Building a new site

Liking something is an easy form of interaction, but not very important, in my opinion.

There is a "like" system in XF. I think Myrthos meant that the current +1's are lost in the transfer with the standard script since they shouldn't normally exist with vBulletin. Maybe something that can be done by hand to preserve them but they would belong to the past anyway, so as Eye said, chances are we'd survive the loss.

PS: but would we like to have 'dislikes' as well?
 
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I'm in favour of a like system, and I use it frequently. I find it's a way of showing agreement, amusement, appreciation, etc, when we don't have the cues of in-person interaction.

But I wouldn't be in favour of dislikes. I think if someone wants to express something negative, they should make the effort to actually say it. I think the disparity helps to skew things slightly in a positive direction.
 
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I'm in favour of a like system, and I use it frequently. I find it's a way of showing agreement, amusement, appreciation, etc, when we don't have the cues of in-person interaction.

But I wouldn't be in favour of dislikes. I think if someone wants to express something negative, they should make the effort to actually say it. I think the disparity helps to skew things slightly in a positive direction.
I agree. I think dislikes have a place in anonymous or very large communities, where people don't dare to write different opinions. That's not a problem here.
 
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True, I'd rather have someone write an opinion than just a dislike with no reason (though it's always possible to ask why X or Y disagrees).

The positive reactions are rarely ambiguous and the neutral ones are just there to put some life or show that someone read the post, so they're all good. Maybe it's best to keep the positive and neutral reactions only, but I wouldn't be entirely opposed to a "I disagree" reaction (not the 'angry' one they show).

Let's make a poll with a few combinations if we happen to have the choice in the adopted solution. :)
 
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I'm in favour of a like system, and I use it frequently. I find it's a way of showing agreement, amusement, appreciation, etc, when we don't have the cues of in-person interaction.
It also avoids the spam of "+1", "This", or "Agreed" type posts...
 
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Yes please cause the codex has plenty of labels for you as well.:p

Still I wouldn't mourn the +1 systems demise either.;)
 
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I also think the like-button allows people to show support of one opinion over another without risking getting drawn into antagonistic discussions.

A lot of people feel an obligation to answer when they've been quoted, which can make a rude response hard to ignore. The like avoids that and allows people to interact in an easy way.

Other reaction I'm not that into. They can be easily misunderstood without the context of a text response. I've seen plenty of people be upset with a smile response, seeing it as a mocking smile. Or a sad face being a "cry-baby" face.
 
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I think likes are great, but no dislikes because people will start forming cliques and alliances against the "bad people" who disliked their post, and/or just get offended and dislike the others post in return, starting a silly forum war, and it just creates problems.

And on another topic, I honestly don't think its necessary to bring all the old forum posts and old news bits to the new site, but that just starting fresh would work too. But I tend to not be sentimental and so that is just me (I'm weird, lol)
 
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I'm not optimistic about WordPress or the wpForo plugin. While there seems to be enough functionality (though I haven't found a direct way to link news to the forums), I'm stumbling on bugs all the time.
 
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Yeah, I would be inclined to skip solutions based on Wordpress + plugins.
 
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Just to add to that, what I've found previously is that when you rely on plugins to provide significant functionality, that's where maintenance pain starts to creep in - you want to upgrade, but not all your plugins are updated to use that version yet, or worse, have become unmaintained. Or they require some action because they've made some changes, and so on.

I kind of think of the Unix philosophy of having, as far as possible, programs that do one thing well, and not try to be all things to all men. So, my thinking on doing something like this is to select the simplest and most robust solutions for the requirements of the site. I think when you stick to the core functionality provided by the solutions you're using, you're effectively letting the developers of that software do almost all the work for you.

So, when I look at the requirements here, rather than look at one platform that could be customised to do what we need, I'm looking first at whether simple implementations of multiple solutions would be much more maintainable than one more custom solution; that running, say, three different solutions close to their vanilla state might be preferable. In our case, maybe a forum, a very simple news site, and a very simple wiki for what we now have in the database. And is it really necessary to have them connected in fancy ways? Perhaps it's fine if the RPG database stuff just lives on the wiki, and we look at it there? With a bit of decent theming, we could it make so the transition between them would not be jarring.

Part of my thinking is in making things as simple and documented as possible, not only for myself, but in case history repeats; if in a couple of years it's time to stand down, it would good to have things such that a handover to someone else with a bit of experience with web services wouldn't be too onerous. We could make the news site and wiki so simple they could exist as static sites, which with our levels of traffic could be served from a potato.
 
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Difficult for me to picture a wiki as a replacement for the database. It's probably better to give up on the feature entirely. It's not the same functionality, and wikis tend to be messy very quickly when they're managed by several people. We may as well use Wikipedia or Steam if that's just to get infos about a game, no need to maintain that ourselves.

When I was a newsposter, or even as a user, I was/am frequently using the database when I wanted to see details about a game, and more importantly, the related articles: news, reviews, … It's also used for the GotY, I don't see how it could be done otherwise to extract the stats.

But yep, the database looks like the most difficult item to integrate with existing solutions.

Maybe we can create the articles with the forum itself, which would look like what we currently have in the forums only (so not a big difference there). If the forum engine has enough features, there should be an API to extract thread titles of a particular forum, perhaps even an excerpt of the post itself, to show in a CMS block. It's a common requirement after all; I think I saw something like that with WP and wpForo but it may be limited.

Then tags could be used to define or refer to games. For ex. tags with the game name, associated with a "news" tag for a news article, "info" for the information about the game, "review" for reviews, and so on. That would make many tags, but would that be a problem?

Surely having a forum and a CMS that pulls info from it shouldn't give us frequent version conflicts. That's what many websites do, but the forum engine needs a good API (though a direct DB access might be a plan B, the forum DB structure is unlikely to change much).

I have no idea of the traffic we have.

EDIT: I get what you mean by using individual tools, @Ripper;. I'm usually following the same principle. :) We just have to see if what's practical without losing the functionality, or as little as possible.
 
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I've played with Xenforo in the sense that I migrated the forum database. That worked, so all people and posts appeared to be there. They even had the same thread an post IDs, so an automated link conversion could be easily made from the old to the new forums.
What would be missing is the hacks we did in VB. All likes would be gone for example.

If your current lead was inconclusive and we had to create the new site on our own, would the Xenforo code be accessible to some of us, to test the integration with a CMS and see what is possible? And perhaps even the database you converted (the public part of it since there are some personal info)?

I don't now if that's possible with the licence.
 
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I guess it should be possible.
 
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Hi there, if we're looking for other options, I'd like to suggest discourse. I follow python development and they have recently changed their rules to not require emailing a list for change approvals, but to use their discourse site instead.

I was curious if this might be useful for the watch. Here are some possible benefits:
* Written in javascript and Ruby, but used by the python foundation (says something)
* Open source
* Can be self-hosted or you can buy a host from discourse.org (looks overpriced)
* A mobile app exists
* there is a plugin system so we have a way forward on the crpg analyzer and database
* custom theme development
* badges

More info on wikipedia.
 
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Yes, I like Discourse (as a user), I first saw it with Owlcat's forums, there's a funny bot to teach you how to use it with live exercises, that was impressive.

But yeah, it's Ruby and JS, I'm not sure it's an advantage; personally I find that Ruby has a poor readability, and from what I read it's slower and eats up more memory than PHP. And I don't know how easy it could be connected because of that.

Here's the link to Discourse with all the info: https://www.discourse.org/ (check out "Community" at the top to see the forums)

And their blog: https://blog.discourse.org/ It's obviously connected to their forums, but I don't know what it's based on.

EDIT:
* there is a plugin system so we have a way forward on the crpg analyzer and database

I love that they explain how to include acceptance tests when writing a plugin :D
 
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I see that their blog is WordPress and their plugin to connect to a Discourse forum.

If you try, you'll see below the article a "Start discussion" or a "Continue discussion" link that goes to the forum. If there are replies, they show on the blog (example).

In the forums (example), the first post is the subtitle of the article (or 1st paragraph if you will). You can expand it by clicking on "Show full post".

I'm not fond of the blog presentation but I think WP is flexible enough to change it. Like here, for ex, with the forum activity showing on the WP page.
 
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Yes I like Discourse very much, and I think they've done a good job with it. They also have the sort of open source business model I like - they develop the software in conjunction with the community, and the whole package is available for anyone that wants to self host, with their money being made by offering fully hosted solutions for those that prefer to outsource. No limited "Community Edition", with a premium version containing features you'd want, or any of that malarkey.

I think in the minus column, I don't like the default layout, and when I first encountered it, I wasn't sure I liked it at all. Probably why Owlcat has their training bot. I just wonder whether, in our case, a lot of folks might be turned off by a too-drastic change. But perhaps not, and in so many ways it would be a significant improvement. Also a strong focus on keeping work client-side where possible, to keep the server more efficient.

With regard to what you were saying, @Redglyph;, I see your point. But I don't really see an initial focus on simplicity as necessarily being a barrier to further development. Pretty much any CMS, and any forum, can be linked in fairly straightforward ways, and it's a very common thing to do. I doubt that would be too much of a headache, and in many cases there are existing guides to various integrations.

Let's say we used something like Ghost CMS (which has a similar "true" open source business model, and a focus on being a modern, lighter alternative to Wordpress), and Discourse as a forum. I'm sure we could link those up, without burning too much midnight oil. Then, I'm sure Ghost would provide what's required if we then wanted to develop more fancy DB stuff later.

So, I still lean towards simple and maintainable, with a better forum solution, as the first step, while not excluding the possibility of further development down the road. With the idea of a separate wiki for our knowledge base, I was just floating the question of how many people get a lot of value from having that information as integrated as it is now, to see whether that's really a necessary part of the spec.
 
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