New Forum: Discourse

This is something I have been pondering for a while now. But have decided to bite the bullet and move on from MyBB to Discourse for Snakeoil community discussions.

There are several reasons for doing so:

1. Updating MyBB is always a pain. You have to update the theme templates every time as MyBB has this hard coupling relationship with it's plugin and the theme templates. This inadvertently lead to a lot of problems and weirdness, e.g. there is suddenly a text build with the words "MMMMMMM" on the side that I cannot figure out how to remove.

2. It's more about me not wanting to invest time in figuring out how to remove these artifacts. Updating MyBB is just too time consuming.

3. The community is really a support portal for me to provide support. MyBB interface just does not support this use case well. And one of my biggest gripe is losing my list of new topics if I revisit the site. Topics that I have never read should always be new unless it has passed a certain period, or I have dismissed it, or I have read it. MyBB does not care for any of that, if I reload the page the new topic lists will be emptied out.

4. MyBB editor is always clunky. Have tried various editors from CKEditor to RinEditor but there is always something nagging issue. Nothing big, just small annoyances. 

These have bothered me for years, I just learned to put up with it. But I just cannot bear with it any more and decided to break away from MyBB.

Have decided on Discourse. Not to be confused with Discord.

There a lot of things I like about Discourse, and somethings I do not. At the end of the day, Discourse is the lessor evil.

Unfortunately with this change a lot of the legacy community content will not be ported over. This is a conscious decision, porting the CMS from b2evolution to Drupal too a lot of time and I do not want to repeat the process with the forums. Sure there is an import script, but really a lot of the old content is no longer relevant to how Snakeoil works these days so might as well do a clean break.

Discord is very different.

Sincerely hope folks will adjust to this new forum software. This move just makes everything so much simpler when it comes to infrastructure maintenance. 

An update of MyBB usually take at least 3 hours to half a day. This is due to how MyBB's plugins interact with the theme systems. Inadvertently something will always break when MyBB is updated. And as MyBB updates gets more and more sporadic, the chances of breakages increases exponentially as I can never replicate the update steps faithfully.

So far so good with Discourse updates. Everything is more modular and logical and updates appear less likely to break anything (touch wood). This is going to save me a lot of of time, and that time saved can be better invested in Snakeoil development and other integrations.

Hopefully this change (and more changes will come) can improve the engagement factor of the Snakeoil development team (really this is just me at this stage) and the community who uses Snakeoil.

Please sign up for a new account over at the new community @ https://community.snakeoil-os.net and hopefully we can get some traction happening.