[libreoffice-website] Forum decision - where do we stand? An attempt of a summary...

Hi *,

if you're afraid of long posts, jump to
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and see whether you can answer without reading the whole thing (but
please read the whole thing, it took a while to write it :-)

seems like we did come a halt regarding moving forward with the forum
testing/evaluation. It's holiday season, and only a few days left to
get all your christmas presents, so that's understandable :-)) But
nevertheless, here's the current status from my POV.

Rationale/What is the goal of all this?
* Decide upon a forum software to be used for the LibreOffice user
support forum.
* Decision is between phpBB and JForum currenlty (unless blockers are raised)

What is the difference (big picture)?
* JForum setup would be different forums for each language, but with
shared login across all the forums, so the setup would be similar to
the user.services.openoffice.org forums.
* phpBB favors subcategories, everything would be in one single forum,
with the languages organized in Subcategories.

Fine, but where's the difference (the more detailed look)?
Let's start with the stuff that both forums provide:
* pm between registered users
* bookmark of topics (JForum distinguishes between private and public bookmarks)
* posts can be formatted using bb-code (and with JForum optionally
also using a set of whitelisted html-tags), graphical smilies are
supported
* posts can be previewed in both forums (phpBB additionally supports
saving of drafts)
* both support moving topics, locking topics, editing topics, deleting
messages/topics (with appropriate permissions)
* both support uploading of attachments (people are not forced to
upload files to a webhoster and paste a link only)
* both allow searching (JForum: whole forum or single forum, (single
category also possible, but advanced searches like this or limiting to
a date-range not exposed in the currently used theme), phpBB whole
forum or a selection of forums/subcategories)
* both forums keep track of read/new posts for you

But you were talking about differences‽
Yes, finally here we go. Most of those originate from the different
organization of the different languages, and thus are not necessarily
tied to the platform used, but start with one of the intrinsic
differences:
* JForum has "nice" URLs, while phpBB uses URLs with Query parameters
like ?f=5&t=4
* phpBB-subcategory solution: Renders "recent posts" and "active
topics" useless for most of the userbase. The language that has most
user/most post will dominate them, smaller NL-Groups cannot make use
of it to track changes. This mainly affects unregistered users, but
nevertheless something to consider. (and also is relevant for
moderators who cannot tell whether a message is spam or legitimate
when they don't know the language)
* having all in one single forum would allow to search all languages
at once, however it is doubtful how useful this is. On the other hand
when trying to only search for one language, the user has to spot the
corresponding language in the advanced searchform each time.
Default/simple search is mostly useless.
* on the other hand, when the languges are separate, the user has to
visit another forum to search in another language (but I guess people
will only search in <native-language> and <english> usually, and
logins can be shared across instances, so people can ask in other
language-forums without having to register in each of them.
* subcategory solution has the problem that the initial landing page
is crowded, you can basically only list the top-categories, and then
the landing page is not really different from a page that just points
to the various languages.
* JForum uses a syntaxhighlighter plugin, so for code-posts you get
colored output, phpBB (at least currently) only has a plain code-box
with no syntax-highlighting.

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So what is needed now?
I for myself want a decision on whether we go with the subforum style
or with separate forum (with shared login) style approach, since this
one basically settles the question of what forum-platform to use.
But also if you have complaints about either of the forums, please
mention them. There are a lot of other forum solutions out there that
we didn't look at yet. (But having a look at those only makes sense
when we know the answer to the above question - so I really like to
have this one sorted out)

What really is missing is feedback of those who will be using the
forum, i.e. the native-lang groups. There's no point in the admins
deciding upon one and then receiving lots of complaints about how
crappy the setup is :-)

So please put the discussion to your native-language group and forward
the feedback please.

phpBB test-installation is at http://forum-test.libreoffice.org/
JForum test installation is at
http://forum-test.libreoffice.org:8080/jforum-2.3.2/

Feel free to register and mess around with the system.

ciao
Christian
PS:
While JForum doesn't use Subcategories in the default setup, there are
big sites running mods with subforums, like for example
http://www.coderanch.com/forums/  (>2'500'000 message, almost 240'000
registered users)
http://forum.spore.com/jforum as another example, uses a (at first
sight) vanilla version, and it doesn't hurt apparently, they have
3'600'000 posts by a litte more than 84'000 users)
Neither with phpBB nor with JForum we need to be concerned about large
number of posts or users. They both will do just fine.

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