Forum migration?

[maru]

Hi there!

So we are considering migrating forum software. IPB 1.3 can allow for arbitrary uploads, but it's quite old software. We're hosted on jcink.com right now, which is lovely but quite limited in terms of what we can upload. We get 500mb of space; even paid, it's 2gb tops. That's not a lot of uploads, long-term!

I spoke to John and he suggested that we just run something ourselves given the storage needs. I could also deploy software myself and give keys for arbitrary upload but it would be sort of janky in practice.

Whereas on, say, Crunchbits, you can get a VPS with 2TB+ storage <a href='https://crunchbits.com/vps/storage#Plans' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>for like $5/mo</a>. So it becomes a matter of software.

Why do we want uploads?

It's really limited in terms of sharing what you're working on right now. <a href='index.php?showuser=6' rel='nofollow' alt='profile link' class='user-tagged mgroup-4'>@watermoon</a> and I want it to be a more collaborative space for artists to hang out and share scraps of material. While IPB was lovely to see deployed again it might be the wrong tool for our developing purpose, and hosting ourselves might be necessary for our needs.

What does this mean for our content right now?

Well, we can get a database export easily. It's just whether we can readily import those posts elsewhere. I guess if nothing else, I could do it by hand in SQL! If we can't import everything everything, it's currently early enough that it doesn't matter.

To what software?

<a href='index.php?showuser=6' rel='nofollow' alt='profile link' class='user-tagged mgroup-4'>@watermoon</a> and I are weighing our options right now! There's a bunch: Invision Community stable is quite nice, but it would cost me $500 for that license. XenForo is what SRB2 forums uses, and that's $200 for a license, not amazing but it's something doable.

phpBB is tried and true — many old old forums use it and you can easily get it to support uploads.

Simple Machines also exists, but watermoon says it might get janky with time? Don't know. Their media upload appears to exist but can't find a working example.

Many others: punBB is another one, myBB, there's Discourse but I don't really like the newer form of forums these days. Remember <a href='https://www.vbulletin.com/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>vBulletin</a>? That exists I guess. It's also only like $200.

Consider this an RFC! What do you think?

edit: <a href='https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2188870' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Found this record of a janky migration someone did with the exact software we have</a>.

[sinku]

I vote phpbb and we heavily customize its interface to look cool. It's free and we aren't beholden to any license terms or cost beyond hosting.

[watermoon]

i guess, to post some thoughts from where i'm coming from…

• the idea of making an artist community out of this space honestly comes from a desire to use this place to fulfill my own emotional needs. i haven't really had a creative community for quite some time, and when it feels like nobody else cares about what you do, it's hard to work up the desire to do anything at all. buuuuut, maybe there's a chance that other people feel the same way, or who feel like they could use something like that in their life?

• phpbb is is definitely the og, and has been around since i was a shitty teen setting up boards for fun that nobody else would ever use (including myself). i see it as the wordpress of forum software, in the affectionate sense and derogatory sense and the that's-the-way-it-is sense. when i was talking with <a href='index.php?showuser=1' rel='nofollow' alt='profile link' class='user-tagged mgroup-4'>@maru</a> i did mention something about the possibility of it being more vulnerable to exploits, but that stigma is likely decades-old too.
also hell yeah i'd love to customize the hell out of this thing.

• my personal opinion is that, unless there is a particular specific use case that you need to have, pretty much any forum software should be able to get the job done. and if the primary use case we need is to be able to have attachments (and perhaps even be able to display them within the posts?), then i'm sure there are multiple packages that'd be able to do that.
i also think that the software itself is of tertiary concern anyway when it comes to community-building. like, <a href='https://forums.tigsource.com/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>the tigsource forums</a> have been running on a version of simple machines that hasn't been updated since the early 2010s and it did pretty well for its time. the something awful forums use a version of vbulletin from 2001 that is held together by layers upon layers of duct-tape, and it also did quite well for its time.

• but that also doesn't stop me from having my gripes when it's come to ipb specifically. i don't really like how if i want to reply to two people in one post i have to click reply for each person in its own tab and then merge the two quotes myself. i don't like being unable to set the scale of an image within an [ img ] tag. i don't like how marking a board as read feels like a multi-step process even when you can see the latest reply right on the side of the board index. so i wouldn't be opposed to moving to something else at all.

[chc4]

woaw a brand new world

[maru]

Yeah, we're here again. I guess links are also weird. Still figuring out board themes! If you hate gimmicky old looking stuff you can change your theme in your profile settings.

[maru]

Okay, so a bunch of stuff I've done so far:

- Added an extension for custom roles. You can set those again.
- Added an extension for multi-quote for watermoon dearest.
- Added an extension to auto-resize avatars on upload. Before it would just reject your upload and make you go do it yourself. I don't know why this isn't a core feature.
- Added an extension for board announcements. Again, why isn't that included?
- Added an extension to put profiles on the left, damn it!
- Replaced the 1982 font with an anachronistic Win95 one. Now it's weird anachronism central! But I prefer it on the eyes personally. You can always change themes to prosilver, as I said, in settings.
- Made the theme slightly less wide. It maxes at 1024px now and posts themselves wrap at 80 characters.

[watermoon]

hell yeah we're back in business

i re-added [​youtube] and (everyone's favorite!) [​hr] to the bbcode list, so those should work again, and they seem to look ok with both themes. i'm mentally going back and forth as to whether to fix all the broken formatting around, but popping into others' posts feels kinda oversteppy to me… maybe we can consider these posts to be a relic of the ipb days.

- Added an extension for multi-quote for watermoon dearest.

awwww you're too kind~

[sinku]

all my paras logued. this is so cool

[meri]

the default theme hurts my eyes a little but i seem to have a completely different one when logged in which is nice and blue

[maru]

the default theme hurts my eyes a little but i seem to have a completely different one when logged in which is nice and blue

Boo I love it. I'm talking to watermoon about themes, but in the meantime I added a third (a dark theme) as a fallback. All this stuff can be set in your User Control Panel, but migrated users got set to the default phpBB theme as their default.

[meri]

the monospace is a little harsh for me personally but i have the luxury of choosing... or not?? i cant find where i'd switch it. i checked all of the menus. are the permissions right here?

[maru]

the monospace is a little harsh for me personally but i have the luxury of choosing... or not?? i cant find where i'd switch it. i checked all of the menus. are the permissions right here?

Believe so. I'll check again, but it's here:

Screenshot 2024-06-11 at 3.54.49 PM.png (131.24 KiB) Viewed 3139 times

[sinku]

Are you able to automatically fix the thread titles for the existing threads with some database manipulation? Everything from the beforetime having messed up formatting is ok but the titles being missing makes the frontpage look weird.

[maru]

I am not sure where phpBB gets the titles from for the main page. It's not from the original post subject line. I think it's easily remedied, though: just make a new post in any of those boards, lol...