[Olpc-open] Going forward with the community forum

Sat Jan 12 15:27:21 EST 2008

Well it looks like we have two sets of needs.

1) Neighborhood usage: Simple management, fast, low bandwidth. - Possibly punBB
2) Global usage: More feature rich management for global scalability, fast, low bandwidth. - Possibly phpBB  

This brings up the question of whether we should consider one forum software product for all needs.

I've loaded punBB on my FC8 system. 
  1.. It is very simple to use. 
  2.. It appears to only have six developers. Will security issues be fixed quickly?
  3.. There is no way to switch off the memberlist and the visibility of website URLs to guests (SPAM)
  4.. Banning users cannot be done using lists, only one user or address at a time.
  5.. Plugins are few and primarily for administrators http://punbb.org/downloads.php
  6.. Lots of language packs (Primarily european languages)
  7.. Lots of themese / styles
  8.. There is no way to add a user without registration (not a big thing)
  9.. There is no way to set registration defaults (eg. not showing email addresses in your profile, or posts)
  10.. Modifications outside of the admin plugins are similar to that of phpBB. To get the feature set of phpBB would be very difficult.
Anyone have personal experience with punBB? 

At first glance I'd go with phpBB for the main forum and something punBB-ish for smaller scale deployments.

Regards,

Peter & Diana

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Michael Burns 
  To: Harrison - Schaaffe 
  Cc: olpc-open 
  Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2008 10:20 AM
  Subject: Re: Going forward with the community forum

  Worth throwing out all our options. In my complaining of phpbb3's mod system (via manual core file editting), punbb was pointed out. It has language support (and we can probably connect it to Pootle to get some great mixups going), has some drop-in modules for Administration, at least, and is meant to be lightweight. All good things so far, right? 

  It has import tools for both vbulletin3 (olpchelp.org) and phpbb2 (olpc.osuosl.org). Worth glancing over. More simple/hackable code is preferable to complex/less hackable code, if we aren't losing any critical features. 

  http://punbb.org

  On Jan 12, 2008 1:33 AM, Harrison - Schaaffe <peter.harrison at bigfoot.com > wrote:

    Hello everyone,

    I have installed a test copy of phpBB3 on a FC8 system at home. The features are improved. They have some importable modules for admin control panel menuing systems, but the rest remain as direct template modifications.

  Wonderful. I will be doing the same for a Internet-reachable site this afternoon. Will share the link around...

    The quantity of available mods for phpBB3 is still very small. http://www.phpbb.com/mods/db/index.php?i=browse&mode=group:phpbb&sub=3  or http://www.phpbb.com/mods/db/index.php?i=browse&mode=group:phpbb

   Agreed.

    It now has CAPTCHA built in for registration and guest posting. Hooray! It also has a better admin control panel search utility for finding users, not just by email address.

    phpBB3 may be suitable for small installations due to its cost, and the volunteer base to modify its language packs, but it still lacks the ease of modification features of vBulletin. Some simple things like adding a user account from the admin control panel is a modification!

    If we were to go with it, I'd strongly recommend minimizing the modifications to the skin/style and header. That way the inevitable upgrades will be much less of a pain to do. There are no phpBB3 styles on phpbb.com, probably because it is so new. The default one, prosilver, would have to modified. http://www.phpbb.com/styles/db/index.php?i=browse&mode=group:phpbb

    Does anyone know of anybody who could create a header image with a transparent background for the forums, a gradient tint image and four corners for effects? 10 images max, most of them tiny.

    I'd also suggest the following for the new forum:

    1. Have email verification as part of the registration process (SPAM)
    2. Allow auto subscription to threads by default. This helps to remind people to come back and see if their post has been answered.
    3. Don't allow users to edit posts for an indefinite time after they have posted (SPAM)
    4. Don't allow users to contact each other by email. (Can send e-mails in phpBB3) It exposes the email address to SPAMmers
    5. No guest posting
    6. Hide the member list whenever possible (Server load for robots and possible URL SPAM trap)

    Put me down as a volunteer for phpBB3 testing on the olpc.osuosl.org test/dev database. Add a forum to it specifically for this thread so feedback and findings can be more easily tracked. How long should the feature evaluation period be? I'll work on creating a phpBB2 export of OLPChelp.org, give me an scp account somewhere and I'll upload it for you to do a test phpBB3 import.

    Regards,

    Peter & Diana

      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: Michael Burns 
      To: Harrison - Schaaffe 
      Cc: olpc-open 
      Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 9:17 AM
      Subject: Re: Going forward with the community forum

      On Jan 11, 2008 11:54 AM, Harrison - Schaaffe <peter.harrison at bigfoot.com> wrote:

        Michael,

        I must admit I am very wary of phpBB2, for the reasons I stated, but the feature set with phpBB3 seems greatly improved. I chose vBulletin for the feature set when the open source product at the time couldn't deliver what I needed. I used phpBB2 for about 4 years.

      Let me tell you, I've said some not nice things about phpbb2 this month, and don't want to rely on it for more than  the time required. A logical upgrade path is welcome, and I would like to learn toward a phpbb3 installation (there is beta work on the mailing list software, which gives us a nice option if we want to take it. The software looks solid without it as well). 

        I understand the desire to stick with open source for deployment of similar platroms around the world at the local level. 

        Is there a plan to migrate to phpBB3, or is it in use already? If v3 can do what it promises, then it would be best to upgrade before the forums get too big.

      There is not a stated goal, as nearly all of the admin work on the forum has been in my free time, with assistance from good Phil Bordelon and his sysadmin skills to assist along the way. I don't want to flip the switch on the site until we have a full running system (regardless of waht software package we land with. a BETA forum running in tandem for users to stress test with the production system seems like the best way to go. Agreed? 

        I'm assuming it would import phpBB2 databases, can it import vBulletin natively? If not a vBulletin export to phpBB2 format should be able to be done with a built in utility.

      It is very much intended to support upgrades from phpbb2 databases. No experience with vBulletin, but an intermediary step to phpbb2 seems good to me. I've streamlined the backup process, so we can play around with db snapshots and not worry about data loss. Whee! 

        I'm going to assume phpBB3 will be the planned platform for the unified forum. 

      I want to echo the concerns overs file-level modifications to install MODs. That really isn't a manageable way to keep software packages up to date, both the phpbb base software as well as updates to the mods. Proper support of MODs/Addons/Extensions is really important in going forward. 

        Please also send a login for the olpc.osuosl.org forum. 

      Will get you a login account as soon as possible. Should be tonight at the latest, will try and get it sooner (weird issue, don't ask).

        As I said previously I figured that olpchelp.org would have a lot of non-technical members, and it does. As a result of this I chose a theme that would be attractive with limited use of graphics. Bandwidth can be an issue on low speed links, so I have used a 30 day expires header on all images to cache them on the client side. The olpc.osuosl.org forum seems to taken a different approach by stripping out most of the the default phpBB subSilver template images. Is there a phpBB theme out there that is judicial in its use of graphics, attractive and could be easily modified to match the OLPC brand / feel?

      The low use of images on the site was a fortunate hack. Few images the better, if only for rendering quirks and page loading, but proper cache option settings is a very good thing, and I think we can find a nice middle ground. As you can tell, I don't have the best artistic touch, so ripping out subSilver images in place of CSS background colors where it made sense was just a look-and-feel hack I threw together. 

         This is an area in where technology, form and function could come together for the relaunch of the combined forums. For me this is very important in attracting membership. It's never just the technology, it's people and process too.

      And not necessarily in that order! :)

      I'm glad we're starting to find a path to start going forward on. I can get a BETA phpbb3 install for us to work on with a snapshot of our db at the olpc.osuosl.org server (some unique url will be sent out to interested testers in the community) and we can evaluate how it will work for our combined uses with a hands on approach. Tomorrow looks like a good hacking day. Anyone care to join the fun? 

      -- 
      Michael Burns * Student
      Open Source {Education} Lab 

  -- 
  Michael Burns * Student
  Open Source {Education} Lab 
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