The New Forum

Micah
Micah
edited December 2009 in General Archive
Obviously, things have changed a little around here...You may be wondering: *WTF?*

We've switched our forum from Beast, a Ruby on Rails forum (btw: the main site is in Ruby on Rails) to Vanilla, a PHP forum. There were several reasons, and I'll touch on them quickly.

(Note: I'm just finishing the migration and it's 2am...so I'm going to be *very* brief because I'm exhausted)

h3. Single Sign On

With the Beast forum it was a pain to have to sign on twice. Once for the main site and once for the forum. At least you only needed 1 account, but still, a pain.

With the Vanilla forum, we've integrated them to achieve Single Sign On (SSO). So, sign in on the main site and you're automatically signed in here.

In a slightly related note, the login form on the main site is now protected by SSL encryption, which we have wanted to do for a long time but needed to wait until the SSO issue was dealt with. Suffice to say that SSL certificates are picky about subdomains.

h3. Maintenance

Running and maintaining a separate Rails app was somewhat difficult. They work best when they're isolated on a server. Since the main site was constantly being updated and the Beast forum was basically a legacy forum, they diverged more and more. Beast was several versions behind when it came to Rails, and we didn't like supporting an old version of Rails just for the forum.

Ryan and I definitely could have kept Beast going, but we'd much rather spend time working on the main site's features than toying with an aging forum.

h3. Features

Beast was very minimal. So is Vanilla. But! Vanilla has an active developer community that is creating addons to extend the feature set. We're hoping to leverage this community to keep things up and running.

h3. Going Forward...

Hopefully this will be the last time we move. We apologize for any inconvenience, and hopefully most of the data survived the move. If anything is missing, please let us know at [email protected] We'll do our best to help out.

Good night, adventurers!
Micah

Comments

  • Micah
    Micah
    Posts: 894
    Test comment.
  • ryan
    ryan
    Posts: 126
    Looks great. Nice Work!
  • ChainsawXIV
    ChainsawXIV
    Posts: 530
    The new forum looks good. If I may offer a suggestion however, I think it might be better if the main forum link took you to the Categories tab view rather than the Discussions tab view. The discussion tab offers a somewhat overwhelming mix of information, as compared to the more categorized view we were used to before, which is essentially what's on offer under Categories.
  • Micah
    Micah
    Posts: 894
    Yeah, I agree about the discussions vs categories. I'll see if there is a setting somewhere to change that.
  • ChainsawXIV
    ChainsawXIV
    Posts: 530 edited December 2009
    Worse comes to worst, you could always just change the address in the main site's link to "http://forums.obsidianportal.com/categories.php" for the same effect.

    Also, I posted a few bugs I've noticed with the new system in a separate "bugs thread":http://forums.obsidianportal.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=1140&page=1#Item_1, though maybe they should just be here instead. Whichever you prefer.

    Edit: Just wanted to add another suggestion, but I'm starting to feel like I'm spamming the thread, heh. Currently, the default setting automatically subscribes you to any thread you so much as comment on, which is a big change from how it was before. It's easy to change the setting, but a minor nuisance to have to. It might be worth changing the default on that, just for consistency's sake, although maybe that's already locked in by the conversion process.
    Post edited by ChainsawXIV on
  • DarkMagus
    DarkMagus
    Posts: 425
    I was wondering if anyone knew how to get this new forum as an RSS feed on my MyYahoo page. I had the old forum on there and it was great, it was up to date and showed the most recent posts in chronological order. I have tried adding the new forum to my page with the following address http://forums.obsidianportal.com/search.php?PostBackAction=Search&Type=Topics&Page=1&Feed=RSS2&FeedTitle=All+Discussions+Feed ---BUT this doesnt work well. It isnt in chronological order and only shows the topics, not the individual posts. Basically it isnt as easily read and organized. (I have played with the settings and I am 99% certain that this isnt a problem of just tweaking yahoo settings) Could someone who knows more than I do about this stuff please explain how I can get an update on my MyYahoo page which shows the most recent individual posts in chronological order. That would be soo helpful. Thanks in advance! :)
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