[Raion]

Afternoon guys,

With the frontend redesigned, I guess it's time to discuss the future plans for the forum to bring it inline with the new design, as well as what this means for users of the forums:

The Plan
The plan for the forum is to bring it inline with the front end for MyBB 1.9 - which sadly keeps getting pushed back:

https://community.mybb.com/thread-215211.html

You can follow that here if you're interested.

With Google's recent push for HTTP/2, to keep our search rankings, it'll eventually be necessary to enforce HSTS on the https://forums.irixnet.org domain, meaning plain http won't be offered via that subdomain anymore. Read on for a contingency

The plan is to use MyBB's APIs to build either a PHP or Python frontend offering a basic http-plain solution for people to use the forum from obsolete systems on another subdomain.

The basic plan is to have:

Login Functionality
Reading/Responding to posts/creating new threads
Attachment uploading
Reading/Responding to PMs

Other functions like viewing avatars, and opening images by default will probably not be offered, and this subdomain won't be indexed by search engines. The goal is to make it accessible for low bandwidth connections as well, hence the limitations there. The reason this is being pursued, and not NNTP or gopher is because of accessibility. It's easier to just use plain http for most, and it's easy to design for comparatively.

FAQ

• Will the dark theme be enforced?

Likely, unless there's a huge push for a light variant. It's going to be up for discussion, but help with that may require a financial bumper so to speak, since developers to help cost money.

• Will the CSS be improved and the minor glitches in places be fixed?

Yeah, the 1.9 release means nothing of the current rendering engine for MyBB will carry over. It's a clean redesign

• Are you still planning to move to PostgreSQL?

Yes

• Any software-related goals included?

I've been floating ideas every so often, but for now, no. I have been trying to get things nailed down here.

• What of a return of chat functions now that Dodoid shut down his discord?

Maybe in the future, but the overall conduct of people on there just became toxic after a while and it divided the culture between the forum and chats, with some people refusing to use one or the other. I'd like for the community to first agree on sticking with our forum before we ever try an experiment of that scale again.

• What are your plans going forward other than the redesign?

Finish my personal obligations to things, including some shipments to users, and then return to working on documentation of IRIX and various computers with contributions for the community. Overall, I think we're in a good position there already, but I think through further refinements, this compendium will be as great as it can be.