It's just quicker for a user to join a Discord community or tweet/DM a question where they already have an account. Even with things like OAuth2, the mental burden of creating a new account is there. Not to mention learning how to use the new platform. And the total gain after all the effort is trivial.
I think at this point in time, it's not reasonable to ask users to sign up to your own private platform unless you have a huge and loyal following. Users have become lazy due to the abundance of alternatives.
When I get an issue/bug/question, the first thing I check is if they have an issue tracker. Preferably GitHub. After that comes their various social accounts; Discord, Twitter, Reddit etc. If none of those work out I would most probably ditch the software. Reaching out via custom channels is cumbersome.
With that being said, this looks really cool although "delightfully simple" won't be an objective feeling among your users. Good job none the less! I wish you the best.
I'm curious how Flarum approaches this.
My problem with discourse has been that Firefox shows FB tracker warning in irregular intervals on the top-left corner. It's says FB tracker. It makes me uneasy. But somehow it is the standard for all OSS communities.
It would also be great if I can Ctrl+F to use my browser's search feature to look through all messages instead of relying on a dynamic JavaScript one.
Disclaimer: Flarum core dev
It may be nostalgia but I spent a decade perfecting my navigation skills through such forums, and I don't see an improvement with the new ones.
https://extiverse.com/extension/askvortsov/flarum-categories
The codebase is pretty rad. Rust makes it insanely fast, and the db schema alone thought me a few things about optimizing a PG schema for high perf.
Although Flarum scales very well, it is not losing sight of shared hosting environments. The only requirement is composer/ssh; hosting providers usually offer these nowadays.
Flarum only released its first stable last year and so has some features missing, yet https://extiverse.com already lists over 500 extensions compatible with Flarum v1.3. Relying on much used technology allows for fairly easy adoption by developers to contribute.
An interesting comparison between Forum software can be found on Slant: https://www.slant.co/topics/898/~best-web-forum-software-pac...
- you're competing with hobbyists that have the same look & feel
- hobbyists are online when the community is (mostly outside of 9-5)
- members of the community demand custom functionality specific to their interest.
Also:
- building communities is very hard
- they're not easy to monetise
I've built two successful communities in related niches and I'm pretty sure that succeeded because I was young and early. It's not easy to replicate now.
The point being, that unless you're already familiar in the "system language" of the software you want to hack upon, or unless the software is very light on abstraction, it's gonna be pretty inconvenient to MVP on top of it.
I've tried in the past to take that approach with few small projects and gave up pretty quickly. In my view it's the same as getting onboarded on a new project - it's slow. The only difference is that with OSS software you might have a bit more documentation available
* Apache (with mod_rewrite enabled) or Nginx
* PHP 7.3+ with the following extensions: curl, dom, fileinfo, gd, json, mbstring, openssl, pdo_mysql, tokenizer, zip MySQL 5.6+/8.0.23+ or MariaDB 10.0.5+
* SSH (command-line) access to run Composer
Unfortunately the dependencies are not as simple as I hoped (other than SSH). Are there single binary forum software (perhaps written in Go/Rust) that use SQLite, that people have experience with?
I guess I am looking for the Caddy of forum software.
uses sqlite, is actively improved, they claim the nim language makes small cross-platform binaries but none for this release it seems.
can the replies be configured contained in the related thread that is indented too for easy reading? I found put all discussions and replies at the same level is hard to follow.
Personally, I have sent these kinds of PRs out and received only approvals and thanks from maintainers. When in an approver/maintainer role myself, these kinds of PRs are trivial to approve and I appreciate them. The PRs that change a bunch of stuff, are large, hard to review, poorly described, poorly justified, poorly tested, etc., are the annoying ones.
Spelling mistakes should be fixed.
A PR is click-click-done, whereas a textual description of the mistake requires small but real effort on the part of a project member.
And absolutely no one gives a flying crap about visibility in the changelog.
Installing PHP in Windows is harder than building a production-level enterprise application in Typescript, sadly but it happened to me.
Good job, PHP.
Back in the day, we simply downloaded a WAMP/XAMPP package, which was a typical windows installer. The thing came with a simple management UI where you could e.g. point the document root to the root directory of your development tree and everything just worked. IIRC similar packages were floating around with other languages or Postgres instead of MySQL.
So what the hell happened since then? Why did those things get so complicated? Does the answer involve complexity introduced by container/scaling/management/IDE/framework/... software? Did installing Software on Windows become more difficult than simply running an installer? Doesn't Windows even have package management nowadays (chocolatey/some App store/...)? If it's so complicated, don't Windows devs nowadays have their trusty WSL anyway?
EDIT: I just looked around a bit on Google, apparently WAMP is still a thing, and Composer also has a Windows installer, which allegedly can work with the former (https://duvien.com/blog/setting-wamp-composer-and-git-window...).
First step to install that tool is to install php.
I don't want a web environment here, just a php with version in my system to install that tool, but failed. I don't know how to begin, try and failed. Hopelessly.
Now that we've added typescript, things only became easier.
It's also been a trend in the past few years for people to make this kind of PR, which is very low hanging fruit, just to increase the number of projects they "contributed to" and their profile activity. The author may have not had this intention, but it sure plays into the stereotype.