QUIRK New PIAF Forum + More

[wardmundy]

As you know, we continue to search for a better forum and overall support solution for PBX in a Flash that could more directly involve more of our current users and gurus.

As part of that effort, we are trying out spruz. Please have a look at your convenience and give us your feedback below.

And, no, we do not yet know whether we could migrate all of our existing content to the new platform. But... we're working on it.

 

[myitguy]

Initial impressions, the site is slow. It's taking me 10-15 seconds to move between pages.

Out of curiosity, have you looked at upgrading your vBulletin license to the new Publishing Suite?

What are you looking to accomplish, maybe someone can offer some insight into a platform that has worked for them...

 

[wardmundy]

We're using the free Spruz offering currently. We will switch to the paid offering in a few days and have been told that the performance is much better. We'll see.

As for what we're trying to accomplish, we want a more current platform that integrates all of the components into a single entity. This includes something equivalent to the Nerd Vittles WordPress blog that could be focused on PIAF and expanded to other contributors. Also on the wish list are more hierarchical forums, wiki, video tutorials, chat rooms, private discussion groups for contributors and gurus, messaging, calendar of events, Google Analytics, and more decentralized management so that different contributors can take responsibility for different components.

Haven't really looked at much from vBulletin because of what we found to be extremely serious security issues in the platform. We've actually rewritten a good bit of it to keep the bad guys out. But that in turn has made upgrades all but impossible. Attempts to work through the security concerns were met with righteous indignation, then stonewalling, then an acknowledgement that the platform never could be really secure on shared hosting servers because each user is essentially running as root insofar as Apache is concerned. Never mind the vulnerable code base! SO... no, vBulletin is not on our radar.

As a first step, we've now moved the new platform to http://pbxinaflash.us in order to simplify access. We see this as a gradual migration and, if we encounter insurmountable issues, we can certainly move in another direction. It is a very crowded field now. We also could simply stick with what we have.

The good news is that development on the platform appears to be fairly straightforward. I managed to stumble through just about everything in less than four hours. If you haven't taken a look around, please do and let us know what you think...

 

[wardmundy]

Still working through that one. They've done it for another platform so it's a question of whether it would be worth it for them or whether they will let us do it ourselves. They both use PHP and MySQL as I understand it.

 

[drmurdoch]

xenforo

As you know, we continue to search for a better forum

The vBulletin 3 forums have been pretty good.
I've migrated my forum to xenforo. We love it.
Much more interactive. Very good on resources.
vBulletin 3 is OK. We really disliked vB4.

and overall support solution for PBX in a Flash that could more directly involve more of our current users and gurus.

If you gave some specifics of what you wanted in terms of the above statement ... I might be able to help.

We do not yet know whether we could migrate all of our existing content to the new platform. But... we're working on it.

There is a robust migration path from vBulletin to xenforo. All posts will easily be transferred, including everyone's passwords.

There is an excellent bridge to wordpress if you wanted to bring nerdvittles and pbxinaflash.com together. There is a supported bridge between xenforo and Mediawiki if you wanted to maintain the mediawiki wiki.

As part of that effort, we are trying out spruz @ http://pbxinaflash.us - Please have a look at your convenience and give us your feedback below.

The spruz blog seems almost as good as Wordpress. But NerdVittles.com seems to be doing fine from what I can see. Not sure I'd want to change much.

The spruz forum seem a bit slow and clunky. Not sure how good the searching would be when there were 1000s of posts.
I found the wiki to be very slow.

Maybe the demo server is slow ?

I was surprised to see a non-integrated search for the spruz site. Blog, Forum, Wiki searching seems entirely separate.

In terms of "Better, easier Support" that you are looking for .... I don't see anything in the .us site that would facilitate that.

The lifeblood of http://pbxinaflash.com is the forums. I'm not sure the spruz forums is up to the challenge.

I'll try to learn more about what you are looking for.

 

[lowno]

I would be most concerned with the SEO aspect of a migration. I am sure a good chunk of your new visitors each month come from posts that are indexed by google. It would be interesting to know the percentage of visitors from google searches like that. You would essentially loose most of that link juice if the url's change.

 

[blanchae]

Where is the new forum being hosted? It is very slow.......

 

[wardmundy]

Thanks for the feedback. Performance has certainly been a major issue. And we can add an inability to migrate from vBulletin as a serious deal-breaker. We'll take a good, hard look at xenforo. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.

 

[da1Bear]

Ipb

Thanks for the feedback. Performance has certainly been a major issue. And we can add an inability to migrate from vBulletin as a serious deal-breaker. We'll take a good, hard look at xenforo. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.

Ward, I have a great deal of experience (more than 7 years running a forum with several thousand members) with Invision Power Board (IPB), and would be willing to assist if you would like to take a look at that platform.

They take security very seriously, have an active developer community, and the performance is excellent, even on inexpensive shared servers. And you can import from vBulletin.

 

[tm1000]

+1 xenforo

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/a-success-story-one-month-after-moving-to-xenforo.13856/

 

[drmurdoch]

I would be most concerned with the SEO aspect of a migration.

The spruz URLs are quite horrible. A friend mentioned that as well.

Although Google says the URL doesn't matter as much anymore .... well ... SEO friendly URLs are still relevant.

 

[drmurdoch]

Anyone have any non-spruz suggestions ?

 

[Ramblin]

Still use (old) Forum for posting?

I'm not sure if the old forum is still considered active or if all new posts should be going to this new forum.

Can you clarify?

As for feedback:
- yes, this version is painfully slow hence my hope that I can continue to use the old forum
- Is it safe to assume you have looked at and decided against phpBB?
- This new forum looks nice, but the looks don't justify the slow response time so I'd take functional over pretty any day (in a forum )

 

[rossiv]

I'm not sure if the old forum is still considered active or if all new posts should be going to this new forum. Nothing has been moved officially to my knowledge. Ward would know definitively.

Can you clarify?

As for feedback:
- yes, this version is painfully slow hence my hope that I can continue to use the old forum
If you mean this forum that you posted on, it is still the active forum. Nothing has been moved yet.
- Is it safe to assume you have looked at and decided against phpBB? I think phpBB was turned down from a security standpoint IIRC. Again, Ward would know for sure.
- This new forum looks nice, but the looks don't justify the slow response time so I'd take functional over pretty any day (in a forum )That's what others were saying above in this thread.

Ward would know the definitive answers to these questions - This is just what I know from my perspective.

 

[wardmundy]

Yeah. We've given up on spruz. Will try some of the other suggestions when we have some time.

 

[blanchae]

Yeah. We've given up on spruz. Will try some of the other suggestions when we have some time.

Ward, When will the new "Forum in a Flash" server application be written?

 

[drmurdoch]

Ward, When will the new "Forum in a Flash" server application be written?

Right after PIAF Google Voice stable !

(AHEM, what I mean is ... Google Voice will never be stable as .. well ... Google keeps messing with it !)

 

[Ramblin]

phpBB security flaw?

Ward,

I was told (above) that phpBB was rejected due to security concerns.

I use phpBB.

Could you share what you found about phpBB so I could either work around the issue or, if serious enough, find an alternative for myself?

Ramblin

 

[rossiv]

Ward,

I was told (above) that phpBB was rejected due to security concerns.

I use phpBB.

Could you share what you found about phpBB so I could either work around the issue or, if serious enough, find an alternative for myself?

Ramblin

No, that was me. That was from my perspective - Ward didn't say any such thing officially. The only reason I said that was because Ward has mentioned in the past and has made evident that he is very security conscious. He probably wouldn't want to risk someone hacking the forums by having full access to the code in a chance to find an exploit - which would be easier with phpBB as it is open source compared to VBulletin where Ward has in fact mentioned, and I quote, a "security nightmare" until he fixed it.

Haven't really looked at much from vBulletin because of what we found to be extremely serious security issues in the platform. We've actually rewritten a good bit of it to keep the bad guys out.

Another reason I think phpBB was turned down was because as Ward stated earlier,

As for what we're trying to accomplish, we want a more current platform that integrates all of the components into a single entity. This includes something equivalent to the Nerd Vittles WordPress blog that could be focused on PIAF and expanded to other contributors. Also on the wish list are more hierarchical forums, wiki, video tutorials, chat rooms, private discussion groups for contributors and gurus, messaging, calendar of events, Google Analytics, and more decentralized management so that different contributors can take responsibility for different components.

To my knowledge, phpBB doesn't have the capability to integrate the above mentioned things seamlessly.

 

[myitguy]

Haven't really looked at much from vBulletin because of what we found to be extremely serious security issues in the platform. We've actually rewritten a good bit of it to keep the bad guys out. But that in turn has made upgrades all but impossible. Attempts to work through the security concerns were met with righteous indignation, then stonewalling, then an acknowledgement that the platform never could be really secure on shared hosting servers because each user is essentially running as root insofar as Apache is concerned. Never mind the vulnerable code base! SO... no, vBulletin is not on our radar.

I took note of the "Shared Server" comment earlier, and I believe I mentioned this in the past, but if you guys need/want something different from Shared Hosting then I have no issues providing a VPS to fit your needs...If I'm feeling particularly generous I may just throw a dedicated server your way. PM me if you want to discuss it further.