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
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.