[Mageia-dev] News about the forum

Mon Oct 4 00:14:13 CEST 2010

Hi all,
+
+After many opinions and suggestions exchanges, mails and thought we have
+started to work on forum thing.
+
+Considering our hope to grow we started to analyse the board engines
+with a few axis of needs :
+
+Work input data :
+----
+
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software_%28PHP%29
+http://www.big-boards.com/
+http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/bbPress+FluxBB+FUDforum+Invision-Power-Board+MyBB+Phorum+phpBB+punBB+SMF+vBulletin
+
+(In this last link boards versions are not perfectly up-to date :-( )
+
+(and secunia resports about security alerts these last years)
+
+Axes :
+----
+
+1) Ability to hold under heavy loads and store many posts
+
+=> phpBB3, vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, MesDiscussions.net which
+are the most represented on big boards
+
+2) Moderation features
+
+=> vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, phpBB3, Simple Machines Forum 2, MyBB
+
+3) User Features
+
+=> vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, phpBB3, Simple Machines Forum 2,
+MyBB, FudForum
+
+4) Security
+
+=> phpBB3, FudForum, vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2...
+
+(phpBB2 was not even considered as an option from the beginning)
+(MyBB was not very good)
+
+5) Look and ergonomy
+
+=> vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, phpBB3, Simple Machines Forum 2,
+MyBB...
+
+5) Opensource (GPL or AGPL)
+
+=> phpBB3, FudForum, MyBB (GPLv3 \o/), punBB, phorum...
+
+
+
+Method and results :
+----
+
+We excluded proprietary software (wether free or not)...
+
+(Of course when it comes to usability and features vBulletin and
+Invision Power Board are far ahead... the goal was to find something
+hopefully able to compete with them) :
+
+So exit: vBulletin, Invision Power Board 2, Simple Machines Forum 2,
+MesDiscussions.net...
+
+Then we excluded forums with utf8 know issues like punBB...
+
+Then we excluded forums with too well known security issues discovered
+theses last years :
+
+So exit: MyBB (Sad for french people but that's life) and phorum...
+http://secunia.com/advisories/product/4144/?task=statistics
+http://secunia.com/advisories/product/4479/?task=statistics
+
+for Fudforum there were not much issues but one of them allowed system
+access... we saved it because of people enthusiasm on the lists :)
+
+Then we Excluded forums with bad organization of
+administration/moderation control panels and/or missing moderation features:
+
+So exit: fudforum (which also would have been painful to relook) and
+FluxBB also.
+
+Nota: Fud has got the very cool mailing list bridge that we should set
+up rather as soon as possible on the official board (but as already said
+this feature still needs to be thought about, discussed by people and
+heavily tested to avoid backfires... considering the current mailing
+lists trafic and the obvious lack of love of some packagers for forums
+this is not something to underestimate)
+
+
+
+=> The survivor is phpBB3 which is n°1 in big-boards.com and yet is far
+from perfect imho. It will need some tweaking (that others would have
+needed also : mainly about troll management, and also support
+enhancements for example to mark support topics as [solved]) to match
+more closely our needs...
+
+So we started to work on phpBB3 with ash (thanks to ennael personal
+funding)...
+
+One cool thing is that phpBB3 is published also through git so we are
+able to track upstream changes and merge them quickly into our running
+version without breaking local patches and enhancements. (The upgrade
+via this method has been successfully tested a few hours ago)
+
+At this precise minute we have a fresh new (skinned) up-to-date phpBB3
+running that still needs a few adds (language packs for example).
+
+Hope we'll be soon able to push DNS records so that everybody can get in
+and give us feedback and improvement proposals.
+
+Stay tuned,
+Maât (a little bit tired... sorry my english is probably uglier than usual)
+
+
+