Sennadar Forums

First of all, I'll respond to some comments that've been raised about the new forum software.

mr wrote: The, um, user interface is confusing and misdirecting. For example: On all the styles I've some across (there might be a jewel somewhere amongst all that dirt) it is ridiculously easy to accidentally post a new topic when you are going to reply. The buttons look the same and the pages where you write look the same. This leads to a lot of accidental new topics.

(.....)

And it is only on phpbb boards that I have had trouble signing in, but that might have been the admins screw-up.

I don's know much about security but I did stuble across this article http://news.com.com/Net+worm+using+Goog ... tml?tag=nl

1: The problems you're describing sound more like design flaws with the theme, than problems with the forum software itself (see point 2 for sign-in). The theme I'm going with is *very* similar to the current one. In addition, it seems fairly easy to design new ones which (if set up correctly) can be user-selectable.

2: I can't see any problems with sign-in at the moment. It works just like YaBB, but more secure (passwords are stored as MD5 hashes - case sensitive and not able to be recovered - unlike YaBB).

3: The worm you link to is apparently a flaw with PHP itself, not the forum software. That is - it's the scripting engine. In any case, I'll be sure to check with my hosting provider to ensure they've upgraded their PHP engine to fix the security vulnerability.


Shadowhawk: Thanks for providing some alternatives. PHPbb looks like the better alternative still, however.

---

Current Situation:
Installing the board is the easy bit, doing a successful, complete conversion of the current board isn't easy, however.

The YaBB to PHPbb converter provided on the phpbb.com site doesn't do it's job terribly well.

I'm in the process of writing my own converter - which should, hopefully, take everything acrosss.

I've spent about 5 hours on it so far - most of that time was spent documenting how YaBB stores its data, and how things need to be set up in PHPbb.

Aside from that, I've got a about a 45% complete set of classes in VB.NET 2003 that reflect the structure of the data in a logical way, and I'm about 15% through writing the actual conversion routine.

Fortunately/Unfortunately when I write software like this I tend to go whole hog - so it'll probably end up being a completely reusable conversion tool for others converting from YaBB (or other similar text-based fora software) to PHPbb (or other similar RDBMS software). It'll just take a bit longer than a rushed 'it just works this once' script.

WARNING!  DUMB QUESTION TO FOLLOW!!

But why are you doing this? I find this board completely satisfactory....

???

MD

Yeah Me Too!

I can find and or reply to new or old topis easily.

I can send a PM.

It is not an unappealing site.

SO WHATS UP?

John

People whined about old messages suddenly being marked as unread.

People whined about there being no spoiler tag.

People whined.

Apart from the whining (Thanks, Karly ), there's a few other problems that I can see cropping up fairly soon.

Basicly, the current forum software works on plain straight text files to store everything. This works OK for a small board, with not much in the way of activity or history. Infact, on the main admin page theres an option right out there in the open - "Delete all posts older than <x> Days", with X being set at 30.

In addition, YaBB isn't secure - anyone with a bit of technical knowledge could easily read the PM's you send, or your password, etc.  

In short, the current system works - but I'm not happy with it.

OK

Thanks for answering.

John

Mods that will be installed on PHPbb:

* Spoiler tags
If you want to write something that'd be considered a spoiler.

* Spell checker
Just to give some of us a bit of a helping hand. I'm hoping it'll support both  US-English an UK-English dictionaries (eg: for "-ise"/"-ize" and "colour"/"color" type common spellings)


---

Update on Migration:

* Import Users: Done
* Import Forum Categories: Done
* Import Forums: Done
* Import Threads: In Progress

To Do
* Import Posts: Waiting
* Post BB-Code conversion: Waiting
* Import Forum Moderators: Waiting
* Import User Avatars (both Custom and 'default'): Waiting
* Post/Thread Graphics: Waiting
* WinForms Frontend: Partly Done.


Should be done by Monday/Tuesday.

Just some questions:
- will the URL change?
- Do you need users to test the forum before official opening?

zedd wrote:Just some questions:
- will the URL change?
- Do you need users to test the forum before official opening?

-The URL will stay the same.

-testers would be good, but not vital.

Drop me a line (email, icq, irc, private message, etc) with availability, if you're still interested. Not that much should really need testing though, mainly just checking that everything converted like it should (more eyes are always good for that though), and a few posts/replies to check the software is up right.

thanks for the interest.

Obviously the conversion hasn't gone ahead as yet  -- blame my sister for that one Took her back to mum's place on Monday and ended up hanging around all day.
 
Anyhow, I've got some work done on it this afternoon.

Update on progress:

[s]* Thread Posts Content Conversion: 70% Complete (all read in and processed, just not written out to the DB yet) [/s]

[s]* Post BB-Code conversion: Completed[/s]

[s]* Search Indexing: 80% done (post-to-word linking is there, but waiting on the Thread Post content conversion to be completed) [/s]


Still to do:
* Groups Conversion (Forum Moderators, Site Admins etc). (low priority, easy to do manually with a forum this size)

* YaBB Built-In Avatars & Post Graphics Conversion: Waiting (low priority, not vital - URL)

* Private Message conversion

There's some other stuff that needs to be done, but it's not very time consuming - mostly just conversion event notifications and such.

shadowhawk wrote:http://freshmeat.net/browse/21/ (Communications :: BBS)
http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trov ... orm_cat=21 (BBS)
phpBB (PHP), FUDforum (PHP), Phorum (PHP), Sporum (Perl), ....

All of those (bulletin) board software I have heard somewhere, most probably presented in some computer journal. Furthermore I don't know if you would rather have board software in Perl (like current one, i.e. YaBB), or in PHP.

BTW. Here is next resource: http://www.forumpoint.com/ - the site about forum software.

spec8472 wrote:Current Situation:
Installing the board is the easy bit, doing a successful, complete conversion of the current board isn't easy, however.

The YaBB to PHPbb converter provided on the phpbb.com site doesn't do it's job terribly well.

I'm in the process of writing my own converter - which should, hopefully, take everything acrosss.

I've spent about 5 hours on it so far - most of that time was spent documenting how YaBB stores its data, and how things need to be set up in PHPbb.

Aside from that, I've got a about a 45% complete set of classes in VB.NET 2003 that reflect the structure of the data in a logical way, and I'm about 15% through writing the actual conversion routine.

Fortunately/Unfortunately when I write software like this I tend to go whole hog - so it'll probably end up being a completely reusable conversion tool for others converting from YaBB (or other similar text-based fora software) to PHPbb (or other similar RDBMS software). It'll just take a bit longer than a rushed 'it just works this once' script.

I would write the converter in Perl, not in VB.NET, reusing (read: copy'n'paste) code from YaBB and of course using some CPAN general RDBMS access module. But you might be more familiar with VB.NET.

BTW. would you consider making the converter code public, i.e. putting it somewhere (e.g. SourceForge if OSS (OpenSource), Gna! or Savannah if Free Software (e.g. GPL-ed)) and putting links (registering project) on Tucows (if it is possible) and Freshmeat (maybe SourceForge as well)? So next person to come to this particular problem (flat plain text files BBS starts to become limiting as the forum grows from small to large, and it needs to be moved to some RDBMS forum software) would not need to repeat your work...

shadowhawk wrote: All of those (bulletin) board software I have heard somewhere, most probably presented in some computer journal. Furthermore I don't know if you would rather have board software in Perl (like current one, i.e. YaBB), or in PHP.

Thanks - I saw your post about the other forum software that other thread, previously.  
I checked out the others you mentioned, but none seemed to have the same level of support (atleast for non-conversion related issues) or ongoing maintenance as PHPbb.

shadowhawk wrote:I would write the converter in Perl, not in VB.NET, reusing (read: copy'n'paste) code from YaBB and of course using some CPAN general RDBMS access module. But you might be more familiar with VB.NET.

Unfortunately, my Perl skills are non-existant, so that rules out modifying the existing board to use a RDBMS. Also, the existing converter (Yabb to PHPBB) is in PHP, where I'm also out of luck as far as skills go.

shadowhawk wrote: BTW. would you consider making the converter code public

Most Certainly!

I'll be posting the code and a compiled "WinForms"  executable online when I've finished writing it.

For non-windows users, I've been looking at making a mono compatible version too.

The licence for the application and code will probably be a Creative Commons, Non-Commercial licence.  

Well, Perl isn't very typical language, meaning it is not just another structural (or object) programming language (ever heard of "lexical scoping" and "closures"?). It was written with "there is more than one way to do the thing" in mind, and fast writing... so it can be easy to use; unfortunately it is also easy to write "write-only" programs. But it have good documentation, namely "Learning Perl" (there are also some good on-line free introductions, primers and tutorials), "Perl Reference" (documentation coming with Perl is also guite good) and "Perl Cookbook" -- no links because I've lost the bookmarks.

And the reason I would write the converter from flat files to RDBMS tables in Perl (after brushing my not large Perl skills), besides the fact that YaBB is written in Perl so half of the work (the analysis of the text files) would be done for me, is the fact that Perl is very good at manipulating text... and of course the fact that it has (I've heard) good abstract database acces layer (meaning it would be very easy to change the database from e.g. MySQL to PostrgresSQL or SAP DB). But what matters most is CPAN: Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, where you probably find module for everything you need (there is e.g. module for PHPbb codes).

As for PHP... there is free on-line manual (at php.net and at Zend pages) which serves as kind of language definition. PHP is quite easy to start programming with, mostly because of similarities with C/Java syntax, and the fact that you can embed PHP in HTML (like ASP). Well, there are some ways to embed Perl in PHP (Embperl, Mason,...) but aren't as popular. And it is very popular: the most popular [free] content management systems and bulletin board systems (fora) are written in PHP . The database functions in PHP are (if I'm correct) database specific (well, there is ODBC driver as well). It is possible to write general database access layer... and probably somebody has written it and put in PEAR: PHP Extension and Application Repository. Although PEAR isn't as large, as popular and as commonly used as CPAN (modules).

Of course adding relational database (RDBMS) support to YaBB would mean that you would have to have got some database (e.g. designing the tables) and SQL knowledge as well...

And not, I'm not an expert programmer in either of the languages...

spec8472 wrote:
Unfortunately, my Perl skills are non-existant, so that rules out modifying the existing board to use a RDBMS. Also, the existing converter (Yabb to PHPBB) is in PHP, where I'm also out of luck as far as skills go.

Let me be the first to suggest you learn Perl -- not neccessarily for _this_ project, but just in general. My last two jobs were gained on the strength of my perl ability, and my current job (which is 100% perl coding) pays...well, better than I've ever dreamed of making.  It's a damned good skill to have.

spec8472 wrote:
Most Certainly!

I'll be posting the code and a compiled "WinForms"  executable online when I've finished writing it.

For non-windows users, I've been looking at making a mono compatible version too.

The licence for the application and code will probably be a Creative Commons, Non-Commercial licence.  

Could I convince you to use the GPL instead? Not because I'm a GPL bigot, but because a company that's going to use this for commercial purposes is likely to put more effort  into making it do what they need, and a non-commercial license would stop them from using it (and thus improve it).

Shalon Wood

dstar wrote:Could I convince you to use the GPL instead? Not because I'm a GPL bigot, but because a company that's going to use this for commercial purposes is likely to put more effort  into making it do what they need, and a non-commercial license would stop them from using it (and thus improve it).

Shalon Wood

Why instead? The project can be simply double licensed (as many other projects are), eg CC-nc/GPL (or OSL).