 Sep 2004 Posts: 42