Bible Pay

Read 6018 times

  • togoshigekata
  • Hero Member

    • 527


    • 31
    • September 01, 2017, 10:21:10 AM
    • USA
    more
Use Discourse as Main Forum
« on: December 05, 2018, 05:13:54 PM »
Currently for our forum software we are using Simple Machines (SMF 2.0)
https://forum.biblepay.org/index.php

I am proposing that we use Discourse
https://www.discourse.org/about

Understanding Discourse Trust Levels
https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/

I created a Discourse for testing:
https://discourse.biblepaycoin.org/

Easy Docker Setup
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md

Pros:
- incentives/gamification for people to read and to post
- can sign up and log in with your Google, Facebook, Twitter or Github account
- ability for active users to post anonymously

SMF2 to Discourse - The Ultimate Guide
https://meta.discourse.org/t/smf2-to-discourse-the-ultimate-guide/90314


  • Rob Andrews
  • Administrator

    • 4097


    • 97
    • June 05, 2017, 08:09:04 PM
    • Patmos, Island Of
    more
Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #1 on: December 07, 2018, 10:29:04 AM »
So I'm looking at this proposal, and I know the younger generation likes eye candy and wants change, and note that I'm not against change, I'm for what is technically better and also better for our PR, but whoa nelly, lets consider the implications of this step by step.

Could I potentially receive a little help in researching a couple items?

#1.  Could we investigate, out of the top 20 coins out there, which of them use discourse?  And while we are at it, could we have an opinion on the "supermajority"  - IE what is the common forum software the top 20 likes the most?   (The reason I mention this is I caution us to jump into discourse if there is a reason that the top 20 dislikes it, then we would need to find that reason first).

#2.  Since discourse is written in javascript I was a little afraid that our content would not be searchable (SEO, Google indexing, PR).  However I feel that discourse has solved this by copying the metadata out - so you can ignore answering this  - I will leave it here for intelligence processes.

#3.  This proposal itself forces an IT change, but - offers very little in exchange - please lets not start a new fight about this - let me try to explain that when it comes to business, I say these things in a succinct way to allow you to realize we are TACKLING a problem (I dont say this in a mean spirit way).  In this case this is an entire IT integration (from forum.biblepay to discourse, and a DNS change and configuration change - 3 tickets).  So lets get our stakeholder on board - TheSnat is our administrator currently.  For #3, let me ask TheSnat, could you please do some due diligence and tell us here If you like the change to Discourse (A), and (B) Would you be willing to do the conversion technologically from an IT standpoint.  If you want tell me from 1-10 how much you desire to do it now, or if you want to maybe put it off a year just let us know.  I think TheSnats weight on his reply should dictate how us Sanctuaries vote for this.   (Its not fair to put IT through 80 hours of work in reaction to one community member proposal, :) 


Thanks guys.

Rob



Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2018, 11:02:04 AM »
So I'm looking at this proposal, and I know the younger generation likes eye candy and wants change, and note that I'm not against change, I'm for what is technically better and also better for our PR, but whoa nelly, lets consider the implications of this step by step.

Could I potentially receive a little help in researching a couple items?

#1.  Could we investigate, out of the top 20 coins out there, which of them use discourse?  And while we are at it, could we have an opinion on the "supermajority"  - IE what is the common forum software the top 20 likes the most?   (The reason I mention this is I caution us to jump into discourse if there is a reason that the top 20 dislikes it, then we would need to find that reason first).


I would appreciate someone to do the digging on this,   from what I've seen they have some high-profile companies using it
https://www.discourse.org/customers
Patreon, imgur, codinghorror, Twitter:
https://twittercommunity.com/

I think this is more telling than the crypto niche, but still worth investigating.

#2.  Since discourse is written in javascript I was a little afraid that our content would not be searchable (SEO, Google indexing, PR).  However I feel that discourse has solved this by copying the metadata out - so you can ignore answering this  - I will leave it here for intelligence processes.

It's strange how much javascript is being used today for things...    But google and other search engines are using JS rendering for their search results,  so we no longer have to fear dynamic content.


#3.  This proposal itself forces an IT change, but - offers very little in exchange - please lets not start a new fight about this - let me try to explain that when it comes to business, I say these things in a succinct way to allow you to realize we are TACKLING a problem (I dont say this in a mean spirit way).  In this case this is an entire IT integration (from forum.biblepay to discourse, and a DNS change and configuration change - 3 tickets).  So lets get our stakeholder on board - TheSnat is our administrator currently.  For #3, let me ask TheSnat, could you please do some due diligence and tell us here If you like the change to Discourse (A), and (B) Would you be willing to do the conversion technologically from an IT standpoint.  If you want tell me from 1-10 how much you desire to do it now, or if you want to maybe put it off a year just let us know.  I think TheSnats weight on his reply should dictate how us Sanctuaries vote for this.   (Its not fair to put IT through 80 hours of work in reaction to one community member proposal, :) 

Thanks guys.

Rob

I'm open to investigating,   I think the benefits from a signup/participation perspective may be worthwhile.   Make it easier for people to log in with social media accounts, and something that is actively developed.

I think it could make adoption/participation here easier...  Ultimately that is what I'd like to see.   I will do some testing to see how easy is is to configure, and if there are other limitations that would prevent its use here.


  • sunk818
  • Global Moderator

    • 521


    • 36
    • April 24, 2018, 02:02:20 PM
    more
Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #3 on: December 10, 2018, 12:02:54 PM »
Discourse won't have the session handling issue. I think perhaps this implementation or this version seems to be a victim of session handling errors. I go to Post and says the session expired. It happens frequently enough that there's a configuration issue or something with the SMF version itself. Registration should be easier on discourse and I've never run into session handling errors on Discourse. Not sure how different the moderation tools are on SMF vs Discourse.

The logical intermediary may be to add social media login plug-ins for SMF to make registration easier (thus leading to greater participation).
BH6oxjLkyz3z8FYpvU3ZR7PTZ31Xt9DkXZ


  • sunk818
  • Global Moderator

    • 521


    • 36
    • April 24, 2018, 02:02:20 PM
    more
Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #4 on: December 11, 2018, 11:16:42 PM »
Another strong reason for Discourse is the ability to review changes in the post:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/everyone-can-view-post-change-history/7639

Production Proposals were/are being treated as Preproduction Proposals with changes to the proposal text diverging from the original intent of the proposal. I believe this practice is wrong and we should follow IT best practices such as having different environments dev/test -> QA -> production. Same with proposals. If the proposal is not well formed, it should be discussed in pre-production proposal. But if proposals in production must be edited, at least Discourse gives the feature where you can compare the original post with subsequent revisions. Its not perfect, but changes can be followed which I think is a more honest approach.

I don't see any downside to using Discourse and only upside.

my only concern is SEO, and there should be some plan to perform 301 redirects of old urls to equal URLs in Discourse:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aforum.biblepay.org
BH6oxjLkyz3z8FYpvU3ZR7PTZ31Xt9DkXZ


Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #5 on: December 12, 2018, 05:44:19 AM »
Another strong reason for Discourse is the ability to review changes in the post:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/everyone-can-view-post-change-history/7639

Production Proposals were/are being treated as Preproduction Proposals with changes to the proposal text diverging from the original intent of the proposal. I believe this practice is wrong and we should follow IT best practices such as having different environments dev/test -> QA -> production. Same with proposals. If the proposal is not well formed, it should be discussed in pre-production proposal. But if proposals in production must be edited, at least Discourse gives the feature where you can compare the original post with subsequent revisions. Its not perfect, but changes can be followed which I think is a more honest approach.

I don't see any downside to using Discourse and only upside.

my only concern is SEO, and there should be some plan to perform 301 redirects of old urls to equal URLs in Discourse:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aforum.biblepay.org

Agreed on the 301,  this is important.. not sure the best way to do that yet, but will figure something out.


  • sunk818
  • Global Moderator

    • 521


    • 36
    • April 24, 2018, 02:02:20 PM
    more
Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #6 on: December 12, 2018, 09:53:23 AM »
Apache has mod_rewrite . If the former url scheme and new url scheme has a repeatable pattern it is easy to do. Worst case you'd have to manually wrote a big redirect list.
BH6oxjLkyz3z8FYpvU3ZR7PTZ31Xt9DkXZ


  • togoshigekata
  • Hero Member

    • 527


    • 31
    • September 01, 2017, 10:21:10 AM
    • USA
    more
Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #7 on: December 12, 2018, 03:02:31 PM »
PIVX uses Discourse: https://forum.pivx.org/


  • togoshigekata
  • Hero Member

    • 527


    • 31
    • September 01, 2017, 10:21:10 AM
    • USA
    more
Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #8 on: December 12, 2018, 03:55:52 PM »
Hey Rob, thank you for your valuable feedback on this

On the topic of change, I personally get attached to original GUIs,
for instance, I still used the original BiblePay wallet theme for a loooong time before finally switching to the bezaleel theme,
and I got upset when Gmail forced new GUI on me haha

Forum wise, I like SMF / phpBB layout vs the Discourse layout, the discourse layout is weird, I like what Im used to

But I do like this quote: "The only constant is change"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus

=

Comparison of Internet forum software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software

=

Proposal wise, I agree this proposal lacks any funding,
its more of a "Should we use Discourse over SMF?", I probably should have worded it that way or started it as a pre-proposal,
I think Im trying to push consensus through now vs letting it sit for months in discussions

Im not sure what an accurate time estimate is, but it only took me about 2-3 hours to set everything up,
for switching over, add an hour to switch DNS records,  add in hours for migrating accounts/threads/posts
and add in hours for learning a new system, and add in buffer for unknowns
I think the 80 hours estimate is very high, maybe 20-30 hours combined would be my estimate

=

Also, any time Ive spent on this Im donating to BiblePay
Im cool with whatever decision gets made, just offering this as an interesting alternative


Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #9 on: December 13, 2018, 11:03:07 AM »
As I have time I will look into moving over.  I think the added features will be a benefit.


  • Rob Andrews
  • Administrator

    • 4097


    • 97
    • June 05, 2017, 08:09:04 PM
    • Patmos, Island Of
    more
Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #10 on: December 13, 2018, 01:37:31 PM »
Hey Rob, thank you for your valuable feedback on this

On the topic of change, I personally get attached to original GUIs,
for instance, I still used the original BiblePay wallet theme for a loooong time before finally switching to the bezaleel theme,
and I got upset when Gmail forced new GUI on me haha

Forum wise, I like SMF / phpBB layout vs the Discourse layout, the discourse layout is weird, I like what Im used to

But I do like this quote: "The only constant is change"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus

=

Comparison of Internet forum software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software

=

Proposal wise, I agree this proposal lacks any funding,
its more of a "Should we use Discourse over SMF?", I probably should have worded it that way or started it as a pre-proposal,
I think Im trying to push consensus through now vs letting it sit for months in discussions

Im not sure what an accurate time estimate is, but it only took me about 2-3 hours to set everything up,
for switching over, add an hour to switch DNS records,  add in hours for migrating accounts/threads/posts
and add in hours for learning a new system, and add in buffer for unknowns
I think the 80 hours estimate is very high, maybe 20-30 hours combined would be my estimate

=

Also, any time Ive spent on this Im donating to BiblePay
Im cool with whatever decision gets made, just offering this as an interesting alternative

I agree on almost all of the above points and discourse doesnt look too bad, especially if PIVX uses it.

However on this one:
"Im not sure what an accurate time estimate is, but it only took me about 2-3 hours to set everything up,
for switching over, add an hour to switch DNS records,  add in hours for migrating accounts/threads/posts
and add in hours for learning a new system, and add in buffer for unknowns
I think the 80 hours estimate is very high, maybe 20-30 hours combined would be my estimate"

I agree with the 20-30 hours for migration tasks other than migrating the entire forum content.
I make the assumption that (not knowing which method we would use to move the data), that we would not move to an empty discourse forum.  IE that we did already manually create the old topics and threads and configure the software (in X hours or so) I assume we still need to move some data.  The rest of this time was a guess on  my part for migrating the data.  I don't know if a data migrator exists or not (from SMF to discourse).  This is basically padding the estimate to ensure TheSnat would want to entrench himself in this endeavor.

Im neutral on this subject- so I think we should let thesnat weight in more on this as I feel we would be pushing the lions share of work over to him if we switch to discourse.  (Especially if he is willing to be hosting the forum etc).  He might be working on POG PHP pages, or proposal enhancements, or wanting to run a copy of dashninja (we should consider calling that BiblePayRabbi if we ever do that) etc.  I would like to see how he would like to spend his next 6 month time.  If he wants to push this off and still do it later please let us know Snat.




Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #11 on: December 14, 2018, 08:27:44 AM »
I agree on almost all of the above points and discourse doesnt look too bad, especially if PIVX uses it.

Im neutral on this subject- so I think we should let thesnat weight in more on this as I feel we would be pushing the lions share of work over to him if we switch to discourse.  (Especially if he is willing to be hosting the forum etc).  He might be working on POG PHP pages, or proposal enhancements, or wanting to run a copy of dashninja (we should consider calling that BiblePayRabbi if we ever do that) etc.  I would like to see how he would like to spend his next 6 month time.  If he wants to push this off and still do it later please let us know Snat.

It's on my list.. not the highest priority (Working building out the web toolset.  BiblepayRabbi is an interesting name, but I thought the term was reserved for Jewish teachers...  We need something scholarly but biblical.. )

I do think it will help adoption, I will work on it as I need distractions/mental breaks from my main tasks. 

Apparently there is a conversion script available, I will look into it more.


  • Rob Andrews
  • Administrator

    • 4097


    • 97
    • June 05, 2017, 08:09:04 PM
    • Patmos, Island Of
    more
Re: Use Discourse as Main Forum
« Reply #12 on: December 14, 2018, 09:44:29 AM »
It's on my list.. not the highest priority (Working building out the web toolset.  BiblepayRabbi is an interesting name, but I thought the term was reserved for Jewish teachers...  We need something scholarly but biblical.. )

I do think it will help adoption, I will work on it as I need distractions/mental breaks from my main tasks. 

Apparently there is a conversion script available, I will look into it more.

I agree Rabbi isn't going to fit, I said it in the sense of an oracle, but its too hard to justify with the gospel at the same time on the front lines.