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2018- the state of the forum, donations request and going forward

Discussion in 'Announcements & News' started by Mr Waffle, Jun 8, 2018.

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  1. Mayoi

    Mayoi Kenkyuusei Stage48 Donor

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    How is this forum so great? (*compliment*) I tried looking for some more Kpop forums to lurk about Produce48, and they are all so hard to read and browse around...

    Also I donated $20 :v:
     
  2. LNK_Tomu

    LNK_Tomu Kenkyuusei Stage48 Donor

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    Also wondering this. I sent a donation about a month and a half ago and DMed @ithebigc , but no green badge yet :cry:
     
  3. skeith

    skeith Kenkyuusei

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    What about using open source and free forum software instead? Such as Discourse or NodeBB
     
  4. innosu

    innosu Stage48 Moderator Staff Member Stage48 Moderator

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    Last time I checked, those were not even close in term of functionality yo XenForo.
     
  5. dutchie

    dutchie Stage48 Admin Staff Member Stage48 Admin

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    Not only that, who is going to maintain all that and handle 'undocumented features' (that what customers call 'bugs' :) )

    I have quite extensive experience with open source projects ... a lot have only best effort support and rely on users fixing undesired behaviour themselves (and hopefully contribute it back to the community).
    Long story short ... you need to invest quite a lot of time and effort to be able to support it, and you need a pretty good understanding how things work if things start to break down.
     
  6. skeith

    skeith Kenkyuusei

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    What features would that be?

    It's not like XenForo is free from bugs.

    I am just saying that we can cut expenses by using open source product for some core forum functions.
    Isn't that what we need? A forum
     
  7. dutchie

    dutchie Stage48 Admin Staff Member Stage48 Admin

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    And I'll repeat that I doubt that you will safe money if you don't have people qualified to maintain it all .... people willing to pour quite a lot of their time into it without being paid for it.
     
  8. Matsui Hikari

    Matsui Hikari Future Girls Stage48 Donor

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    um..I did a quick search on Discourse and it's not free though? Same goes for NodeBB. Besides, with the size of S48, it's impossible to go for a free software.
     
  9. innosu

    innosu Stage48 Moderator Staff Member Stage48 Moderator

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    There are. If you are tech savvy enough to set up Ruby on Rails (for Discourse) or nodejs (NodeBB) you can run it without paying. Of course, maintaining those server are magnitude harder than maintaining a PHP application like Xenforo.
     
  10. dutchie

    dutchie Stage48 Admin Staff Member Stage48 Admin

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    That's a rather bold statement, I'm curious what your rationale for it is?
    (btw, not looking for an argument, just curious why you would think so)
     
  11. innosu

    innosu Stage48 Moderator Staff Member Stage48 Moderator

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    Experience? Not specific to Discourse and NodeBB though, but I have maintained Ruby on Rail, NodeJS, and PHP server before.
     
  12. dutchie

    dutchie Stage48 Admin Staff Member Stage48 Admin

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    same here ... and in my humble opinion, all three frameworks are just as easy to install since the emergence of package managers like gem, pear, pecl and npm.
    (and ruby has .rvm which allows you to install gems as user in stead of having to install everything as root)
    I kinda dislike javascript as a language, and php can be pretty horrific code (yes, I'm looking at you Wordpress!) but ruby on rails is pretty well structured making it easier to maintain by forcing you to separate logic, storage and presentation (and I know you can program properly in any language, but rails (not just ruby on rails) tends to forces you to comply).
     
  13. innosu

    innosu Stage48 Moderator Staff Member Stage48 Moderator

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    But for PHP, you can literally drop the file on the server, and if you are on shared host or install PHP from distro's package, you can literally forget about it.
    The same can't be said for node and ruby. Yes, it's easy, but it's not PHP-easy.
     
  14. dutchie

    dutchie Stage48 Admin Staff Member Stage48 Admin

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    And then you find out your hosting provider doesn't support the PHP version you are using ... or some plugin ... or the php.ini doesn't have the setting you need
     
  15. innosu

    innosu Stage48 Moderator Staff Member Stage48 Moderator

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    Almost never has that problem personally -- you check that information *before* paying. But this is getting out of topic anyway.
     
  16. skeith

    skeith Kenkyuusei

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    IMHO
    Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, PHP, etc are just tools that we can use to run a forum software. Easy or not is a matter of experience and perspective.
    Of course, someone who spent their entire life on just specific language/tools will see another language/tools is a challenge for them.
    but I think maintaining them (in this case ruby on rails) is almost the same as currently maintaining the server for this XenForo

    However, I do understand the choice of the site admin in keeping with xenforo. I am just curious and merely voicing my opinion, that opensource software maybe just as adequate as xenforo and the pros, is less expensize
     
  17. dutchie

    dutchie Stage48 Admin Staff Member Stage48 Admin

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    And I respectfully disagree with the conclusion that it will be less expensive just because it's 'free' ('free' being either open source or free of charge).
     
  18. skeith

    skeith Kenkyuusei

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    I respect your opinion
    However, it is logically clear that when you can cut an amount from an expenses, it is called less expensive
     
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  19. goratnik

    goratnik Member

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    The most expensive component of each software/community project are man-hours, just saying.
     
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  20. skeith

    skeith Kenkyuusei

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    Remember that what I voiced about is specifically monetary expenses in context of the original topic, donations

    I do agree that human resources are important, but don't forget, "less expensive" here is referring to literal monetary expenses as in the amount of donation needed
     
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