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Ongoing Forum issues - Raion - 11-09-2018

I'm writing this post in response to a lot of complaints levied against the staff here as to the direction in which some parts of the site have been taken namely this section.

This is not me calling out anybody or naming any names I am simply providing a clear and concise explanation for the majority of the decisions made.

Let me start by saying that I am the one responsible for every decision that has been made in reference to the forums and no other staff members have been involved in these decisions. Directing your complaints to other members of the staff is not the most effective way to handle things, it's because I am solely responsible.

Here is the question that's probably on everybody's mind: 
The primary reason is because all of the solutions for forums are community projects with limited support for custom setups such as this.

Next:

I don't have a timetable. Unfortunately some of those issues are caused by theming, or codebases and everyone has different priorities. Some people railed on me for weeks for a responsive theme for their mobile devices. Others have been slamming my inbox about notification deliverability, which finally got corrected, some people want something that can be browsed on early Mozilla or Netscape browsers, and some are extremely upset with the attachment situation.

I do not ignore people's requests, and I do my best to try to make everybody happy. Unfortunately nothing I do will please everybody, and I try to handle requests in order of usability
While I appreciate every offer of assistance I've ever been provided a lot of it comes down to people being inexperienced with how our infrastructure is set up or trying to condescendingly tell me how I should run or configure something. I really wish people would not make assumptions on how things are run here and understand that there are additional risks involve such as security, trust, and duplication of efforts that are involved here. 

We are not using a typical lamp stack, our infrastructure involves DDOS protection, NGINX as the webserver (no Apache), FreeBSD/iocage, MariaDB, and more. I have to be very careful with who I give access to the systems because I do not want a situation where somebody accidentally takes an entire system offline and I have to clean up the mess. 

I try to avoid providing too much information for a reason. For those of you who are unaware there are people who would love nothing more than to see this site destroyed because of a personal hatred for the community that stems from well before this site was ever a thing. Some of you know the name of who I'm talking about but I'm going to leave the guilty party's name out of this.
Our original forum was run under PHPBB. There are several known and outstanding bugs with it that increased the workload substantially. I've elaborated on this before but the community was unwilling to help us when I needed them the most because they informed me repeatedly that I was a moron for not forcing SSL on the site and the users. I offer it as an optional service because some of our users do not care for using a modern up-to-date browser and do not want to sit and be lectured about how to use their machine. I wholeheartedly agree.

Other technical issues complicated the mess. We ran out of disk space one day because it duplicated attachments hundreds of times. Again crickets from the community when I went to them asking for help. It never fully supported PHP 7.2 which I wanted to move to for performance reasons and because it's more secure. And it did not fully support Maria DB which I use instead of Oracle MySQL for obvious reasons.

I don't mean to breed a Harbinger for people who are upset with the constant design shuffling as we work out problems with the forums. However, when MyBB 1.9 is released I will be designing a new theme for it which matches an updated style guide for the website and which the majorityof sections will eventually follow suit. The eventual goal is a better integration of services and a better overall experience for all of our users. That's why at the moment we are holding off on any permanent fixes for outstanding issues when these are likely to be resolved with the next upgrade. The eventual goal is to settle on a stable design that matches everything quite well.

RE: Ongoing Forum issues - jan-jaap - 11-10-2018

Keep up the good work man, it's very much appreciated.

RE: Ongoing Forum issues - BackPlaner - 11-10-2018

I haven't had any problems with the site so I'm sorry to hear that you've been getting reports otherwise. Keep up the good work! :-)

RE: Ongoing Forum issues - jpstewart - 11-11-2018

Like others have said, keep up the good work.  It is definitely appreciated.  

I don't know how many people are bugging you about problems, feature requests, etc.  But don't forget that all of the users who are not complaining are happy users.  For a lot sites, it's a small but vocal minority griping about stuff while the silent majority are satisfied with the service being provided.  Don't let the complaints get you down.

RE: Ongoing Forum issues - jan-jaap - 11-16-2018

(11-09-2018, 10:39 PM)Raion Wrote:  some of our users do not care for using a modern up-to-date browser and do not want to sit and be lectured about how to use their machine.

I was wondering about that regarding my Techpubs site, so I had a look at the log files.

After eliminating the bots, indexers and attempts to hijack a non-existing wordpress site, I have left: roughly 50% Android, 40% Chrome, and the remaining 10% is split between Firefox, Safari and various iPhones, iPads and a hint of Internet Explorer. The rest is statistical noise.

Last month, nobody used either Netscape or Mozilla on IRIX. 0 hits. This month, 1 person visited 1 or 2 pages using an Indigo2 running Mozilla 1.0. I had to fire up Mozilla on an SGI to double check the user agent myself.

My Techpubs site uses simple, static HTML with a hint of CSS. The end result is less than desirable for more than half the visitors, it seems. Apparently "mobile first" is not just important for buzzword compliant hipster sites but the majority of people are browsing this oldskool material with their phones as well. Don't worry, I'm not going to change the site, 'responsive' designs don't make sense as long as the payload (the manuals) is static HTML.

But going forward, if I wanted to create a new site in 2018, it needs to work for mobile visitors. Which means using newer CSS which breaks older browsers (more than 4 or 5 years old). Then again, this is probably why I'm not seeing any hits from e.g. IRIX: the rest of the web moved on too and is utterly broken for these old browsers.

So, does anybody use this forum from Mozilla on IRIX?

RE: Ongoing Forum issues - Raion - 11-16-2018

We have a couple of users that do it unfortunately I can't compromise our layout for the sake of them. The forum does have a read-only archive section and that is sufficient for people who just need to read a post or two. We're not going to have a satisfactory solution that can solve every edge case.

RE: Ongoing Forum issues - Jacques - 11-16-2018

No issues for me, I just had to turn off avatar images for my phone as they were overly large, but nothing a single radio button click can't fix.

RE: Ongoing Forum issues - BackPlaner - 11-17-2018

This site is one of the few that works very well on Firefox from the Tezzie, and an Android Chrome I just said it to "view as desktop" and everything is fine.