FluxBB at meego.com

markc · 2010-03-10 03:24:26

In case folks are not aware of it, the issue of what forum software to use at meego.com is currently under discussion and up for debate. There are only 2 options so far, vBulletin (which talk.maemo.org is using and the preferred choice) and phpBB3 because some folks (like myself) object to the MeeGo project using proprietory software. There is a very small possibility that FluxBB could be chosen if enough effort was put into lobbying for it.

MeeGo may become a major major operating system so whatever forum software will be used will get extremely well tested and have a very high profile, if it survives. Discussion is on the Meego-community mailing-list and formally logged at...

http://wiki.meego.com/Forum_/_Talk

qie · 2010-03-10 03:28:00

a better choice: vBulletin

markc · 2010-03-10 03:40:00

Well that was really helpful (NOT) and probably just killed off any small chance of using FluxBB. Looks like I'll crawl back under my rock and put whatever effort I can into supporting phpBB3 because if this is the kind of support FluxBB provides then there is absolutely no hope of it ever being chosen. What a pity.

BTW if the project was Git based it would have increased the chances many fold.

trichome · 2010-03-10 03:40:11

qie wrote:

a better choice: vBulletin

Them's fightin' words around here, buddy.

I kid, of course, but maybe at least explain your reasoning for such a bold statement? If vBulletin is the already the preferred choice of the majority that will use it then alright. But there may be compelling reasons to go with Flux as well, such as speed (recently mentioned), ease of use (assuming the users aren't completely shackled to vb), and perhaps cost. I'll admit that I didn't read up on the wiki the OP posted, gotta fly!

OP wrote:

because if this is the kind of support FluxBB provides then there is absolutely no hope of it ever being chosen. What a pity.

Fairly sure qie isn't a part of the FluxBB team.

Last edited by trichome (2010-03-10 03:49:40)

Reines · 2010-03-10 08:56:56

qie if you want to support something other than FluxBB while posting on the FluxBB forums that is fine, but please at least explain the reasoning behind your decision. Saying vBulletin because it has .../can do ... lets us see potentially missing features or areas to work on.

If they chose to use FluxBB that would be awesome, though I always prefer to suggest people use whatever suits them best. I would say that FluxBB is a much cleaner and lighter alternative that would allow them to integrate it in any way they wanted with their site. However they may not have time or want to integrate it, and they may feel that they need feature ... which isn't included.

PS. Out of the 2 main alternatives they have listed I'd have to so phpBB3.

Franz · 2010-03-10 09:00:53

FluxBB's speed and small size also might be an important factor. I don't know what kind of server they have or how big of a problem it is to add resources, but with FluxBB you'd probably save, I'd say (looking at the "most people online" numbers of the old board).

qie · 2010-03-10 09:03:22

Reines wrote:

qie if you want to support something other than FluxBB while posting on the FluxBB forums that is fine, but please at least explain the reasoning behind your decision. Saying vBulletin because it has .../can do ... lets us see potentially missing features or areas to work on.
If they chose to use FluxBB that would be awesome, though I always prefer to suggest people use whatever suits them best. I would say that FluxBB is a much cleaner and lighter alternative that would allow them to integrate it in any way they wanted with their site. However they may not have time or want to integrate it, and they may feel that they need feature ... which isn't included.
PS. Out of the 2 main alternatives they have listed I'd have to so phpBB3.

coz they hold a license of vBulletion, so alternativation is a waste of money.

Franz · 2010-03-10 09:04:11

qie wrote:

coz they hold a license of vBulletion, so alternativation is a waste of money.

It's not like you have to pay for that forever.

P.S.: And if they're thinking about the switch, then that shouldn't be a problem.

Last edited by Franz (2010-03-10 09:04:38)

qie · 2010-03-10 09:09:27

maybe there is a time i would buy a license of "IPB or vBB". it's worth and valued. my first forum site is based on IPB 1.3.2 as the year of 2003,there was a cool skin called "caliskin" of it. hoho~_~ but IPB 1.3 is unsupport , after two years I changed the site to Punbb from scratch, -_-! lost so lots of members.

Last edited by qie (2010-03-10 09:10:52)

Franz · 2010-03-10 09:10:18

Could we maybe come back to the true purpose of this thread: the advantages of FluxBB!?

qie · 2010-03-10 09:12:20

Franz wrote:

Could we maybe come back to the true purpose of this thread: the advantages of FluxBB!?

eh.... the advantages of Fluxbb, my opinion is , it's better than Vanilla forum ^^. better than Usebb

Last edited by qie (2010-03-10 09:13:21)

markc · 2010-03-10 09:15:39

I personally think FluxBB (or PunBB) would be an excellent choice but no one is going to come here looking for assistance. If the folks that really care about FluxBB would like to see it even considered for this opportunity then some FluxBB heavy hitters will have to step in and make the case. There are a limited number of hours to even do so. I am happy to update that wiki page with an option for FluxBB (or anyone else can) and some points in its favor if they can be outlined here. I don't use FluxBB myself so there is limited effort to be expected from me other than general assistance and posting this heads up.

Not having a stable v1.4 nor a Git repo are negatives but it's small size and lighter resource usage are definitive positives. It could be hosted on the Linux Foundation servers (possibly) so servers resources are not an issue but I'm confident FluxBB could support more concurrent users than just about any other PHP forum and offer a much better development track because of it's smaller codebase (which would be greatly enhanced if devel was Git based).

markc · 2010-03-10 09:18:41

@qie: would you please not hijack this thread. Thanks for your cooperation.

qie · 2010-03-10 09:38:46

markc wrote:

@qie: would you please not hijack this thread. Thanks for your cooperation.

ok, you choose anything you want ,you afford the risk yourself. I am just interesting that since you didn't even use Fluxbb ever how you could recommend this software to a so large and important production forum without any test and Risk Assessment

qie · 2010-03-10 09:42:31

@markc: Do you know ,with fluxbb , there is no Poll , No sub forums, No private message, No hardly moderator permission control , and there is no migration tool for your vBB 3.8? then you planned to re construction from scratch?

Last edited by qie (2010-03-10 09:43:59)

Franz · 2010-03-10 09:43:07

There soon will be (a converter tool).

markc · 2010-03-10 09:57:55

@qie: thanks for offering valid points of interest. I'm not sure any of the features you pointed out are needed as Drupal will provide the core CMS functionality leaving the forums to be just that, a good fast forum that offers (to me) a reason to get involved with it's future development, also, as far as I know, the forum will be started from scratch so there is no need to bring across current vBulletin user base. A truly unique opportunity.

vBulletin is proprietary code which offers ABSOLUTELY no chance of anyone in the "community" ever having any control over or contributing directly to the development process. Zip, nada, never. That is the number one reason not to use vBulletin. Even phpBB would be preferable from this point of view. It urks me no end that MeeGo, which could become the epitome of community based open source projects (after the kernel itself), could end up using a proprietary frontend communication system like vBulletin which would lock out any direct contributions from a potentially massive open source friendly user base.

FSX · 2010-03-10 11:03:23

I think Fluxbb would be a good choice since it's already used on some big forums. The Arch Linux forum works quite fast and it is really active there (I'm an Arch user). They also use APC (opcode cache).

markc · 2010-03-10 11:32:35

@FSX: yep, me too, that's where my end-user experience and enthusiasm for FluxBB comes from (and chakra-project.org). I started a thread that lasted for 2 years with nearly 1600 replies without a hitch (the forum was PunBB based when the thread started). I've always been impressed by the performance of bbs.archlinux.org. Thanks for the point about APC, useful to know.

Reines · 2010-03-10 11:37:16

Having a look at their table of requirements:

Integration with drupal - There is no module for this so it would need done manually. Integrating FluxBB is (in my opinion) much easier than integrating phpBB3 or vBulletin, but it is still extra work.
SEO - phpBB3 seems to have a SEO mod that does fancy URLs and other things. vBulletin has a mod to auto generate sitemaps etc. While sitemaps would be easy to make for FluxBB, fancy URLs require quite a lot of modification (not hard, but takes a bit of time).
Plugins - FluxBB has admin plugins, but they are self contained and cannot really alter any core functionality, that needs done manually. This is a (temporary) step backwards from 1.3 which had an extension system.
Ranking/Voting - There might be a 1.2 mod that can be adapted, I've no idea...
Karma - There are 1.2 mods for this that would quite easily be adapted to 1.4, but I've no idea if the code quality of them is any good...

I'm sorry this sounds a bit negative. I obviously love FluxBB and would love to see it being chosen, but since they do specifically list requirements I would feel a bit funny going and trying to push something that doesn't fit them properly.

I've also just read the discussion about vBulletin vs phpBB3 in the mailing list and it seems to me that a lot of the concerns are over the fact that the users (and administrators) are already used to using vBulletin and don't want to learn to use a new software. Again it sounds negative, but I'd say the difference from vBulletin to FluxBB is huge in comparison to the difference from vBulletin to phpBB3.

Saying that, Arch linux uses FluxBB (as has been said), and it seems to work great for them.

@markc: Off topic, but using an opcode cache (APC/XCache etc) will improve the performance of most PHP software quite a bit, if you run a server that doesn't you should install one!

markc · 2010-03-10 12:09:44

@Reines: thanks for these points.

I think the integration with Drupal revolves around a single signon between Drupal, MediaWiki, BugZilla (I think) and whatever forum is used. Is there an OpenID module for FluxBB?

SEO is mainly clean URLs and good META tags so that is pretty well covered.

Admin granularity could be an issue. Page Ranking/Voting and user Karma may not be hard to add but I'm not sure they are really necessary or essential even if vBulletin does offer such facilities.

The most positive and powerful point would be to import your SVN head into, say, Gitorious (or Github) and be able to demonstrate a willingness to accept patches and a fast turnaround with updates. This is the killer feature that vBulletin cannot compete with, speedy and transparent development.

Franz · 2010-03-10 12:29:18

I don't exactly see why we'd need Git for transparent, community-oriented development. Patches can be accepted with a SVN repository, too.

Reines · 2010-03-10 12:33:28

Git is much more the in thing at the moment I haven't used it much but I will say I liked what I tried.

Franz · 2010-03-10 12:36:59

Reines wrote:

Git is much more the in thing at the moment I haven't used it much but I will say I liked what I tried.

I do like it, too, and it definitely has its advantages, but I was wondering about the necessity

FSX · 2010-03-10 12:40:26

Git is a lot better than SVN. Tagging and branches (and merging branches) is much easier. I support a move to Git. ^^

And I'm almost sure there's also a tool to convert the SVN repository to Git.

Last edited by FSX (2010-03-10 12:41:13)

Forums

#1 2010-03-10 03:24:26

FluxBB at meego.com

#2 2010-03-10 03:28:00

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#3 2010-03-10 03:40:00

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#4 2010-03-10 03:40:11

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#5 2010-03-10 08:56:56

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#6 2010-03-10 09:00:53

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#7 2010-03-10 09:03:22

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#8 2010-03-10 09:04:11

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#9 2010-03-10 09:09:27

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#10 2010-03-10 09:10:18

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#11 2010-03-10 09:12:20

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#12 2010-03-10 09:15:39

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#13 2010-03-10 09:18:41

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#14 2010-03-10 09:38:46

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#15 2010-03-10 09:42:31

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#16 2010-03-10 09:43:07

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#17 2010-03-10 09:57:55

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#18 2010-03-10 11:03:23

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#19 2010-03-10 11:32:35

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#20 2010-03-10 11:37:16

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#21 2010-03-10 12:09:44

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#22 2010-03-10 12:29:18

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#23 2010-03-10 12:33:28

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#24 2010-03-10 12:36:59

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

#25 2010-03-10 12:40:26

Re: FluxBB at meego.com

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