Archived Forum

Hey Glyn, as a heavy openHAB forum user (but not involved with admin) I think the move to Discourse was a great decision. Unfortunately I had no involvement with the move itself but if you contact Thomas (https://community.openhab.org/users/teichsta/activity) I am sure he would be happy to answer any questions.

+1 on that, the new Openhab forum is a very helpful, easy to use place

Have you guys looked at xenforo?

Another site I use has switched to this. It seems to have stopped spam almost completely and has a great interface. They completely redisgned things and it took about 3 months, although I understand a copy across would only have taken days.

Simon

It would be good to capture other opinions and views about a replacement forum, as once it's changed, we will have to live with it for years to come!

Can we draw together a shortlist of suitable candidates?
1) Discourse
2) Xenforo

​Any others?

Paul

Xenforo is top grade but not free, you have to buy it

Discourse is unknown for me though I'm a webjunky .... first time ever I hear that one ... seems to be free, why not install it somewhere and let us play/fool with it ? still best way to discover it for users and those that need to manage it.

Simple Machine Forums is pretty stable but slow evolution (not always bad)

PHPBB did some huge improvement but still has major spam issues

Vbulletin is now having a bad press since a few years though I liked it long time ago

invision seems rather nice also, not free but seems to run ok. Visit a forum with heavy traffic and it holds ...

That's about what I know, fooled around a lot with scripts a few years ago. What I learned ... look at evolution, actif support, quick response to bugs/security problems, actif members helping each other and most important, a good coder (ex PHPBB has a nasty habit crashing under heavy load, database wise)

The phpBB spam issue can be resolved via the free (as in beer) script ZBBlock from spambotsecurity.com

We run it at aluminumalloyboats.com and have had zero spam for 2 years.

And yes, the improvements they've made recently (v3.1) are very nice.

ZBBlock works with Drupal too. I made the suggestion regarding its use here, over a year ago, but for some reason, nothing came of it.

What are the reasons for not considering Drupal 7 or 8? - Better the devil you know and all that?

I've also used

https://invisionpower.com/

which appears a good stable solution

Thanks for all the responses. 

@stuart invisionpower does not appear to be open-source this is an essential requirement IMO 

@Bill Thomson ZBBlock sounds useful. However, their website is terrible! 

@bidouilleur @Bramco Xenforo does not appear to be open-source this is an essential requirement IMO 

@sheepy @ summerboy thanks for your feedback. Good to hear. I will contact Thomas to ask him about the openHAB forum setup.

I will setup a custom demo with Discource so we can evaluate the platform.

@robert yes drupal 7 / 8 is a possibility. Maybe more for the website rather then the forum. From what I have seen forums is not an area where drupal excells. I think a deciated platform for the forum will give us a better experience.

From what I have seen forums is not an area where drupal excels.....

It's at least 5 years behind the leaders in respect of user experience IMO.

Paul

It's at least 5 years behind the leaders in respect of user experience IMO.

I have to agree with that.

I have set up a free 14 day trial with Discourse, this incidence is hosted by Discourse. If we choose to go down this route then we will probably host the forum ourselves, but there should be no difference from the end user perspective. 

Please login (create an account or use your Google, GitHub, or Twittter account) and make some test posts to get a feel for the platform:

https://community.openenergymonitor.org/

If you want to see an active example of Discourse being used with a thriving community, check out the openHAB forums: 

https://community.openhab.org

Others interested to push the tests some more ? We have been only a few to test Discourse. Think most of us are convinced but being like 5 to test .... jump over and do some testing like we did. And don't be to serious about it, just push, click and post whatever and finally give your opinion .. 

Thanks for helping to test. I'm convinced it's the way to go. I spent most of today installing discourse onto our own server. It's been a bit of a epic involving docker and configuring nginx as a reverse proxy for our whole site since discourse does not work well with apache but we require apache to serve drupal php. Anyway.. I got there in the end. Once I finish setting up I'll migrate from the discourse hosted trial system to our own hosted instance then start sending out invites. I'll let you know when the self hosted version is ready.

ok, we'll test it a bit once ready ... see if all is still ok on your server ... never know ;-)

Would that explain why I'm seeing this message?

If I click "Proceed to community.openenergymonitor.org (unsafe)" I get the same page as http://heatpumpmonitor.org/

Ok, forum is now up on our servers. I've migrated all content from the trial. I think most things are working, although not done much testing yet. Please let me know how you get on:
http://community.openenergymonitor.org/

SSL has not yet been enabled.. I'm working on it.

Ah yes, please use the HTTP link http://community.openenergymonitor.org/

I need to setup HTTPS SSL. The reason you see the HP page is that HTTPS requests are currently getting sent direct to Apache rather than Nginx. This will be fixed soon but for now please use HTTP link above

Can I suggest a 'sandpit' category for a while to allow folk to play with the new forum rather than create test posts in main categories?

Good idea Brian!

Paul

I've just created the sandpit category, so please post away....
(There is already a  sandbox category, but doesn't show up on the home page or have a description so not sure if it's a duplicate?)

Paul