1. Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by GreenEuphorian Feb 25, 2021
- 2413 views
Here is my wishlist:
Dark mode
Phix sub forum
Notification via email of thread replies
Daily/weekly digest of new threads via email
2. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by AlexXX Feb 25, 2021
- 2380 views
I would highlight not only Phix, but also GUI, Network. ability to attach images and files.
3. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Feb 25, 2021
- 2355 views
Hi Alex
One small step at a time!
What we all need to remember is that the forum is written in Eu (and other stuff, see the about website at the bottom), and is a small team of developers who have other lives, so changes are necasserily slow.
However, what would be nice is if a downloadable set of programs were made available, and how it was put together, and how it could be run and tested on ones computer at home, along with some documentation on how to do so.
In any case this would be a 'good thing' as devs come and go, and how to put stuff together can get lost.
Cheers
Chris
4. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by petelomax Feb 25, 2021
- 2357 views
However, what would be nice is if a downloadable set of programs were made available, and how it was put together, and how it could be run and tested on ones computer at home, along with some documentation on how to do so.
+1
5. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by katsmeow Feb 25, 2021
- 2357 views
Here is my wishlist:
Dark mode
Phix sub forum
Notification via email of thread replies
Daily/weekly digest of new threads via email
I believe these have all been suggested before, many times. Also suggested was people self-tag like Pete (and a few other people) does with his [Phix] tags on the subject lines. Because....
One small step at a time!
What we all need to remember is that the forum is written in Eu (and other stuff, see the about website at the bottom), and is a small team of developers who have other lives, so changes are necasserily slow.
, which is of course all true. Except the small steps and necasserily(?) parts. I suspect OE may need to evolve in leaps and bounds to stay active, based on OE source code files to add features, written by us mere users/lusers, and this includes this forum. Over a decade ago (in the dark ages before OE) i wrote search code for an irc bot, but it involved http proxies written in PHP and mIRC and such things not available in Euphoria. Someone needs to write a complete forum starting with this forum's open source code, with the desired changes, solely in OE code, and run it in parallel with this forum, people might be allowed to vote on features, and then give the source to whoever is the appointed dev at the time. And they can shoot it all down, and you are back to square one.
Kat
6. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Feb 25, 2021
- 2321 views
Hi Kat
It sounds like you may be the developer to take the forum forward, and develop it in ways that yourself and others have envisaged, I think you have demonstrated over the years that I have known you that you certainly have the skills and the drive to do so. I might even suggest that sometimes it is better for one person to have control rather than deferring to other also highly motivated and driven team mates with their own idea set.
You might even consider adding a spell checker espeshally for me 
Cheers
Chris
7. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by katsmeow Feb 25, 2021
- 2300 views
Thank you, Chris.
If i remember correctly, the forum's code is heavily linux-oriented, and i know zero *nix stuff. It starts with a "bang"!?
I wrote a Metaphone/Soundex library years ago to make sense of irc typos, it can make quick work of "espeshally". I could be persuaded to donate it to the cause.
Kat
8. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by katsmeow Feb 25, 2021
- 2289 views
I wonder if it would be easier to start from scratch. Use a building block approach, modularised. Keep the same look and feel, but easier to insert modules. Too many people have hacked at the forum's code, and most people who had a clue to it have left. And i hear it's nearly impossible to set up a local version of the existing forum. And, to make things worse, if a dev cannot build OE v4, in 64bit, how can new forum code be compiled as an exe to run as cgi behind apache on a remote http host?
Kat
9. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Feb 26, 2021
- 2230 views
I knew you were the right person for the job.
Cheers
Chris
10. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by mitgedanken Feb 27, 2021
- 2207 views
I knew you were the right person for the job.
Cheers
Chris
+1
11. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by katsmeow Feb 27, 2021
- 2190 views
But i do not know linux, and this forum runs on linux, so any code i write is automatically inapplicable. I have bought computers preloaded with *nix, and have no computers running *nix.
I have asked for help from people who have contributed code to this forum in the past, and they won't touch it now, as it is. With no documentation, code i write would be compatable only in the look of the webpages.
And a number of people have been adamant in the past that i cannot touch the forum. There is code in this forum written explicitly to ban me from even posting here. I therefor am no part of this forum, or wiki, or manual writing, not even proofreading.
I am not seeing any point in me writing a new forum in code that will be automatically rejected, unless the point is to distract me from posting about anything else.
Kat
12. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Feb 28, 2021
- 2169 views
But i do not know linux, and this forum runs on linux, so any code i write is automatically inapplicable. I have bought computers preloaded with *nix, and have no computers running *nix.
Easily fixed, download virtualbox, download a linux iso, install and play. I don't think it'll take too long for someone with you technical abilities to get to grips with it.
And a number of people have been adamant in the past that i cannot touch the forum. There is code in this forum written explicitly to ban me from even posting here. I therefor am no part of this forum, or wiki, or manual writing, not even proofreading.
Well, that's a testable hypothesis, easily proven or disproved in an open source world.
However, it was not my intention to goad you into doing something you don't want to do or that wouldn't be appreciated, only to suggest that as you have so many good ideas for the forum, and are technically capable (more than I suspect), that you might want to get stuck in.
It's ok Kat, I won't goad you any more.
Cheers
Chris
13. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by irv Feb 28, 2021
- 2156 views
Kat, if you try something like Mint Linux, I believe you'll find it much easier and less aggravating than Windows, after just a few hours of experimenting. It's friendlier to programmers. It's also easier on the eyes - no joke. I have Windows 10 and Linux on this computer, and to me, Windows is just ugly and text is hard to read. I probably haven't used Windows more than an hour, total, in the past year.
14. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by GreenEuphorian Mar 03, 2021
- 2104 views
Kat, if you try something like Mint Linux, I believe you'll find it much easier and less aggravating than Windows, after just a few hours of experimenting. It's friendlier to programmers. It's also easier on the eyes - no joke. I have Windows 10 and Linux on this computer, and to me, Windows is just ugly and text is hard to read. I probably haven't used Windows more than an hour, total, in the past year.
+1
15. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by petelomax Mar 03, 2021
- 2123 views
Linux is much easier and less aggravating than Windows. It's friendlier to programmers.[citation][disclaimer]
[citation] not needed - OEforum welcomes unfounded and outrageous personal opinions.
[disclaimer] compilers are easier to install, but low-level Windows API is several thousands of orders of magnitude better documented than Linux syscalls[citation]. 
16. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by GreenEuphorian Mar 04, 2021
- 2043 views
Here is my wishlist:
Dark mode
Phix sub forum
Notification via email of thread replies
Daily/weekly digest of new threads via email
Another feature request: Optimization for mobile devices, especially font size (currently, the font size appears tiny and by default the text is unreadable)
17. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by petelomax Mar 05, 2021
- 2030 views
Another feature request: Optimization for mobile devices, especially font size (currently, the font size appears tiny and by default the text is unreadable)
I believe that should be relatively easy. The start of the source of this page currently looks like this
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <!-- Nonzero1.0 by nodethirtythree design http://www.nodethirtythree.com missing in a maze --> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>OpenEuphoria: Forum: Suggestions for improving the forum</title> <meta name="keywords" content="" /> <meta name="description" content="" />
From my recent research you don't need most of that any more, that nodethirtythree link is dead, the keywords and description could no doubt be improved, it should be more like:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en" > <head> <meta charset='utf-8'/> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/> <title>OpenEuphoria: Forum: Suggestions for improving the forum</title>
For the tiny text, the missing viewport is the most significant thing.
For the difference it makes, you can (/can you) compare http://phix.x10.mx/licence.php (new) with http://phix.x10.mx/licence0.php (old)
[I am not claiming that adding a viewport will instantly make any site mobile-friendly, but it's a start.]
I am not adamant or certain of going utf-8 (I just copied this from one of my samples), we may need to stay with 8859 for legacy posts.
No doubt Greg will chip in.
18. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Mar 05, 2021
- 2006 views
No doubt Greg will chip in.
I have already been planning to rewrite the forum software, which is why I've been writing Euphoria MVC. And I plan to implement everything already mentioned here, more or less.
I'd like to lead that project but anyone who wants to contribute will be welcome to. I would appreciate if everyone could be patient and not try to put the cart before the horse.
-Greg
19. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by irv Mar 05, 2021
- 1987 views
When you see the cart before the horse, it usually means the horse is dead.
20. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Mar 05, 2021
- 2031 views
When you see the cart before the horse, it usually means the horse is dead.
Indeed. I've seen some things in my work that I've described as "the cart is careening downhill dragging the horse behind it." Let's not get to that point.
-Greg
21. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by monsieurb Mar 16, 2021
- 1747 views
Would it be sacrilege to suggest a ready-to-go, non-EU powered solution (be that hosted or self-hosted), that already has the tooling needed to add sub-forums and other things dynamically?
22. Re: Suggestions for improving the forum
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Mar 16, 2021
- 1834 views
Would it be sacrilege to suggest a ready-to-go, non-EU powered solution (be that hosted or self-hosted), that already has the tooling needed to add sub-forums and other things dynamically?
Not at all! It's a valid suggestion and it's been discussed before. I believe the opinion at the time was that we should be eating our own dog food and writing the entire website in Euphoria was the way to do that. But I also feel the level of detail to which we went at that time, and the number of "bells and whistles" we tried to pack into the server, borders on not invented here syndrome (we were even running email and DNS on the old server). Keep in mind that was thirteen years ago and a lot of the world has changed. I think the culture and resources supporting software development have grown and matured a lot since then.
My current motivation is to reduce our attack surface. Things can't get done if there are too many things to do. I don't have the resources to babysit a web server and a database server and a source code server and continuous build server and so on and so on. I migrated from our own Mercurial server to GitHub. Now I' working on setting up nightly builds there as well. Then we can move to doing releases from those builds. After that I'd like to maybe migrate our wiki and tickets there as well. Then all that's left running here is news and the forum.
As it stands, I think Euphoria MVC is in a "good enough" state to start building a website, even if we only use the routing and templates and other utilities (like JSON) for now. But overall its API will likely change and anything written now will have to be updated over time to accommodate. I have an overhaul of the database library mostly completed and then I will commit and publish a new version. Then I'd like to redo the model framework and use that to build a user and authentication framework.
So again, you're absolutely correct that we could. Do I want to? No, not really. And I think we have bigger fish to fry than forum features right now anyway.
-Greg
