The other post was simply getting too cluttered to continue - this post eliminates that by creating a poll for the most suggested changes.
Please vote accordingly.
Edit 1
I meant to put WoltLabs not WotLabs.
Not listed: Discourse.
There's a whole logistical discussion that needs to happen before we start voting.
@Darth#1726 There's a whole logistical discussion that needs to happen before we start voting.
That happened in the other thread
@Darth#1726 What exactly do we need to be discussing? A poll is simply just getting everyone's opinion. The result does not change anything.
Discourse or WotLabs sounds like a good choice.
@Xen#1728 The thread is titled "The Final Forum Vote" so I took that to mean this was meant to be the deciding factor.
@Darth#1729 Well I don't think this thread would be official unless Wild said so. As far as I know, this is nothing more than a poll to see what forum the community wants.
@Darth#1729
Ah I see - could someone rename it to just Forum Vote then, as I don’t know how to.
@Xen#1731 It's not always clear if a suggestion will be approved/denied even if the majority votes for that option, I just interpreted the wording of the title to mean this was supposed to be the deciding vote. Regardless, I'd like to throw my vote in for XenForo.
I haven't posted anything on here yet but I have been lurking a bit. Since it genuinely pains me to use the horrid web design and interface on Flarum (note after writing this: it was difficult to put bullet points in this post properly, that's how bad it is), I have chose not to be an active poster on these forums as they currently are. I intend on this being my first and last post (excepting responses possibly) on the Flarum forums. It's good to see that many agree including Wild and wish to scrap this forum software in favor of something different. However, my thoughts:
I have investigated the usability of the ProBoards forum as it currently is. While it appears that all data related to 'liked' posts are gone, all threads and posts from the past appear just as they always have. If you for some reason aren't able to log into your old forum account, there is a very simple workaround to make it possible. The only problems with ProBoards is the members list and search, the latter being much more important as it appears to be completely broken. This is an issue that can likely be rectified by somebody contacting support and telling them that it needs to be fixed. Ultimately, there would be minimal difficulties going back to ProBoards, and we would be uniting the history of the forums onto one platform and using the original forums from 2012.
Flarum is not a good forum software. It is what it is, it looks horrible, it is terrible just to use, and I can't take it seriously. I am not alone in holding this opinion, many people here do not want to have use this god-awful forum software. Many basic features are missing from it and what features are there are not pleasant to use in any way. This is okay however because Flarum is not a production-ready forum software, it is in beta and its developers recommend against using it production. We made the mistake of using it in production.
A transition to forum software like XenForo or WoltLab would be a significant improvement over Flarum and be more welcomed by the aggregate community here, but see the next point.
The last 8 years (minus the last few months most of which has been permanently wiped anyway) of the history of this community is in one place: the ProBoards forum. After all the effort (and technically getting ProBoards staff to break their own rules) that was put into getting that back restored to how it is now, I think it would be a mistake not to switch back to using it as our permanent forum. We spent 8 years there and all users here are comfortably accustomed to it. Being attached and accustomed to software like that is not a bad thing that needs to be rectified; it's actually a great thing for a community. People in general don't like sweeping, bold change; that goes for this community as well. I would know because I tried to enact it many times. People prefer incremental adjustments and improvements, the switch from ProBoards to different software has been anything but that and it's frankly one of the hugest mistakes that has been made by the administration of this community in the history of it. If we switch back to ProBoards, we can easily have some sort of archive for the threads that have been posted here thus far (relatively not much), and we will be uniting the community's history on a platform that ALL of its users are already accustomed to, not fracturing the community into segments that prefer a different software (XenForo, WoltLab, Flarum, etc). It enables Finest to be the independent forum manager which has helped this community greatly in times of struggle or ownership debacle and enables smooth transitions of power which we unfortunately missed out on with this particular debacle as we had switched to Flarum. It reunites us with the members of the community we may have lost out of disinterest when it was chosen that we had to move off ProBoards, it reintroduces familiarity. Thousands and thousands of people know what totalfreedom.boards.net is, who knows what forum.totalfreedom.me is? Hell, more people I'm sure know about totalfreedom.boards.net than totalfreedom.me itself.
Ultimately, I think that it should be the community's choice which path we pick, and I think that it should be something discussed with all options thoroughly considered. I think that the history and legacy of this community should be kept in mind and not just a blinding light of ambition. If you remove all of the aspects of history this community holds, you are left with nothing.
Based on all of those points, my vote is for ProBoards as it always has been and I suggest everybody think & discuss strongly about which option is the best route for the community.
Discourse is the better choice of forum in my opinion. It requires some setup, so it won't just look instantly perfect out of the box but if you can do that competently, you end up with a forum rich with modern features that this server has been looking for for a while. Here's an example: Now, nobody will file incorrect applications, because it can be done through forms on Discourse. You can also have other cool stuff like custom forum webpages (maybe for something like voting or the Discord server) and it comes with a really nice admin panel to top it off. The only real disadvantage I can think of is that it isn't hosted on its own server like ProBoards.
I have no idea why you would convolute the poll with multiple forum choices vs keeping the forum as is.
What are you going to do if the majority of people vote for moving to another forum, but there is no majority for a particular forum vs. flarum? Are you just going to go with the most popular alternative? RCV matters.
Would've been wiser to start with the simple question: ""Do you want to move forums or not". and then procede to forum alternatives, if the majority voted for moving forums.
While this sounds like a good idea these things end in carnage.
I've already said the forums is something I'll tackle and post a more detailed proposal on shortly. Would appreciate it if folks gave me a chance to form that proposal into something meaningful rather than simplifying it to such an extreme of this sort of poll...
@wild1145#1742 The fact of the matter is that public opinion was against moving away from Proboards and still remains in favour of using proboards.
The switch should've never happened if it was per the community's approval.
this thread is pretty reactionary and wild has said he's working on it. Wild should be the one posting this thread, The poll itself is also extremely bad lol
man i feel like im literally the only one that doesn't mind flarum atleast from a user perspective.
if we choose to move forum can we atleast stick to it and be certain on this choice for good?
@Miwojedk#1743 To be perfectly honest, the forum move is one of the few things I felt Seth had done right in his time (Well the mandating of it not the execution...). I firmly believe there will always be things that go against public opinion but serve to fit the longer term needs of the server in a much better way, and I think the forums are one of them. I've always been very anti-moving off Proboards, but that's not because pro boards is good (It's really not, there are a whole host of good reasons for us not to go back) but because nobody ever laid out a proper plan for moving elsewhere, and when people rush these things they go to absolute shit.
I will make a more detailed post shortly (Tonight hopefully) and the forums will be covered off in that post, as I appreciate I've spent a lot of my time recently firefighting and not being able to do a lot to improve things!
@lyicx#1754 if we choose to move forum can we atleast stick to it and be certain on this choice for good?
Yes, that's why I'm not rushing with anything, and want to have a fully formed plan in my head before doing anything, and ideally getting something to an "Early Pilot" that the community can play around with before any permanent changes are made.
Unfortunately from an admin perspective I don't personally think Flarum is sustainable, it's just so far a very immature product that causes me more headaches to maintain than some of the systems I look after in my day job that are up to 10 years old with hundreds of bespoke components, and that's saying something...
Regardless of whether anything will be done with the opinions in this thread, I just want to say that I am still conflicted about whether moving back to ProBoards is a viable option.
I think there are not too many people who think that ProBoards is the best software from a technical point of view; it is purely the history that makes it attractive. I have always been against moving away from it because I predicted that it would cause more pain than it was worth, and that has definitely come true in my opinion. But now that we have already suffered that pain, is ProBoards really still that attractive?
@anthony#1585 I don't care what forum software we use, but I'm getting tired of TotalFreedom playing the "Switch Forum Software" game. It's getting annoying that, like, every month, I have to create a new forum account because we switched forums. I suggest we stick with Flarum, we need to break the cycle of switching forum softwares.
