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posted by
mattie_p
on Saturday February 22 2014, @03:56PM
from the slashcode-will-solve-all-your-problems dept.
from the slashcode-will-solve-all-your-problems dept.
technopoptart writes:
"I need advice from people more experienced that I am with open source forum software. I am going to be setting up a forum system for computer science students from the various colleges in the area.
I have been running a closed SMF forum for my wife for a year. I wanted to solicit advice about SMF or any other systems that I may consider. I have played with phpBB but I found it labor intensive, as newly created sections are made invisible even to the admin by default, I don't want a laborious permissions system. I appreciate any advice you can give."
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(Score: 5, Funny) by FuckBeta on Saturday February 22 2014, @03:58PM
Well you've come to the right place, given that it runs on open source software forked from one of the most venerable sites on the 'net.
So what about using http://slashcode.com/ [slashcode.com] for your project?
Quit Slashdot...because Fuck Beta!
(Score: 5, Informative) by Lagg on Saturday February 22 2014, @04:26PM
As much as I loved the slashdot that soylent is forked from I can't say I recommend it. Maintaining perl is hard enough, decade old perl is not much better. From what NCommander tells me it's a pain in the ass to get running period on the older version of apache and mod_perl much less the current stable versions and he's still trying to get it working last I checked. If for some reason PHP is your thing you could try out xenforo. I've deployed it for a few places and it's written by the same guys who did vbulletin, but it's so much better. The way it does templates makes doing layout changes easier and the user and group management is fairly acceptable. I'd usually not recommend something like this due to it being PHP and riddled with problems that implies but given the environments teachers are restricted to on campuses it'd likely be the most easily deployed. Unfortunately though it's proprietary, but if you don't mind that it should still be fine. The code isn't obfuscated or anything and I've successfully done various patches in the past.
Another option which I've only deployed once is Vanilla. Which is also written in PHP but is GPL licensed. It looks okay for the most part but I haven't used it enough to say much more than that.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me]
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(Score: 0) by crutchy on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:24PM
I gotta agree about the perl thing. PHP as much as it gets bagged a lot is quick, easy, and forgiving.
I prefer to write my own stuff (no third party stuff off the interwebs) but there are probably a lot of good forums out there.
phpbb3 is in debian's repos so i would probably trust it over anything just downloaded generally off the web.
The soylent slashcode has too many folders. I know folders are useful for some stuff, but I just use gedit for development and if I need to quickly open a file I don't want to be hunting through ten levels of directories. At least if there is a heap of files in a single directory I can type the start of the name and the file browser will take me there.
Templating is useful, but I'm of the opinion that if it makes the application a heap more complicated then the benefits of templating are eroded.
If it's for CS students, maybe something like FusionForge (available in debian repos as gforge).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:06PM
The last thing you want for a web programming language is to be forgiving. The more forgiving it is, the more likely your mistakes will turn into security holes.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by crutchy on Saturday February 22 2014, @08:40PM
true, but if it's not forgiving enough nobody will use it (or pay for it)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tynin on Saturday February 22 2014, @04:33PM
Not that I've looked at the code, but from what I've read from others, was that slashcode might just take a bit of skill with a few people pitching in, in order to get it setup and running. That fails on his not labor intensive request.
Still, having no idea what the licence is on slashcode, it sure would be awesome if whoever is looking at the code these days would modernize up the install process/backend if only so the awesomeness of this moderation system could be used in the educational world. As I agree, it is worlds better than any forum I've been forced into using.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Saturday February 22 2014, @04:40PM
That is planned, but it is not top of the todo list by any means, and it will be some time before an updated and working version can be released.
It's always my fault...
(Score: 1) by tynin on Saturday February 22 2014, @04:56PM
That is really fantastic news. Keep up the great work :)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Foobar Bazbot on Saturday February 22 2014, @05:29PM
One relatively short-term goal is to create a VM image that lets anyone spin up soylent-in-a-box -- this will give contributors who don't have access to the staging servers a way to try out modifications and submit working patches. That's not precisely what you asked for (which also being looked at longer-term), but it sure doesn't hurt.
(I'm not involved, I just hang out on IRC too much.)
userscript: Expand/Collapse buttons on every comment [userscripts.org]
(Score: 0) by crutchy on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:37PM
that's an awesome idea.
that would make new dev involvement much easier if all I have to do to get a working slashcode working is download a vbox drive image and boot it up.
although having to work it out first might be a useful initiation :-)