Wedge

Yup, that is the underlying thought I've had about it. I have no idea why it's so popular or why its fans are so militant. I can't help but think there's almost something like Stockholm Syndrome :/

Supposing the post has, I dunno, a couple of YouTube videos in it? Suppose it's a dirty great long post... there are plenty of posts of mine on this forum that, when shrunken into that width, certainly wouldn't fit on the page... it's supposed to be a preview, not an alternative thread view.

Oh, it is creating a scrollbar but the fact is it's *still* the size of the screen. See attached.

I prefer this one, this works on mobile and feels more natural. However, I might be inclined to suggest we do some kind of cut on the preview text simply because it's kinda big in some cases. For example I got a like on one of my New Revs posts which was pretty lengthy and it only just fits on the screen vertically when wrapped into that width.

Carrying on from my tour around vB 3.8.7, I took a look last night at MyBB. I thought for about half a second about learning just enough to go troll MyBB but that seems a bit much :niark:

OK, so I hear a lot of MyBB fanboys squealing about how much better MyBB is than SMF, and not once have I ever heard why it is so, so I thought I'd try and figure it out for myself.

First reaction
I'm looking at the default theme and my very first reaction is "This reminds me of vB 3.8.x". It's not an exact knock-off but somehow it reminds me more of vBulletin than anything else does; phpBB and SMF have very much their own identities, even back in SMF 1.1.x days.

The second thing is how cluttered it all seems - as per first screenshot. MyBB claims to support a threaded view but I'm not sure it works properly or if it does, it isn't working properly for me, as I can't consistently get something to be a nested child. Strike one for MyBB.

And HOLY FUCK IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY... I know a lot of people dislike the whole 'return to the board' thing but then we have the interstitial screen, the infamous 'Thank you for posting, you will now be returned to...' with an option to dive out to the board. Eeeeew. Fortunately, it is disableable in the admin panel, but still...

OK, one thing I did see that impressed me, AJAXive quick reply. But that's not that much right now. Other than that it's not really much different; though the layout of information above the post itself makes it clumsy IMO, if you have an inch+ header on top of every post to put the user information in.


Admin panel
OK, so let's take a look through the admin panel.

The front page is not really surprising - admin notes, some interesting mini-stats (MyBB/PHP/SQL versions, number of threads/posts/users, subdivided by totals, new and awaiting approval)

Oh, that's weird... there are two different themes in the admin panel. Classic and Sharepoint, I'm using Sharepoint because it looks slightly nicer to me.

Then I see something learned from vB: a page whose sole purpose is to link you to page after page of settings. They're very long pages, too... see attached. I'm all for comprehensive options - and the options seem pretty comprehensive without going overboard, but the layout needs some serious work IMHO. There's only 25 options on this page, but you can see how long that page is. And there are 21 pages of just settings, if that makes sense.

Most of it is pretty straightforward stuff until I see this particular option in the Server and Optimization page:Say whaaaaaaaat? And no, there's nice help popup or anything to explain it... And there's a typo elsewhere on that page >_<

And WTF... I've seen this elsewhere but it truly makes no sense to me: Add New Setting. You can actually add new items to the admin panel directly, but unless you're actually doing something with it, it seems a bit redundant and if you are doing something, you might as well make a plugin out of it.

That leads me to something else that *really* grates on me: display ordering. Various controls give you the option to set their order (like custom fields being ordered, settings/setting groups)... and you set this by putting in numbers. Want a new custom field to be the second one down? Put in a display of 2 then order the rest to move them down too... because that's a nice user experience.

Other stuff seems fairly straightforward, though I slightly baulk at the 'MyCode' new bbc options. You create it with straight up regex, their example:
Regular Expression

Replacement

A history lesson: SMF used to do their bbcode with this back in 1.0. One of the main reasons 1.1 dropped the old ubbc function and replaced it with the scary beast that is parse_bbc is because of ReDoS vulnerabilities. If you have regular expressions, it's possible to craft a post that can mess with them to cause the PCRE library to poop itself and create incredibly slow-parsing situations which can DOS the server (hence ReDoS - regex denial of service)


All in all, it doesn't strike me as being anything that exciting and certainly not being deserving of the fanboyism... hell, even the Apple vs Android fanboys have valid arguments in their favour but this doesn't seem like it.

In fact the only thing I can see that has any advantage so far is the plugin system but when I looked at the plugin architecture... whooo... my exact comment last night was that it blows monkey chunks compared to Wedge, it looks like the plugin's actual file must be loaded at startup to initialise it (as opposed to us which doesn't explicitly have to load anything, just validate its existence)

What I will say is that it does have a bunch of things in the core, like thread prefixes (where you pick a prefix out of a set list), as well as stuff like announcements (setting predefined messages in a board above all the topics like super-pinned topics)[1]

Permissions are weird though, see attached. You set the default permissions per group elsewhere (where it's a simple tickbox, yes/no) and set per board overrides here. There doesn't seem to be deny permissions so it is simply allow/disallow as we know them and you drag the permissions between the two or you can press the 'Set Custom Permissions'. It does seem very clunky compared to SMF's let alone what I've talked about for Wedge.

So yeah, pretty much as expected, MyBB stacks up reasonably well to SMF in terms of features but the admin navigation is ugleeeeee... and yet it's much like how XenForo does it and that's considered good... I dunno what goes through these peoples' minds sometimes.

1.	Which I might add to Wedge, though before I saw it in MyBB

https://www.phpbb.com/about/history/
3.0 = Olympus, 3.1 = Ascraeus, 3.2 = Arsia, 4.0 = Rhea

AFAIK they're all Greek in origin.As long as we don't try and emulate Ubuntu... Breezy Badger, Dapper Drake, Feisty Fawn, Gutsy Gibbon, Hardy Heron were reasonable, but then it started getting silly... Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope, Karmia Koala, Lucid Lynx... seriously I'm not making this up... Maverick Meerkat, Natty Narwhal[1], Oneiric Ocelot, Precise Pangolin, Quantal Quetzal (there's a WTF), Raring Ringtail, Saucy Salamander... who thinks this up?

But it proves my point about naming, when you pull down from repos, you refer to breezy, dapper, etc. not the version number.Plenty of choice, certainly. We could keep it simpler and just use names mentioned in Hitchhiker's Guide, there's fewer in there. ;) Not the complete alphabet if memory serves but I'm not entirely big on the 'rotating through the alphabet' thing.Nothing wrong with that. My own cultural references are surprisingly poor these days, it's been years since I've seen or read anything with a decent cast of characters and places, barring H2G2 of course.Yeah, agree with you on LOTR type naming. Norse mythology is cool, but off hand I don't know many names beyond the obvious (Asgard, Thor, Odin, Valhalla, Loki and for the few Dirk Gently fans, Mr Toerag.)

1.	Who the fuck uses 'natty' as an adjective any more?

Because I don't want to copy phpBB ;)

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144...

Assuming we start with 0 = A, and take modulo 26... that gives us:
A, B, B, C, D, F, I, N, V, I, D, L, O

Interesting.