[Mageia-discuss] News about the forum

Maât maat-ml at vilarem.net
Mon Oct 4 00:14:13 CEST 2010


Hi all,

After many opinions and suggestions exchanges, mails and thought we have
started to work on forum thing.

Considering our hope to grow we started to analyse the board engines
with a few axis of needs :

Work input data :
----

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software_%28PHP%29
http://www.big-boards.com/
http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/bbPress+FluxBB+FUDforum+Invision-Power-Board+MyBB+Phorum+phpBB+punBB+SMF+vBulletin

(In this last link boards versions are not perfectly up-to date :-( )

(and secunia resports about security alerts these last years)

Axes :
----

1) Ability to hold under heavy loads and store many posts

=> phpBB3, vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, MesDiscussions.net which
are the most represented on big boards

2) Moderation features

=> vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, phpBB3, Simple Machines Forum 2, MyBB

3) User Features

=> vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, phpBB3, Simple Machines Forum 2,
MyBB, FudForum

4) Security

=> phpBB3, FudForum, vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2...

(phpBB2 was not even considered as an option from the beginning)
(MyBB was not very good)

5) Look and ergonomy

=> vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, phpBB3, Simple Machines Forum 2,
MyBB...

5) Opensource (GPL or AGPL)

=> phpBB3, FudForum, MyBB (GPLv3 \o/), punBB, phorum...



Method and results :
----

We excluded proprietary software (wether free or not)...

(Of course when it comes to usability and features vBulletin and
Invision Power Board are far ahead... the goal was to find something
hopefully able to compete with them) :

So exit: vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, Simple Machines Forum 2,
MesDiscussions.net...

Then we excluded forums with utf8 know issues like punBB...

Then we excluded forums with too well known security issues discovered
theses last years :

So exit: MyBB (Sad for french people but that's life) and phorum...
http://secunia.com/advisories/product/4144/?task=statistics
http://secunia.com/advisories/product/4479/?task=statistics

for Fudforum there were not much issues but one of them allowed system
access... we saved it because of people enthusiasm on the lists :)

Then we Excluded forums with bad organization of
administration/moderation control panels and/or missing moderation features:

So exit: fudforum (which also would have been painful to relook) and
FluxBB also.

Nota: Fud has got the very cool mailing list bridge that we should set
up rather as soon as possible on the official board (but as already said
this feature still needs to be thought about, discussed by people and
heavily tested to avoid backfires... considering the current mailing
lists trafic and the obvious lack of love of some packagers for forums
this is not something to underestimate)



=> The survivor is phpBB3 which is n°1 in big-boards.com and yet is far
from perfect imho. It will need some tweaking (that others would have
needed also : mainly about troll management, and also support
enhancements for example to mark support topics as [solved]) to match
more closely our needs...

So we started to work on phpBB3 with ash (thanks to ennael personal
funding)...

One cool thing is that phpBB3 is published also through git so we are
able to track upstream changes and merge them quickly into our running
version without breaking local patches and enhancements. (The upgrade
via this method has been successfully tested a few hours ago)

At this precise minute we have a fresh new (skinned) up-to-date phpBB3
running that still needs a few adds (language packs for example).

Hope we'll be soon able to push DNS records so that everybody can get in
and give us feedback and improvement proposals.

Stay tuned,
Maât (a little bit tired... sorry my english is probably uglier than usual)




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