On Sat, May 23, 2015, at 07:40 PM, Liam White wrote:

I hope I don't come off as too aggressive, but site coders aren't magicians.
PHP is not Python etc and while there are existing forum applications already written in Django it'd be more ideal for us to work with the existing models we have on the website than to retrofit another forum app onto the site and pray that it works, then hassle to convert model storage when we need to tweak it.
(It's not even that hard to make a forum: you'd need a backing database and two controllers: a topic controller and a post controller, that pull all of the weight. Bonus points for using ElasticSearch to index it. Only hard thing is a suitable frontend.)

Problem I've seen is that most forums are poor interfaces to feature-shy reimplementations of newsgroups. Getting something useful and actually functional would be key. After a while things start to weigh a community down, like the 'oh no, I've accidentally closed a window now I'll have to spend an hour reading through that thread again to find my spot' classic forum fail, and others.

Simultaneous web and news reader interfaces are actually a viable solution... once the problem is properly understood.

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Jon A. Cruz

jon@...18...