Normally with suggestions I'd make a list of pros or whatever but I'm not going to do that this time. I'm impartial, however this was an issue the community did discuss during Seth's temper tantrum and I'd like to see it resolved. I'd also like to mention this should be a discussion rather than 'vouch' or 'object' but that is beyond my power to enforce
Move back to proboards. Yea or nay?
No I don't care what forum we have I just want to use the same one for more than 20 minutes
The poll to move back to proboards was for the purposes of enacting the ownership application process which has now concluded. Due to proboards at the time not being 100% Restored, and as far as I'm aware still not 100% restored the decision was taken as I understand it, to start using this forum given the community was on Flarum before Seth threw his tantrum and I personally believed and still believe it was the right call, as we discussed before the moving of the forums is a decision to be taken by the owner, and at the time we had no owner to make that decision.
I'm also heavily against moving back to Proboards, in my mind it's a step in the wrong direction for the server, and I don't think it gives the best possible image for the servers online presence, while yes it has a lot of history, it has limited functionality which we are able to get through hosting our own forum solution. I also don't really like that just to use our own DNS and remove the ads (Which we'd really want to be doing) that it traps us in a payment scheme with Proboards, and that if we do go back the longer we end up using it, the harder it would be again to justify moving off.
I have already tasked some of my team at ATLAS to do some investigations into alternate forum software, because Flarum really shouldn't be being used in production and work is underway at the moment there to come back to me with some suggestions on what would be technically recommended.
My hope is that once there is a proposal for what forum suite would work best, to spin up a demo and present it back in beta format for the community to look at and provide feedback, I am keen to get off Flarum, and keen to never go back to Proboards, but equally the community need to agree that what we move to is going to be a good choice, and to ensure that it's actually usable and people are comfortable with it.
For info, some of the forum suites that are so far being looked into is XenForo, Discourse, WoltLab and IPBoards - Personally I lean towards WoltLab because I have a license that just needs to be updated, it's got excellent themes and add-on's that can be installed and worked really really well when I was using it for personal projects before and I think hosted CJFreedom forums for quite some time when we were trying to find the best forum solution for the server then.
I still think it's sad that the vast majority of the community wanted to stay on ProBoards, but mighty Seth wanted to transition to MyBB, and thus got his way.
I'm indifferent to the actual question of whether or not to stay on Flarum or move to Proboards, but the fact still remains that the only reason the switch happened was because we had an owner who disagreed with the majority consensus. A consensus which has/had been held in every-single-poll on the matter.
Flarum feels uncomplete design and function wise, but proboards is literally incomplete with the restoration not fully going through. Neither is something we should move/stay on. Moving to a new forums would be the best
ProBoards isn't really a viable option anymore. It's half broken and it's really just an archive of everything at this point. Of course it's better than nothing but I'm just saying that switching back to our current ProBoards forum isn't really going to work well. I personally like Flarum and think we should stay on it.
Object.
I'm with @shrimp#1545 here, I don't care what forum software we use, but I'm getting tired of TotalFreedom playing the "Switch Forum Software" game. It's getting annoying that, like, every month, I have to create a new forum account because we switched forums. I suggest we stick with Flarum, we need to break the cycle of switching forum softwares.
@anthony#1585 this also I'm not sure flarum can actually export data to a new forum yet
@Telesphoreo#1614 I have not been able to find any tool that can do this either, but given that we have the database, we can always write our own converter.
@StevenNL2000#1618 That was my working assumption. In reality it shouldn't be too hard to do the transformation. Just needs some thought to go into it. Expecting users may need to do a "password reset" and we don't try to transfer that, but all the content and everything else I'm expecting to transfer over without too many headaches.
@anthony#1585
yes yes I agree with nathonyial here.
yes proboards is Literally The Best i'm not even fucking active and i want this
object, even searching for stuff on proboards is a mess i gotta set like 10000 filters.
can we go to proboards? yes? thanks.
proboards looks shit can we go back to flarum? thanks.
flarum still sucks ass, can we go to EsoTalk? thanks.
EsoTalk is too good for the server, can we go back to proboards? thanks.
wild has actually found a good forums? yeah but history so we should stick with proboards.
this shit is like hot potato but with forums
Vouch. If we can't use ProBoards, we can always use something like WoltLab instead.
Object.
I Vouch.
Vouch for a service like wotlabs or xenforo
