Ugh, maybe this will finally push forums to burn those infernal Tapatalk interstitials. Forum owners: I'm looking for one piece of information from a web search, not a whole dumb app that will completely ignore my search goals.
Even worse, there are a lot of sites with outdated and insecure tapatalk plugins. We ran tapatalk for a few month and you had to patch it every other week. Maybe they fixed many of those issues by now, but it is still annoying.
I must be in the minority but the Tapatalk app seems okay to me. It takes the cruft and ads out of the forum you are on and just presents you the content in a relatively stripped down format.
Maybe my use case is out of the ordinary compared to a lot of HN, I use it for a single forum that I am an active member of, and I can't recall the last time I googled something and was redirected to a result that was a forum entry that redirected to a Tapatalk ad (99% of my google searches end up at stackoverflow or blog entries).
I think people aren't complaining about the quality of the app. Rather we dislike the fact that when clicking a link to a forum we are forced to decline to install their app before we can view what we are looking for.
Personally I close the page.
I really hope the creators of tapatalk go out of business.
If Google, phpBB and tapatalk and get their shit together they would support deeplinking and make the experience seemless. It's not even that technically challenging but could run afoul of existing ad models...
> a phpBB forum, meaning I won't find what I'm looking for anyway.
I'll have to disagree on this point. There are a lot of phpBB forums out there, and their quality and content varies widely as the Internet itself. Many of them, esp. some of the long-established ones, are invaluable sources for all sorts of arcana. Wikipedia doesn't even begin to touch the kinds of obscure practical knowledge embedded in the "dark web" of phpBB forums. There are a lot of Google searches for which a single post by some domain expert is the top result, many of which in old, old forum software of some sort, usually phpBB.
FWIW, I've never once run into a Discourse forum in the wild, i.e. via a web search, site link, etc.
There are lots of phpBB forums, and their content is many times invaluable. The application itself though, is completely terrible. It's not that the information isn't there, it's the finding that sucks. For example: basic things like having the search index work properly with unicode. The chances that the php, db and app settings are all properly set up for searching for "ö" are slim to none.
I don't agree with all the design decisions of Discourse, but it was (seemingly) designed to be a straightforward migration from phpBB and other similar forums (flat ones). Just having a proper search alone is worth the migration.
+1 on the discourse: Is anyone using it, like at all, except discourse? I have been waiting since it came for it to become a place for everything that Stack Overflow bans (non trivial questions that need discussion, "how can this be done in an elegant way" etc).
<rant>And: Can someone please please create a new stackoverflow that rewards solving problems instead of going full Daesh in destroying old artifacts, enforcing dumb rules etc?</rant>
I tried to use Discourse but the hardware and software requirements combined would have meant a $20+/month VM rather than a $10/month VM:
- Dual core CPU recommended
- 1 GB RAM minimum (with swap)
- 64 bit Linux compatible with Docker
- Postgres 9.3+ (2 GB RAM min?).
- Redis 2.6+
- Ruby 2.0+ (we recommend 2.0.0-p353 or higher)
Ultimately I wound up putting PHPBB with a different skin back on the server, since it just requires MySQL, PHP, and any web server.
Plus Discourse has a lot of strange features (e.g. auto-mod promotion) and it feels like it is still in beta based on the feedback they get on their own forums.
And don't get me started on the docker-based setup. If you want a local native install (no docker container) well, you cannot. Docker or nothing.
The whole product feels extremely convoluted and over-engineered.
Yup. I had pretty much the same problems, except I didn't even get to installing because the requirements put me off.
I just wanted something that sucks less than PHPBB or SMF, you know? But this thing mainly seems more bloated, and the live demos didn't really quite convince me of the "sucks less" part either.
One thing I haven't even been able to test yet, once you have it running, how much is there to configure in order to tone it down? Because if you want to run a forum for pretty much anything but a tech audience, I would like to get rid of all the "dynamic" and "interactive" javascript stuff. Because it really makes it less interactive/dynamic for people on old, low-powered computers. They need basic HTML full page reloads (assuming the HTML is somewhat lean--leaner than PHPBB/SMF preferably :) ).
Because the unique thing about forums, that still gives them relevance in the 2010s, is that you can gather a community with extremely specialized niche knowledge. If the person who knows everything about, I dunno, stained glass dyes, psychogeography or uh Sumerian breakfast recipes, just happens to have a really old machine you don't tell them to upgrade or suck it, because he or she may be one of the only people in the world with the particular expert niche-in-niche knowledge that brings invaluable quality to the forum, much more than having a shiny slick UI that looks buttersmooth on a new laptop.
I just checked out discourse and honestly as a user I would rather use phpbb than that. Im sure discourse is a much better piece of software but I can not stand the format.
well , it's easy , because Discourse is extremely complicated to deploy for the average joe. phpBB is ... in php , ie cheap hosting , sftp deployment ... Server side Ruby was never easy to deploy.
This may have formerly been the case but at least since they switched to Docker based installs it's incredibly easy. I migrated an ancient vBulletin forum over to Discourse last week and had no problems with the basic (fairly short) instructions. https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INST...
It's not very easy for an average developer either. I have worked 12 years as a developer, know my way reasonably around linux, and find docker about as easy to understand as chinese.
in what way? I totally understand being bewildered by it at first but once you start with it it's a lot easier to get to grips with than many things in the Nixverse.
I just had to create our Docker setup at my work, basically from scratch (and I'm a front end dev) and if I can, you can :)
Yes, I agree there is someting wrong with how they created that application. They have made enough changes to the Ruby landscape for Discourse alone, that the deployment story should have been addressed. The issue atm seems to be that there are no free/cheap hosted ones.
You're saying the underlying platform somehow has some bearing on the quality of the users and the content? Don't get me wrong, I agree phpBB is outdated but well-established, long-running forums are a goldmine of information.
No. That's not at all what I'm saying (as is obvious from my further replies). The content is useless unless you can find it.
Edit: actually, it CAN have a lot of influence on the quality of the content. Ever found a phpBB thread with dead images because the user hotlinked them? Discourse downloads them and replaces the urls with the locally cached ones, ensuring the images are there in five years. That's just one example.
