Stop exaggerating the issues with Flarum

Flarum has been a piece of absolute dog shite since I had the misfortune of installing it when Seth deleted everything. They have over-promised and under-delivered, and there are a lot of better open source alternatives. People criticize it because it's a significant pain point for the community, as the forum here has historically been the centre of the community, and when it lacks basic functionality to enable a forum to be successful, it gets shit thrown at it.

I would never recommend Flarum to people, and would never willingly support it in the future after the pain of doing so here, it's entire architecture is backwards and it's been poorly engineered. It makes running a community with it's software more difficult than it should be, especially for "Modern" forum suites like it claims to be and to compete in.

↩  characterslimits I shit on it because it is absolute dogshit. It lacks something as simple as thread previews before a post is submitted which has led me to make quite a number of well-known 'galaxy brain moves' accidentally posting shit in the wrong places by hitting the wrong button because I am trying to preview what I write so it doesn't look like garbage. In addition to that problem, it lacks a number of features such as proper thread-stickying so every sticky in creation is listed when you view new posts and let us not forget it lacks a "falling" feature which proboards had, allowing for spam and drama posts to be able to obstruct non-spam posts. Overall, it is a pain to use and doesn't look good at all. The hate it gets is well-deserved imho.

↩  characterslimits I enjoy flarum, except for the major inconveniences such as:
-Constant refreshing, not live replies

• huge wall of stickies that i have to scroll down ON TOP of refreshing every time and on top of that pressing another button, all that struggle just to check for new posts.

• The modular and barebones design of Flarum means that at its core, it is missing a lot of features that are present in other pieces of forum software. While this allows for easy customization, a major caveat of this design is that once a certain extension stops being maintained and the API it relies upon has been rewritten, you can no longer use that extension on your forum when updating it without using an outdated version of the forum software or by using an alternative extension that may or may not be compatible with the existing data. Worse yet, if there is no alternative you are basically shit out of luck and have to either strip out functionality from your forum or maintain a fork of the extension yourself.

• Flarum is designed to be modern. While many are fine with how it looks, in recent times modern design trends as a whole have seemingly taken a liking for making their designs look claustrophobic on monitors wider than 1280 pixels. I recognize that this is a matter of personal opinion, but this is something that I wanted to point out anyways. In my case I have a 1080p monitor set to the 100% DPI scale, and without any form of custom CSS the forum looks terrible.
  
  There's too much wasted space on the sides that could be put to better use. There are similar issues on websites like Twitter and Facebook, and they drive me nuts. This forum looked so bad for me that I actually wrote some custom CSS and zoomed the page out a bit to make it more tolerable for me.
  
  Ironically, the only monitor that this forum looks good on is my 5:4 monitor, which is a kind of monitor that is considered outdated today because nobody produces them for the consumer market.

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↩ @'billy7oblos' probably a little unrelated

No dude thats related

↩  characterslimits

In all fairness, since 2012 we used proboards, where we didn't have any significant problems. Proboards was better for everyone, especially from a moderation perspective.

The reason I shit on flarum, is because it literally lacks the basic function to call itself a forum. Even straight out of the box, just basically nothing. Everything is buggy, and to be quite frank I just wish we could have gone back to proboards.

The only reason we moved, and they only reason we are still here today is because of Seth. 1 because he forced the community to move here, even after countless threads explaining the downside.
2, because he caused irreversible damage to the proboards forum and we can't go back.

↩  characterslimits You have chosen to ignore my actual point, and put words and infer statements that I did not make. I've made my point, Flarum is a crappy piece of software, I've outlined why, you've chosen to nit-pick it and ignore the context behind those points, and you've decided that you'd rather suggest what I mean by them instead.

The entire software suite has been nothing but a buggy piece of crap, you want me to stop complaining about it, I'm afraid it's too late. They made a poor piece of software that I've had to make work for TF, and I've hated every fucking second of it.

If you want to have an actual conversation about why Flarum is a piece of shit, don't go to the trouble of taking me word by word and tell me why I'm wrong, because you ignored the majority of my post and chose to go for the bits that you cared about arguing.

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↩  characterslimits That’s because you don’t care about quality. You just care about complexity (which is what appeals everyone for some reason). If I show you something that’s extremely complex, you will instantly like it regardless of the actual quality.

Show me something extremely complex. I'm ready. I don't like complex things, I like things that work and have basic features that make actual sense, like thread previews and an easy to read and understand layout. The people here like things that work, easy to use and understand while not being piles of dog shit that are buggy and have limited features without adding a bunch of extensions to get basic forum functionality. Other forum software suites that I've used have more features and sucked less than this does out of the tin without having to make a suggestion to get a possibly outdated plugin or take the risk of it not working at all to add a feature that should have been included from the start.

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↩  characterslimits How do you damage a cloud-based forum software? What’s really preventing you from going back?

The previous owner (Seth) legitimately deleted the forum and we had to have ProBoards staff go out of their way and actually recover the forum following deletion, but it fucked user accounts and shit, making it unusable.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/79…861204/hell.png

why are people getting angry over forum software lmao
calm down yall

I like Flarum, I think it's the best forum software aside from XenForo, which costs a whole bunch of money. People will never stop complaining. People complained about the Proboards forum, the MyBB forum, and the flarum forum. You can't make everyone happy and trying to argue about something that's a personal preference isn't really productive and is gonna lead to a shitshow.

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↩  characterslimits We use a service called Pusher to load posts in real time.

Do you work for Flarum 😭

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↩  Akefu-Brewer huge wall of stickies that i have to scroll down ON TOP of refreshing every time and on top of that pressing another button, all that struggle just to check for new posts.

Tip: Mark all threads as "Read", or just the stickied ones, and you wont have to scroll down all those stickies, to do this, there's a button labeled with a checkmark, press it to mark all threads as read, then you only have to refresh, hope this helps!

↩  Akefu-Brewer ↩  Zarcana Aaaand this is one of the main reasons Flarum is crappily designed. There's nothing suggesting that stickied threads will disappear from "All discussions" after being marked as read, because that's not how sticky threads work in the world of forums. This place's set up like a glorified Twitter, not a real forum.

↩  RedEastWood no, that's an extension that's currently running on this forum.
i know because i assisted in setting it up when this was first spun up.

the yellow-beige notification bit at the top of the forum at times telling you that a thread has been updated is what pusher does. in a thread it (usually) will automatically update the thread and show the new post(s) without refreshing.

(if this wasn't an actual question, please let me know because i may have misunderstood you.)

I am sure that Flarum is great for certain communities, I just think it isn't for ours. Flarum has a design philosophy where it tries to be as minimalistic as possible and leave everything to extensions. However, to replicate the feature set that we actively used on ProBoards, we need so many extra things that it becomes unmanageable.

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↩  characterslimits If it was poorly engineered someone would have found a way to illegitimately get Forum Admin by now.

not everything is about power

it’s poorly engineered in the usability sense too. the fact that i have had to open a thread 5 times to mark it as read is just not right, it shouldn’t have a glitch like this. i had to like and unlike a post in said thread just now to see if that will work.

flarum is such a bad forum software, it lacks what we need as a community and let’s not forget the ban only system

i actually like flarum i cant even lie but I can't deny its flaws in that its a pain in the ass in the back end to do anything from what I've been told. lack of direct messaging may alienate those members of our community that doesn't want/isnt allowed discord. i do agree that some individuals exaggerate flarum's problems but like those same individuals will also criticise a stone for not being a rock so like