Forum Issue: Can it be fixed?
Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)
Posts: 23,514
Ken, Bump, and Co.,
In your meeting tomorrow, please consider the question, "Can this thing be fixed with Vanilla?" I know that you've been inundated with specific issues and have been tackling them one-by-one with notable success. But take a moment, if you will, to step back and consider whether Vanilla is capable of satisfying the most critical needs of the Parallax Forum. I know it's so easy to focus on one issue at a time, fix it, then move on to the next, without dialing back and focussing on the bigger picture.
I also know that you're trying really hard to make this thing work. (Ken says so, so it must be true.
) But I'd hate to see you reach the point where mere tweaks to the settings become insufficient and delving into the underlying code becomes the only way to meet the demands made manifest over the past week.
Thanks,Phil
P.S. I'd so rather be focused on technical issues and Propeller stuff than on forum matters. But I feel that we're in a period of stasis until the latter can be sorted out.
In your meeting tomorrow, please consider the question, "Can this thing be fixed with Vanilla?" I know that you've been inundated with specific issues and have been tackling them one-by-one with notable success. But take a moment, if you will, to step back and consider whether Vanilla is capable of satisfying the most critical needs of the Parallax Forum. I know it's so easy to focus on one issue at a time, fix it, then move on to the next, without dialing back and focussing on the bigger picture.
I also know that you're trying really hard to make this thing work. (Ken says so, so it must be true.
) But I'd hate to see you reach the point where mere tweaks to the settings become insufficient and delving into the underlying code becomes the only way to meet the demands made manifest over the past week.Thanks,Phil
P.S. I'd so rather be focused on technical issues and Propeller stuff than on forum matters. But I feel that we're in a period of stasis until the latter can be sorted out.
Comments
http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/151090/#Comment_151090
Reads very much like "My way, or the highway"...
Significantly the "best answer" to whatever the problem is, is to go in and hack out some code some place. Exactly the scenario Phil is warning against in his opening post here.
I'm amazed that that the Vanila Forum forum is the same ugly layout and style as we see here.
I'm amazed that that the Vanila Forum forum is the same ugly layout and style as we see here.
Not so surprising, when you read the Chief Product Officers post.Well, the Vanilla product officer has a point. Vanilla is Free and Open Source software. One cannot expect them to do any more work on it than they want to for their own ends.
Significantly the "best answer" to whatever the problem is, is to go in and hack out some code some place. Exactly the scenario Phil is warning against in his opening post here.
True, but some of this comes down to "culture and fit"
Example: I've used, and made many suggestions to, the Notepad++ efforts over the years.Because it is intended as a Programmers Editor, there is little phase-shift between what I asked for, and what many other similar users wanted, and most suggestions were implemented.
Of course, because of the "culture and fit", the Notepad++ was already 99% usable for what I needed.
It really is hard to see where Ken's claimed 800 man-hours went into this new forum ?
"culture and fit"...very true. Every project has a different culture and fit.
Some are really into attracting contributors, if only for bug reports, patches and documentation etc. They get their project all set up with that as a major goal, an easy build system, clear getting started instructions, attention to their forum and so on.
A big thing there is making an easy to use plug-in system so that users can create whatever harebrained feature they like and it need never impact the core project whist at the same time being usable by people who want that. The node.js module system is a fine example of that, as is the module system of the atom editor from github.
Of course even then if a feature you want does not fit their plans for the project you are out of luck.
Others just don't care, they do their thing with their code, GPL it, if you don't like it or have problems with it then tough.
Ah well.
But I've gotten the idea Parallax wasn't looking for forum software that required so much tweaking. There are definite costs involved, and you're never sure if the effort will pay off.
I guess the main concern was data migration, and Vanilla offered the best out-of-box experience for that. I know many disagreed with me, but I would have been fine with a read-only archive of the old forum. Start anew, and all that. Oh, well.
-Phil
Very successful. Apart from the full week of constant complaints from just about everybody, people promising to not return, acrimony being fired around, that we have just had.
As a famous surgeon once said "The operation was a total success, unfortunately the patient died"
I do hope this is all resolved soon and we can get back to business.
Even though I truly did not support a forum upgrade, I have tried to refrain from making critical comments until now, because I believed Parallax deserved at least a little time to resolve issues. However, at this point, a fair amount of time has already passed and I personally don't like it at all.
I just wonder if it would have been much wiser to invest all this time and effort into vBulletin. I liked vBulletin a lot compared to this ... Heck in my honest opinion, even the junky forum software I have on my website has a better layout than this, but I am unsure of the security.
Besides the layout, I have other issues with this software. Up till now, I have only been able to start one thread and make two posts, that was until I installed Google Chrome. It peeves to no end that I had to install Chrome, just to enable posting.
Please go back to vBulletin and fix it, because this forum software cannot be fixed. I can tell just by looking at it
There was no going forward with vBulliten so we are going backwards with Vanilla instead
Ugh... too much speculative thinking on the web these days?
Will or will not Parallax stay the course with Vanilla?
Will or will not Greece stay in the EU?
My gut feeling is that 99.9% of us will adapt fine to Vanilla, once the functionally and categories are appropriate.
Public speculation on 'Are you in or out?' just heighten drama for those that love drama.
This is merely a Forum on the Internet, and it is mostly what the posters say that creates value. Good content and thoughtful help are central, not speculative debate on what Parallax might or might not do.
My gut feeling is that 99.9% of us will adapt fine to Vanilla, once the functionally and categories are appropriate.
Probably. But a consultant spending two or three days of coding could have migrated the old vBull DB to anything, including the new version of vBull. Not to put too fine a point on it, I"m sure there are other surprises awaiting us regarding this forum. So for Parallax, it will become a game of whack-a-mole. I'm sure there are better ways for them to spend their money.
But really how much time has passed? The day after it came out all of Parallax was busy cleaning and doing inventory. They then had two days to work before being off for the long weekend (I'm pretty sure Parallax had Friday the third off). So really there have only been two work days at Parallax since the new forum came out.
If we're going to give Parallax some time to get this fixed, I don't think two days is much time to give.
I don't know what the solution to this issue is. I have no idea what sort of forum software would work well but if one thinks things could be fixed with a bit of time, I don't think two days is enough time to expect a whole lot of improvements.
Very successful. Apart from the full week of constant complaints from just about everybody, people promising to not return, acrimony being fired around, that we have just had.
As a famous surgeon once said "The operation was a total success, unfortunately the patient died"
I do hope this is all resolved soon and we can get back to business.
And what exactly is that business to be gotten back to? Parallax bashing of other sorts? A constant bias toward any product other than Parallax's?
We seem to have a few posters that can't help themselves when it comes to participating in a negative fashion. I suppose it is psychologically rewarding.
Paradoxically, I grow angry at Parallax that Parallax tolerates it. As it does drive away the less combative that come here seeking help and mentoring. It also tends to lead us all into being more negative.
If one really doesn't have anything constructive to contribute and is just here to amuse one's self -- that is out of bounds. And that has nothing to do with the drama of the changeover except that it all makes it harder to get back on a good track.
You are being a trifle hypocritical. Or did you already forget your own recent whining about some new forum features?
I at least made one constructive input regarding the forum by pointing out a serious matter that needs urgent attention.
What did you do?
Is there some logic to it; e.g. "New" appears only in threads I've participated in, or something? Anyway, it's confusing. Has this been reported as a bug, if it is a bug?
Is there some logic to it; e.g. "New" appears only in threads I've participated in, or something? Anyway, it's confusing. Has this been reported as a bug, if it is a bug?
"New" only appears in threads you've previously read (since the update). If you haven't read the post you are not told how many new messages there are since you're already told the number of replies in the thread.
I think the "New" feature is working correctly.
Well let's say "working as designed."
There are threads that I once read, shown bolded only now, that no longer show New, even though they contain new posts. So, I'm guessing if I visited without reading the New posts on X visit, then New is not shown next time around in Y visit. I miss out, and then cannot easily tell which discussions I've been following. (And no, I'm not going to bookmark anything. Thanks, but no thanks.)
If that's the way it's supposed to work, I'm not sure it's good UI. I prefer the small icons many forums use to indicate your participation. For example, you know if it's a discussion you've posted to, even months ago, by seeing a certain icon. If there are new posts, that's shown, too. And so on.
From the discussion list itself, I can't discern between discussions I've posted in, not posted in, read/not read, read just part of the posts, scoffed at, or anything! Am I the only one that finds these kinds of tokens useful?
I prefer the organization of forums containing threads made from posts. And yes, I want the little icons that inform me of new posts in forums, new posts in threads, threads where I've posted, and all that. It's useful information that shouldn't be hidden. The stuff which is presented here as all important in that intrusive side bar, is mostly useless.
I have no idea why, when starting this project, Parallax decided they first needed to dig themselves a big hole to climb out of. It makes no sense whatsoever. There is no way that "vanillaforums" was the only way to move forward.
I would also like all of the threads that contain unread posts to be displayed first, not intermixed with ones I've already read.
-Phil
Is there some logic to it; e.g. "New" appears only in threads I've participated in, or something? Anyway, it's confusing. Has this been reported as a bug, if it is a bug?
It looks a little erratic here too, but I thought maybe the 'new' thresholds had been reset by work on the code.
Here, some older threads suddenly appeared with a lot of 'new' tags, but digging into them shows the number was clearly wrong. New since 2012 perhaps ?
-Phil
We seriously considered implementing PhpBB. It more closely aligns with the look and feel of the old vBulletin site. The issue we could not ignore was that the available migration tools do not support migrating attachments; every thing but attachments. Without attachments, many posts would have far less informative and useful.
The Vanilla Forums has a migration tool that is able to migrate the discussions, user accounts, attachments and avatars. The avatar component had a bug that was corrected at about the same time as our cut-over, so we excluded avatar migration. It also provided code to allow the redirection required to not break The Google.
It really is hard to see where Ken's claimed 800 man-hours went into this new forum ?
The 800 hour figure includes the time we spent working with vBulletin during the unsuccessful attempt to migrate the site to version 5.x. The remainder of that time was allocated to UI, plugin selection and testing and migration testing. It all takes time.
My gut feeling is that 99.9% of us will adapt fine to Vanilla, once the functionally and categories are appropriate.
Probably. But a consultant spending two or three days of coding could have migrated the old vBull DB to anything, including the new version of vBull. Not to put too fine a point on it, I"m sure there are other surprises awaiting us regarding this forum. So for Parallax, it will become a game of whack-a-mole. I'm sure there are better ways for them to spend their money.
The support and engineering departments at vBulletin spent six weeks trying to complete a working migration with our data set and were unable to make it work. The author of the Vanilla migration has said he spent months figuring out how to make this work. The final product appears to have worked well. Migrating the vBulletin data is not a trivial task.
We will continue to work though the issues the the forum members report. We are serious about making this right.
My comment about the migration tools comes about knowing other sites on older VB installs that were able to upgrade, and yes it was tough. They were all serviced by getting outside SQL help that first moved the data into format-agnostic tables, and then from there they could use generic queries to rebuild to any forum. I believe the same consultants were used in the two other sites I am aware of. However, their fee was quite steep -- $2K to $10K, from what I heard.
Vanilla's migration tools are open source, I believe, so the technology is out there. That said, it's a done deal, and that portion is behind you.
Not to keep this going, but I think the shock was mostly from the abruptness into dropping into an untested forum. But, maybe there was no other way to keep the other forum alive for 2-4 weeks, while working out the bugs in this one with a small, select, and invitation-only group of testers.
I was trying to convey to our readers that there was much more to this process than most of us would expect. Certainly much more than I ever expected.
Another point that most forum members are missing is that we did release a preview of the Vanilla site back in March to solicit comments and to give forum members a chance to kick the tires. There was interest for about two weeks before the traffic to that site dropped off. We did take what we leaned from user comments when we worked on the final version. Now that we have a new set of critiques to work with, we will continue working through the list to get as close as we can to what our members want on this site.