Since there are some issues with the Message Boards, I'll ask the question I've been wondering about.

Why are we using an in-house, home-made(?) Message Board?

There are several 'off the shelf' boards available that provide all the reatures we have and so much more.

In keeping with the project, "phpBB2" is Open Source - if that is an issue?

'vBulletin' is also a good package for $160 (hardly going to bust the project budget?)

Given the clear lack of manpower, I'm surprised that effort is going into something that seems unnecessary?

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Read this thread on that.

Another issue to take in to consideration is the Boinc license... it's an open source project. We can't just go off and incorporate 3rd party closed-source projects like vBulletin and then distribute it. Another significant issue with Boinc is Dr. Anderson, the lead developer, wants to keep it *free* so people can implement it without paying for any software licenses.

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Read this thread on that.

Another issue to take in to consideration is the Boinc license... it's an open source project. We can't just go off and incorporate 3rd party closed-source projects like vBulletin and then distribute it. Another significant issue with Boinc is Dr. Anderson, the lead developer, wants to keep it *free* so people can implement it without paying for any software licenses.

Whis is precicely why I mentioned pbpBB2 it is OPEN SOURCE.

From phpBB site: "In addition, phpBB is open-source software so it has no fees, no subscriptions, and no restrictions on modifications. Couple this with a thriving and friendly phpBB community and you have a killer solution for creating communities on your site!"


Open Source, No Cost, No licence, no fees, modify it yourself.

Seems to fit all the considerations above?

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Yes, probably. I was mostly replying to your vBulletin for $160 question.

BBCode has now been integrated into the forums here. Okay, it has some bugs still, but at least it has a lot of things you can't do any longer, while there are other things you now can do with ease.

The thing with phpBB that I find is that no matter what forum you go to, they all look the same. All have the same emoticons, the same private message option at the top, the same look and feel, no matter what colour scheme is being used. so why can't these forums be a little bit different?

The other issue is, by having to set up a new phpBB2 forum, all old posts here will be lost. Now there's integration of BBCode in the forums, without losing anything of its format, all messages and postcounts. Plus I think it wouldn't be as easy to integrate the 32 character login option that now binds everything for you together (posts, your preferences, your BOINC) on a phpBB2 forum. For those you still need a nickname & password login combination. You'd be losing a lot more than gaining.

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Since there are some issues with the Message Boards, I'll ask the question I've been wondering about.

Why are we using an in-house, home-made(?) Message Board?

There are several 'off the shelf' boards available that provide all the reatures we have and so much more.

In keeping with the project, "phpBB2" is Open Source - if that is an issue?

'vBulletin' is also a good package for $160 (hardly going to bust the project budget?)

Given the clear lack of manpower, I'm surprised that effort is going into something that seems unnecessary?

Well, over at climate you can choose the boinc forums or the phpbb2 - now, I personally dislike phpbb2, so I don't use it. If I have the choice, I choose whatever alternative there is to phpbb2.

Obviously phpbb2 is not very customizable either - or else millions of forums wouldn't look like a copy of each other ;)

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Yes, probably. I was mostly replying to your vBulletin for $160 question.

BBCode has now been integrated into the forums here. Okay, it has some bugs still, but at least it has a lot of things you can't do any longer, while there are other things you now can do with ease.

The thing with phpBB that I find is that no matter what forum you go to, they all look the same. All have the same emoticons, the same private message option at the top, the same look and feel, no matter what colour scheme is being used. so why can't these forums be a little bit different?

The other issue is, by having to set up a new phpBB2 forum, all old posts here will be lost. Now there's integration of BBCode in the forums, without losing anything of its format, all messages and postcounts. Plus I think it wouldn't be as easy to integrate the 32 character login option that now binds everything for you together (posts, your preferences, your BOINC) on a phpBB2 forum. For those you still need a nickname & password login combination. You'd be losing a lot more than gaining.

I don't see any insurmountable problems there though.
As I said, I've been wondering about this question for a while, and the current board problems (almost unusale IMO) prompted me to raise the point.

Perhaps the development team wasn't aware of phpBB when the decision was taken.

Anyhow, IMO there are never decisions taken that souldn't be re-visited periodically.

BTW, I'm not knocking the developers of this board, Generally it works well, but doing it in-house is what I could call a 'courageous decision'.

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I agree that the horizontal scrolling is currently very painful.

I can see though that improvements are being made by AthlonRob and his
team of dedicated forum breakers.

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Kolch - Crunching for the BOINC@Australia team since July 2004.
Search for your own intelligence...

Since there are some issues with the Message Boards, I'll ask the question I've been wondering about.

Why are we using an in-house, home-made(?) Message Board?

There are several 'off the shelf' boards available that provide all the reatures we have and so much more.

In keeping with the project, "phpBB2" is Open Source - if that is an issue?

'vBulletin' is also a good package for $160 (hardly going to bust the project budget?)

Given the clear lack of manpower, I'm surprised that effort is going into something that seems unnecessary?

Well, over at climate you can choose the boinc forums or the phpbb2 - now, I personally dislike phpbb2, so I don't use it. If I have the choice, I choose whatever alternative there is to phpbb2.

Obviously phpbb2 is not very customizable either - or else millions of forums wouldn't look like a copy of each other ;)

Fair comment. I don't really ever notice which BB I'm using, I guess most are vBulletin, and the ones I don't like so much are probably phpBB ;)

I guess I still don't see the point of rejecting vBulletin over cost though. I'ts only required once per project, not per client.
All the current projects together wouldn't come to $1,000. Surely the developers time must have exceeded this figure many many times.
As a package developer myself I often have to make the same decisions, buy-in libraries etc/vs hacking them out myself.

As an aside, if there's a blanket 'no cost' attitude to BOINC, they really never should have produced a Windows client - it requires a paid-for,
licenced and NON-Open Source run-time environment for every client - MS Windows.

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As an aside, if there's a blanket 'no cost' attitude to BOINC, they really never should have produced a Windows client - it requires a paid-for,
licenced and NON-Open Source run-time environment for every client - MS Windows.

You forgot the compiler ...

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I guess I still don't see the point of rejecting vBulletin over cost though. I'ts only required once per project, not per client.
All the current projects together wouldn't come to $1,000. Surely the developers time must have exceeded this figure many many times.
As a package developer myself I often have to make the same decisions, buy-in libraries etc/vs hacking them out myself.

As an aside, if there's a blanket 'no cost' attitude to BOINC, they really never should have produced a Windows client - it requires a paid-for,
licenced and NON-Open Source run-time environment for every client - MS Windows.

There's a difference between supporting Windows in clients (an option) and requiring all the projects to pay $160 for a license to have forums (not as much of an option). And how would they continue to distribute the Boinc code? They'd need a hacked up vBulletin version to work with boinc's setup... they certainly couldn't offer it via CVS.

vBulletin isn't an option, AFAIK.

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Rob

Why are we using an in-house, home-made(?) Message Board?

There are several 'off the shelf' boards available that provide all the reatures we have and so much more.

In keeping with the project, "phpBB2" is Open Source - if that is an issue?

I'm not sure why the initial decision was made to use something "home-made" - but what we have now works (sans a few bugs that just need to be located) and works well with Boinc. Any other board systems out there would need to be hacked up to authenticate with boinc, provide stats, etc. Many don't have the same feature sets we're all used to. And what about old posts?

I responded to vBulletin usage... now phpBB2. phpBB2 is *popular* - and that, tied in with its bad programming design, have lead to it being exploited on a semi-regular basis. phpBB sites are "hacked" all the time.

It's also a hog... it supports far more than we need here (and doesn't support some things we're using).

I don't think it's a viable option for what we're doing.

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Rob

Why are we using an in-house, home-made(?) Message Board?

There are several 'off the shelf' boards available that provide all the reatures we have and so much more.

In keeping with the project, "phpBB2" is Open Source - if that is an issue?

I'm not sure why the initial decision was made to use something "home-made" - but what we have now works (sans a few bugs that just need to be located) and works well with Boinc. Any other board systems out there would need to be hacked up to authenticate with boinc, provide stats, etc. Many don't have the same feature sets we're all used to. And what about old posts?

I responded to vBulletin usage... now phpBB2. phpBB2 is *popular* - and that, tied in with its bad programming design, have lead to it being exploited on a semi-regular basis. phpBB sites are "hacked" all the time.

It's also a hog... it supports far more than we need here (and doesn't support some things we're using).

I don't think it's a viable option for what we're doing.

Don't get me wrong Rob, I'm not knocking your efforts. I was just thinking
perhaps there was a short-cut to gettting at least one aspect of this
project finished.
I was never suggesting that an 'bought-in' BB could replace the whole site, stats, downlads and all.
There's no reason why th BB shouldn't just be a link off the main site is there? (According to Bruno, Climate supports both BOINC board and phpBB)

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Don't get me wrong Rob, I'm not knocking your efforts. I was just thinking
perhaps there was a short-cut to gettting at least one aspect of this
project finished.
I was never suggesting that an 'bought-in' BB could replace the whole site, stats, downlads and all.
There's no reason why th BB shouldn't just be a link off the main site is there? (According to Bruno, Climate supports both BOINC board and phpBB)

One reason is integration: we tend to forget that these boards are open only to those who are in the project and have logged in (we forget because we have cookies that handle that for us).

It means that in general, these boards aren't spidered by the search engines or evil spiders like "EmailSiphon" -- it means that an E-Mail accidentally posted here won't suddenly get much spam.

To me, that's worth a whole lot.

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The forum here works well & meets the needs of those who use it.

While there may be better fourum oftions out there, I can see no reason to change.

If it ain't bust, don't fix it.

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Foamy is "Lord and Master".
(Oh, + some Classic WUs too.)

Fair comment. I don't really ever notice which BB I'm using, I guess most are vBulletin, and the ones I don't like so much are probably phpBB ;)

I guess I still don't see the point of rejecting vBulletin over cost though. I'ts only required once per project, not per client.
All the current projects together wouldn't come to $1,000. Surely the developers time must have exceeded this figure many many times.
As a package developer myself I often have to make the same decisions, buy-in libraries etc/vs hacking them out myself.

As an aside, if there's a blanket 'no cost' attitude to BOINC, they really never should have produced a Windows client - it requires a paid-for,
licenced and NON-Open Source run-time environment for every client - MS Windows.

Well, personally I like to create my own boards as well. Most of the off-the-shelf boards don't meet my needs, so I would have to spend months trying to figure out someone elses code, and then some to figure out how to change it to meet my needs. At least with my own stuff I know how the darn thing works, where this and that code fragment are etc ;)

Anyway, the funniest thing is, on all the sites where I use message boards, the ones that feature their own stuff are the ones I like the look and feel of the most (except the tree-style boards ;) but those I don't use much anyway).

In regards to BOINC I don't think the no-cost deal is the only or even by far the most important issue. Build a message board around a given site is much easier and faster than taking something pre-made, and re-code it to fit - AND much more safe, as it is pretty easy to overlook small but crusial security wholes that might exist in the pre-made stuff (or is created inadvertantly by the costumizing).

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(According to Bruno, Climate supports both BOINC board and phpBB)

Yes, but the messages aren't at both boards

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And I'm wondering what it is about the dedicated forum packages that is missing here?

From a project-manager perspective the BOINC forum is deadly easy to setup and use (it is in the box with everything else related to BOINC and really doesn't require anything) and from a user perspective it has all the functionallity that 99% of the users would want - even extras such as avatars and signatures etc.

The option of phpBB was looked at shortly after the original (more or less featureless) message boards were created. However phpBB does not really fit with a close integration into the BOINC system, and it is very large and complex (integration would for instance involve writing wrappers for their template system and password manager).

Manpower - I'm not sure Rob (who contributed a lot of patches to the forums recently) would be working much on core client improvements if he wasn't working on improving the forum software...I may be wrong though.

Manpower - I'm not sure Rob (who contributed a lot of patches to the forums recently) would be working much on core client improvements if he wasn't working on improving the forum software...I may be wrong though.

You're correct - I think I sent my last patch for the core client to Rom over a year ago. It's just too complicated and time consuming for me to go through and figure out the C/C++ syntax than it is for me to just do stuff in PHP. :-)

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Rob