The forum's future - how many care?

noranthon · Super User Joined: 07 Jul 2005 Posts: 3318

Hi, acknak. By "another" I meant "another". You have spoken up previously and I appreciate that.

At some point we will have to stop shielding behind "if" and acknowledge it's a matter of "when". I've just heard from another would-be member stymied by the lack of provision for a second activation email.

There is nothing to stop you approaching OpenOffice.org and reporting the result. One suggestion I've heard is that we could also approach Sun. I'm not enamoured of either course and believe both approaches would be rebuffed.

I like the independence of the forum. This is for users, it is not a promotional or support exercise. At the same time, it can serve those who wish to promote and support OOo. One thing I think we could use here is a "Services" section. Some of the posts that are tagged as spam could, I believe, be posted in such a section so that they are seen only by those looking for them.

I've been doing some research. It seems to me that the simple machines format is to be preferred for security reasons. It's website is http://www.simplemachines.org/ . Its support forum: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php For another example of a forum using it, see http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php . One advantage which is only apparent when you post is that the posting editor window is much wider.

The German forum is here: http://de.openoffice.info/ . For a more colourful experience: http://www.forum-openoffice.org/forum/ . The forum which in my (limited) experience contains the best features is http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/index.php which is partly supported by a consulting service http://www.lqconsulting.com/
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noranthon · Super User Joined: 07 Jul 2005 Posts: 3318

For anyone interested in thinking about details, I've come across this review of the host rated as best by the reviewer and links (at the foot of the page) to reviews of 9 other hosts. This is how the host in question presents its service: http://www.siteground.com/forum-hosting.htm

Recent user reports have not been complimentary.
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ccornell · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 6:17 am Post subject:

TerryE · Super User Joined: 16 Jul 2006 Posts: 550 Location: UK

Just got back from my vacation, and I am pleased to see that this debate has fired up. I also note that noranthon has suggested an extra option, so we have the following options:

Agree extra admin access to current ASPextra.net hosted forum.
Take over the hosting of oooforum.org. As Mark B says in many ways this is just a variant of (1), which again needs draude's cooperation, but in this case also his cooperation and agreement to transfer control.
Transfer the site to another home but keeping phpBB format. Having taken the effort to understand the internals of phpBB and done a download of the current site, I now know how to do this one.
Transfer the site to another home but migrating to new format.
Do nothing and watch the forum fall apart

I have ranked these in my order of preference, though the pros and cons of these options are complex. (1) is the easiest to implement and will improve the service for the users, because a proper cleanup of the D/B and some basic maintenance (including some of the phpBB patches discussed in other threads) would buy us immediate performance benefit. The main constraint here is that draude would need to permit this control, so (i) this reqires his willingness to talk and (ii) we would need to agree sensible rules of audit / administration so that he feels comfortable in sharing control. At this stage we don't need Apache or machine [root] administrator access; one or more of us just needs ftp user access to the forum's phpBB directory tree and admin access to the MySQL D/B which hosts the forum. However we are still ultimately constrained by the machine resources of the current hosting server, and the point to note is that the forum as a knowledge base is growing steadily over time and this hits both MySQL data volumes and query response times. However without admin access, we can't do the basic capacity planning to work out how close we are to this particular black hole's event horizon.

(1) to (4) all require us to designate forum administrators of known "provenance" who have basic LAMP knowledge plus general IT background and working SQL / php developer knowledge is what is required; I [TerryE] and 9point9 could do this, and no doubt there will be others equally qualified. As soon as we move away from the single benign owner model, we also need some form of adminstration charter/rules of engagement to avoid the current situation happening again.

We must preserve of the existing knowledgebase as a new blank forum is of little use to anyone. Hence for the options which involve rehosting, (2) to (4), migration of the knowledgebase becomes a critical issue. In (2) this is straight forward given a standard unload of the current D/B. I have worked out how to do (3) using my current D/B dump, and this would take 1-2 weeks migration effort, spread over a lot of evenings. I feel that (4) could involve a lot more effort, which is going to a real issue for any solution which requires us to move away fom phpBB. Whilst I accept noranthon's point that some BBs may have a richer feature set, as far as I can see phpBB is significantly more user friendly than the distribution list model adopted by the Sun OOo communities, and a lot better than the MS equivalents used in my company.

For all of these options we also need to offer continuity of user identity, and I have worked out a secure way of offering this.

The main issue for (3) to (4) is the continuity of service one. Even if we started up oooforum.someotherdomain, what is to stop users contining to use oooforum.org? Even if the top 30 or so posters all agreed to stop posting to oooforum.org and we put "DO NOT POST HERE, USE XXXX" stickies in every forum, it would still be chaos. Urrrgggghhh!

So this is why I really vote for getting draude's engagement on this issue. I'll try pinging him another email on his private email address. Having just acquired my own 400 email backlog over two weeks vacation, I can see why he's probably got his forum mailbox pointing to a SPAMsink, so there is little point in the community lobbying him on this one.
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Terry
WinXPSP3, OOo 2.4.1, Ubunto 8.04 for development
Also try the Official OOo Community Forum where I mainly post now.

Mark B · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:21 pm Post subject:

TerryE · Super User Joined: 16 Jul 2006 Posts: 550 Location: UK

Mark, funny you should mention this, but I actually had "I [TerryE], 9point9 and Mark B" in my earlier draft but figured it was a bit cheeky to finger you uninvited Razz

. If draude maintains his trappist mode, then we might need to resort to piloting (3) on a test site. We probably need a pre-prod playpen anyway. I don't know what ISP you use but I use WebFusion for my private web site, and have no complaints as I have found it to provide a good stable service. This should be fine for pre-prod data volumes, though I am not sure that its basic shared LAMP service (which costs ~£90 p.a.) would meet the transaction rates needed to support the OOo usage profile.

Let's see what Ed B has to say first
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Terry
WinXPSP3, OOo 2.4.1, Ubunto 8.04 for development
Also try the Official OOo Community Forum where I mainly post now.

noranthon · Super User Joined: 07 Jul 2005 Posts: 3318

ccornell · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 11:10 pm Post subject:

TerryE · Super User Joined: 16 Jul 2006 Posts: 550 Location: UK

noranthon · Super User Joined: 07 Jul 2005 Posts: 3318

Your interest and contributions are very welcome and it's good to hear from someone with more than inkling of what goes on.

On the subject of templates, sometimes members of the forum want to share them. I doubt that it would be any great hardship to make provision for that.

If the forum were to be part of Sun or openoffice.org, who would administer it? How responsive would the administrator/s be to feedback from members?

I have been so unimpressed with OOo's determination to make life good for email harvesters by clear publication of email addresses of contributors to mailing lists. OOo and Sun have no experience of forums and I imagine the choice of technology would be poor and configuration of options would be inconsiderate of members' privacy.

Having geeks running things is the worst aspect of free software. Our mate Bill was more than a geek and so is Mark Shuttleworth - hence the success of their organisations.

Perhaps most people would be more comfortable being truly within OOo. Most members, as another poster pointed out, probably think the forum is part of OOo.
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ccornell · Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2007 5:23 am Post subject:

noranthon · Super User Joined: 07 Jul 2005 Posts: 3318

I mentioned the mailing lists only to illustrate how badly OOo handles user services. The archives not only provide a clear rendition of the sender's email address, they provide an additional tab "Raw Display" which provides additional information about the sender's email arrangements.

I've got an email account which is just for OOo list digests (never opened) and the resultant spam (also never opened). Protests on the users' list (the worst for spam : http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=users ) result in derision from some volunteers and indignation, specious justification or silence from the hierarchy.
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noranthon · Super User Joined: 07 Jul 2005 Posts: 3318

At this stage, I thought I'd mention that my experimental free site contains a board only visible to those logged in (named "Members Only"). I created it as a possible location for discussion of details of any move. I can register interested parties manually or, if there's enough interest, enable registration.
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