Re: OpenEuphoria, Discourse, and you!
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) 2 weeks ago
- 389 views
As the last dev standing from the time when Jeremy convinced us all to go to a modern forum in the first place (replacing the old statically generated web site that was based on the email list), I think it's important to share my opinion on this vitally important matter.
I'm not keen on the idea of switching away from using software written in Euphoria,
The loss of "eating our own dog food" here will indeed be tough. However, given a choice between losing this for the website and losing this for the language (OE is still written in OE after all, aside from some Makefiles, configure scripts, and a small C backend component)... I'd rather keep it in the language and get a new website.
especially when we'd be switching to a "competing" language (Discourse is a Ruby on Rails app),
If we had to pick something else, I'm glad it was Ruby. Nowadays I'm much too busy with my day job to help out here - and it's Ruby that I'm using in my day job. It's the most Euphoric-like language I've seen out there thus far that's hit mainstream. They even have 'elsif' !
but I think the pros far outweigh the cons in this case. Discourse is a mature open source project with hundreds of contributors and millions of users worldwide.
After much deliberation amongst myself, I am strongly considering migrating this website to Discourse.
In fact I believe this is largely in agreement with what Jeremy would have wished. The reason he worked so hard to create euweb and the current forum is because he thought the community would benefit from having a modern website and forum, instead of one stuck back twenty years ago.
Sadly, that was close to twenty years ago. It wasn't possible to keep up with developments in the wider Web, and now the forum is again stuck back twenty years ago.
We should have a modern website and forum.
Discourse comes with a whole suite of moderation features, supports wiki pages, and is almost endlessly customizable to fit our needs.
The only disadvantage is that, as per https://meta.discourse.org/t/358131 , Discourse is so modern that they tend to drop support for older browsers and things (like older mobile phones) very quickly. Jeremy and I remained committed to keeping this website functional with much older technologies like IE on W98 or w3m (which I'm still using) - when ajax broke it (since w3m had no javascript at the time) it was a quick fix to make it work JS free again.
So, once we migrate ... I guess this is goodbye.
If we're in agreement I'll continue my efforts on this and hopefully complete the migration in early January.
-Greg
On the one hand, I'm glad you waited (so I was able to share my thoughts). On the other hand... hopefully this won't be delayed much longer. OE could use the facelift.
