The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
vBulletin is dead, long live Vanilla
Älphämönkëy
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, it's been a long time coming but here is the latest on the future of our forums.
vBulletin is dead, long live Vanilla
After looking at the software solutions out there we have decided to run Vanilla Forums. Vanilla Forums is an open source project written in PHP backed with a MySQL database server. The core developers of the project formed a a startup company to provide a variety of services (including hosting).
Why Vanilla?
I'll make a longer post about this in the future. In short, they "get" forums. When we approached different vendors they were the only ones that asked the right questions. "What games do you guys play?" "How do you deal with spam?" "How do you deal with trolling?"
From a code perspective, the Vanilla Forums software is built on top of a plugin architecture. This makes the code much easier to customize than vBulletin. This modularity has made it pretty easy to extend Vanilla to include the community features that we have come to rely on: reporting posts, marking posts as awesome, infractions and jails, spam control, etc.
From a management perspective, the forums have this knack of crashing right before big events (Child's Play/PAX/etc). This large crash during the holiday Child's Play seasons was really poorly timed. Obviously I want to make sure the forumers are taken care of but I also have obligations to other readers as well (child's play donors, store customers, etc). The Vanilla Forums guys will manage the day-to-day technical bits powering the forums for us, patching software, tuning MySQL, taking backups, etc. We will still be involved but at the end of the day the Vanilla guys will be the ones "on call" for our forums.
Wait, I thought MySQL is the devil's database! Why aren't we switching? What about searching?
I've been working with the guys over at Vanilla to make MySQL work for us. This includes simple things like using InnoDB to reduce lock contention and more complex changes like using Sphinx to power searching. We have contingency plans setup to run replication in the event we really need that extra performance.
Why not develop our own forum software?
We definitely have the community talent. I was overwhelmed with all of the responses and I even had built out a spreadsheet of people/skills. We would have had the ability to make a rocking forum software, but it would have taken a while. Developing our own was always our "last ditch effort."
What's next?
The development of the new forums is already underway. Our own Erika Greco will be minting a new design to make the forums look more like the new mainsite design. The goal is to have a beta of the forums available for you guys to play with before PAX East. We aren't looking to pull a Digg here, so we will be looking for feedback early in the process.
As always, I'll be around to answer questions.
UPDATE:
vBulletin is dead, long live Vanilla
After looking at the software solutions out there we have decided to run Vanilla Forums. Vanilla Forums is an open source project written in PHP backed with a MySQL database server. The core developers of the project formed a a startup company to provide a variety of services (including hosting).
Why Vanilla?
I'll make a longer post about this in the future. In short, they "get" forums. When we approached different vendors they were the only ones that asked the right questions. "What games do you guys play?" "How do you deal with spam?" "How do you deal with trolling?"
From a code perspective, the Vanilla Forums software is built on top of a plugin architecture. This makes the code much easier to customize than vBulletin. This modularity has made it pretty easy to extend Vanilla to include the community features that we have come to rely on: reporting posts, marking posts as awesome, infractions and jails, spam control, etc.
From a management perspective, the forums have this knack of crashing right before big events (Child's Play/PAX/etc). This large crash during the holiday Child's Play seasons was really poorly timed. Obviously I want to make sure the forumers are taken care of but I also have obligations to other readers as well (child's play donors, store customers, etc). The Vanilla Forums guys will manage the day-to-day technical bits powering the forums for us, patching software, tuning MySQL, taking backups, etc. We will still be involved but at the end of the day the Vanilla guys will be the ones "on call" for our forums.
Wait, I thought MySQL is the devil's database! Why aren't we switching? What about searching?
I've been working with the guys over at Vanilla to make MySQL work for us. This includes simple things like using InnoDB to reduce lock contention and more complex changes like using Sphinx to power searching. We have contingency plans setup to run replication in the event we really need that extra performance.
Why not develop our own forum software?
We definitely have the community talent. I was overwhelmed with all of the responses and I even had built out a spreadsheet of people/skills. We would have had the ability to make a rocking forum software, but it would have taken a while. Developing our own was always our "last ditch effort."
What's next?
The development of the new forums is already underway. Our own Erika Greco will be minting a new design to make the forums look more like the new mainsite design. The goal is to have a beta of the forums available for you guys to play with before PAX East. We aren't looking to pull a Digg here, so we will be looking for feedback early in the process.
As always, I'll be around to answer questions.
UPDATE:
Älphämönkëy wrote: »Sooner than I thought. For some reason I'm used to "new update announced! Look for it in 8-10 months!" so hearing 'next week' at a latest is refreshing. And with PAX just around the corner, too.
I'm going to revise my statement. As much as I would love to have a public beta before PAX East, I'm only giving it a 40% chance. The more likely scenario is that I will open it up to moderators to poke around first. Opening to the public really depends on how confident we are in the new forums and how smooth of a tech setup we have at PAX East.
In a worst case scenario, we are still looking at a public beta sometime in the next two weeks.
Älphämönkëy on
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And I guess the vanilla folks are ok too.
I think I am all terribly excited now.
Does that mean you nailed down hosting? Are they doing it, or is it in the cloud or what?
Us developers can still help out with making any plugins required!
I've liked the current PA forum "look", myself.
Indeed!
We are using a cloud hosting provider called Linode. Amazon's EC2 was priced pretty weird (reserved instances, etc) and Rackspace wouldn't play ball with us
Linode's IO performance seems to be reasonably fast and they are committed to working with us. Once we are further along in the process, I'll write up another post about how we decided to choose instance sizes.
Exactly. I don't imagine there will be a ton of user submitted plugins, but it would be fun to make little things for April Fools and the like.
These times they are a-chaaaaaaaaangin:whistle:
Just give the new theme a shot. I imagine that the colors will be similar to the store
Could you not also support user-defined themes?
Also: http://www.google.com/search?q=linode+site:http://news.ycombinator.com
I was also pondering setting up a forum to go with my site, and Vanilla has a solid endorsement. :rotate:
Off-the-cuff list of things would be cool to have:
The 100-page restriction has an effect on thread content, too - ensuring that any content in top threads is always somewhat fresh. The technical problems that caused the restriction might be gone, of course, but whether 300+ page threads with an OP written last year are really desirable is another thing.
I don't like user-defined themes from a maintenance or design perspective. Sorry
I don't generally use them personally, so no skin off my back
We already use Github to track our sites. I need to figure out a way to sanitize the code a bit (IP, authentication, etc) but I think that seems very reasonable.
Don't be too quick to congratulate him; he still uses zeroes to pad his numbers, like the drunken bum that he is. :x
Gotcha, alpha.
Subforums are absolutely supported by Vanilla
Spoiler & Quote tags: That seems reasonable, but not something I'd have time to write before launch. Would you be willing to write this modification.
Tables: Interesting. I'd need to think more on it.
Searching will be on from day one on the new forums. Searching will never return on the current forums.
Sorry.
"It's called padding and it's illegal."
Only if you get caught.
e: or we could import them but leave them untranslated from bbcode, at least initially. Hm.
The forums probably don't need a lot of space. It's almost completely text aside from the odd occasion when Tube uploads something.
Pretty sure that happened in the past. If you look back far enough you can find posts with different spoiler syntax.
As for quote I think you guys may be talking cross-purposes, though I haven't looked at Vanilla yet.
I'm sorry, that was confusing. I'm going to port spoilers and quotes as they stand now, I won't be supporting the fancy javascript enhancements.
We easily fall under their storage limit. The DB sits around 20GB, and we can pool resources across instances. The real limitation is software load balancing.
ooo. I use linode too!
How much of that is uploaded avatars and signatures? That seems like something that would grow slowly.
13 yotta-nybbles per fortnight.
It is almost completely text, but there is a lot of text. But I see alpha answered the question anyway.
Now you're just making numbers up.
Describe it in hellas.
Text is tiny
Oh, maybe an additional 20GB. I'm looking at an 8GB and 3-4 2GB instances. Space pooling makes this a non-issue. Worst case I can offload the file content to a CDN or somesuch.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=13+yottanibbles+%2F+fortnight
Okay, assuming that each character you see on the forum is ASCII and not Unicode we can assume that each post is around just, say, 50-100 bytes of text. 100 bytes seems low to me - between SE++, D/D, and G&T that's about 1.3 GB right there. Since alpha said the DB size is 20 GB, I'm guessing my, er, guess is on the low end because even including uploaded avatars and signature images I didn't account for any overhead in my estimate (like formatting).
So, like I said, these here forums have a lot of text.
!!!!
(hooray for new forum software)
Any chance this might eventually make the forums a little more mobile device friendly too?