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So as you guys know, I've done 'System Visitations' where I glance around each of the different forum systems that I have licenses for (or are open source) for commentary purposes, seeing what they do, whether they have features we don't, that kind of thing.
I asked this on the thoughts and got a few mixed responses. So I thought I'd make it a poll. We don't have enough polls on this site. NEED MOAR POLLS.
Previously on System Visitations:
MyBB 1.6.10(http://wedge.org/pub/off/8143/system-visitations-mybb-1-6-10/)
vBulletin 3.8.7(http://wedge.org/pub/off/7953/system-visitations-vb-3-8-7/)
IPB 3.4.5 (plus the rest of the suite)(http://wedge.org/pub/off/8157/system-visitation-ipb-3-4-5/)
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I'd like to see you try Vanilla. Not because I'm a fan, but because I could never fully understand how it's supposed to work or be intuitive. Maybe you can think of a use case for it, but I surely can't.
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The problem with Vanilla is that I already think it's unintuitive. The use case is primarily around having a single board and only a single board (niche forums, yo) and having meta-data to indicate the context of the topics, e.g. what amount to tags and topic prefixes. You end up with tags that categorise topics, and tags to classify topics, subtle but different. It's much like how you can put a blog article in multiple categories in WP but give each article its own set of tags as well.
In SMF/Wedge terms, their overall categorisation would be to our boards, with tags per topic as well, and then just show everything as if it were in one board sort of making the whole thing pointless. Though you can get per-board listings too.
Designwise, the key word is minimalism. The categorisation is primarily about giving some taxonomy to topics while everything else is just about shoving the content at you with as little fluff as possible. This, depending on your perspective, may be a bad thing.
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Voted Vanilla. I will like the system visitation, opted to use it in this forum http://campusng.com as I think it suites the forum better than smf. I will also like unbiased review,it may not be now,maybe later.
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I have just added a new option to the poll for Woltlab Burning Board 4 - they've released the first beta for free download for use until November, as per http://www.woltlab.com/news/Burning-Board-4.0.0-Beta-1-released.html
I figured it might an interesting thing to explore, and people can also change their vote if they'd like to see me take a look at it.
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Voted for IPB. Seems the best competitor IMHO..
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OK, so IPB seems to be the runaway winner thus far... but I'll give it a little longer in case anyone else wants to vote for WBB...
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I'm with Multi on this....IPB >
Have a go @ what they say about them here... http://www.forum-software.org/
Arantor: Should do a promo matrix similar to above to coincide with the release of wedge?
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(psst, if you don't vote in the poll, it doesn't count... and yes, I can tell since admins can see who voted what)
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An entry for fluxbb would be nice, too. It's fast and has very little features (last time I checked, avatars were a plugin), but I've always had a soft spot for it. I think you already looked into it, back in 2010. ;)
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Other than glancing at it briefly in 2010, and coming from PunBB back in 2006 (to SMF), I don't really know it, but I think it's going to be lower down the list.
This time around is pretty clearly IPB, but I will put it on the list next time :)
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(psst, if you don't vote in the poll, it doesn't count... and yes, I can tell since admins can see who voted what)
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It is easily done ;) And yes, you have voted now :)
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My fault I know, but perhaps the "submit vote button" should be more pronounced in its colouring? Just a thought.
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Yeah, polls are something that need some UI love and that's partly why I proposed some other stuff which would encourage a more thorough look at the UI anyway.
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I can't see myself looking at IPB bloated and pretty slow, xenforo is much better. Burning Board, doesn't offer anything unique (to me) and the name alone is scary :) but yes, system visitation will not be bad.I will like to see why Germans are jumping to their ship.
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Well, I think part of that is because it's primarily German first - with WBB 3.x, there was a perception from outside that if you weren't German, you would get second class support. A forum software that has German support first and foremost is likely going to get good take-up from Germans running a forum.
I suspect Wedge will do well with a French audience for that reason, though in Wedge's case, French is not quite the primary language but I try to give i18n enough time for it to be so.
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Ok, never knew German was the default language. Le Nao au Francais Professor?
Posted: May 30th, 2013, 11:07 PM
Ok, never knew German was the default language. Mons. Nao au Le Francais Professor?
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Nao is actually French ;) That's how come Wedge has the strong French presence that it does (and why it's had French in the core since forever) and I'm British which is why English (UK) is around.
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That's 'dangerous' combination. I have never met French webmaster online or saw a popular French forum though.
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:yawn: That was two hellishly long posts :/
OK, I'm going to reset the poll in a minute to remove IPB and put up the other choices.
Posted: May 31st, 2013, 02:46 AM
OK, poll has been updated, all previous votes removed. Please vote again for what you'd like to see next time on System Visitations!
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I'm reading now. Allow 1 day to reply to those 2 really interesting posts. :)
Posted: May 31st, 2013, 03:42 AM
What about the old Snitz Forum 2000 ? It's in ASP and Access DB though :P
http://forum.snitz.com/
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The problem is I gotta run it somehow - ASP is not an environment I'm equipped for.
:edit: It's also extremely quiet around there for some reason :/
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The problem is I gotta run it somehow - ASP is not an environment I'm equipped for.
Here's IIS http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx
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It's been years since I played with ASP. But I don't really want to download it to my main setup because it'll likely break WampServer :/
:edit: A forum software that considers MySQL 3.22 as a suitable minimum version and has 2000 in the title is probably a bit out of date in any case.
Wait wtf
Under the "New in 3.4" header...Password Encryption
All passwords are now stored in the database and cookies after they have been encrypted.
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Xenforo! Please give a little insight in relation to IPB.
Thanks.
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What do you mean 'a little insight'? Didn't you see the ENORMOUS posts I did for IPB last night?
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vB5. Mostly because I'm interested in the WTFs
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Nothing wrong with that :) Oh and don't worry I'll be looking! :niark:
Unless XF gets a landslide of votes, I'm hoping to put it off a bit until 1.2 becomes available. There's a *lot* of changes in XF 1.2, partly because of the lawsuit - you only have to go to http://xenforo.com/community/forums/have-you-seen/?prefix_id=30 (all the topics with the 1.2 prefix) to see what's new.
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Update: I've added SMF 2.1 alpha to the party as an option if anyone's curious to see what the changes are from 2.0 to 2.1.
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What do you mean 'a little insight'? Didn't you see the ENORMOUS posts I did for IPB last night?
Thanks.
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In which case you sort of missed the point of what I've been doing.
With each system I've been tackling it on its good points and its bad, reasonably objectively. Certainly that's the case with vB 3 and IPB 3, I'm interested in what the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms are. I'm looking at each platform to see if there's anything interesting or useful they've done that might inspire us.
MyBB... if you listen to its support community, one of its strengths is simply 'it's not SMF'. I want to understand if it is one of MyBB's strengths and if so, why. Does it mean there is something we need to change in Wedge? Is it just fanboys spitting out their cereal in disbelief? It's not about comparing the two as such, it's about understanding whether one of its supposed strengths really is one of its strengths.
I don't care about whether platform X is better than platform Y, and I'm certainly not anyone's review service. I'm not here to provide you recommendations for one platform over another and I'm sorry if that's all you're taking away from this series. I care whether platform X has features that we can implement or improve upon in Wedge.
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I was looking for performance point of view between then not features. Not the biggest fan of IPB because they have turns of features I will never use and to make it worse, they are all in the core, all these makes IPB much slower than Xenforo.
Thanks anyway.
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In which case you already have your answer and don't need me to further validate what you already know or suspect to be true. But I'm still not doing system X versus system Y unless there is a *specific* reason to compare them.
I have no doubt, for example, that I will be comparing XF with vB 3 when I get to reviewing it because XF's developers are ex vB developers (Kier Darby was lead dev of vB 3.x as well as XF), but that's also to see how things have evolved, and what has stayed the same in that time. That's a similar comparison in a lot of ways to SMF 1.0 to 1.1 to 2.0 which is something I might do sometime just if I get bored; there's nothing to learn from the earlier SMF history.
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Just a reminder: I added SMF 2.1 to the poll if you want to see what they've done with it without having to install it yourself.
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In which case you already have your answer and don't need me to further validate what you already know or suspect to be true. But I'm still not doing system X versus system Y unless there is a *specific* reason to compare them.
I have no doubt, for example, that I will be comparing XF with vB 3 when I get to reviewing it because XF's developers are ex vB developers (Kier Darby was lead dev of vB 3.x as well as XF), but that's also to see how things have evolved, and what has stayed the same in that time. That's a similar comparison in a lot of ways to SMF 1.0 to 1.1 to 2.0 which is something I might do sometime just if I get bored; there's nothing to learn from the earlier SMF history.
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There is very little similarity between XenForo and IPB in the scheme of things; most of the similarity is form following function and how most forums have much the same general idioms at work. Actually if you follow the story, XenForo does bear a similarity to what Kier admitted that he wanted vB 4 to be but that Internet Brands decided it wasn't going to happen.
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Just for those voting XenForo... if you keep those votes for it, you're going to be seeing the out of date version...
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@Arantor could you take a look at esotalk? It reminds me of discurse, overall its a nice concept that you can check out.
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I'll add it to the list, but their own site - http://esotalk.org/ - says it's indefinitely on hold :(