[The Starport News]Server Switch & Site Direction

NeXoSE

Well, you guys obviously knowing much better than me about the back of this web site.

On the other hand….

I used to run a small Chinese comunity long before, which share same topic with spacesimcentral.com. And it’s larger than spacesimcentral.com in amount of post & replies. (But quality is low I have to say)

We don’t have staffs at that time, only moderators who also contribute contents like MODs and Tips. But most contents is contributed by users.

I’m not saying the community is healthy, but it shows that web site run by user generated content is workable (Technically, this web site is mostly UGC’ed too). So you may no need that many staffs you expected.

Of course, it will be a quality issue but I think it could be resolved by appropriate community management. (You have to discover it yourself)

Even you need to post news and keep track updates by yourselfs, it’s just cost few hours every week. (Writing news is not rock science, not in this topic)

And … well, Xoops sucks. Article is difficult to categorize and read, download is not easy to use, only thing that relatively useable is the forum…
Lot of good web application come out those years: Wordpress is good one and not just a blog, and Forum application like VanillaForums, esoTalk, Discourse (SEO may sucks), Flarum (SEO sucks), every each one is far better than PHPBB.
Consider to move to another application if you want to change direction of this website maybe?

Fenris_Wolf

I know i’ve been absent from the FL community for a number of years now, so my opinions on TSP’s direction maybe of little value (it was quite a relief seeing that it was still online), but IMO branching off into other related games could be a good thing. As NeXoSE said, alot of news and such will be generated by users, and some of the more worthy may even make for suitable staff. A influx of new users from other gaming communities may even help revitalize FL a bit, when they see the large amount of content here and get that nostalgia feeling. However, it will probably take a substantial push to get the momentum going. Of course the focus should probably remain on FL, as the information located here really is quite extensive and most of it is not available anywhere else.

FriendlyFire

I have serious doubts we’d have any kind of influx. Why would people come here? We have no unique twist, no particular tie to any of those other games people would like to see us cover as well.

It’s a miracle the site still exists, what with barely any active admin and severely outdated software which runs on duct tape and hopes.

Vital

SC should be covered imho, as the poll suggests.

w0dk4

NeXoSE wrote:

And …… well, Xoops sucks. Article is difficult to categorize and read, download is not easy to use, only thing that relatively useable is the forum…
Lot of good web application come out those years: Wordpress is good one and not just a blog, and Forum application like VanillaForums, esoTalk, Discourse (SEO may sucks), Flarum (SEO sucks), every each one is far better than PHPBB.
Consider to move to another application if you want to change direction of this website maybe?

This is good point and I think its a good mid-term goal to ditch Xoops completely and replace it i.e. with a vanilla forum. We can still have the Wiki and the Forge as seperate entities of the site, the only valuable thing we’d lose is the downloads module but that is crap anyways… I’m not sure if there are any good download database solutions out there though.

? Offline

“vanilla forum” - mybb please

w0dk4

I will move the server in approximately 7 to 10 hours after this post. The whole site including forge and SVN will be down.

Thaddeus

Very good. Good luck!

w0dk4

And it’s back up! Sorry, I ran into some networking issues but all resolved now. As usual, if something is broken, post here so I can fix it!

Also, seems like there may be some session issues. Just logout and login again to fix it.

Dromedary

Seems to me to be quicker than the old site, which is obviously a good thing

NeXoSE

Yeah, I conform it feels little bit faster than the old server, but I think it’s because Cloudflare node is changed ….

And, maybe … enable SSL support that provided by Cloudflare? https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl

EDIT:
Yeah, the node is definitely changed … to some where not belongs to Cloudflare.

AND:
The HTTPS page gives me a ObenVbN login…

HunterKiller

If I’m on the new site as of this post, it seems to function well. Also, had some $ left over from last month, something rare of late so, I tossed them this way.

Thanks for keeping the site running, w0dk4.

w0dk4

Thanks HK! One month already covered

NeXoSE

I will try to make a donation when I finished my current project and got a new job.

Keep it up!

__AXE__

Make it for both

? Offline

Checked vanilla forums with wordpress and mybb with wordpress - both are good but integraton better with vanilla. Vanilla have good plugins and Q&A like structure

But in my opinion vanilla better for business and mybb for gaming

NeXoSE

HeIIoween wrote:
mybb

Well, since this topic is come to my field (I’m a newbie web developer), I couldn’t support you at this point.

Take look those Star counts (On GitHub), It’s obvious vanilla forums gets more interest from people…

But I don’t like either of it, I make my own one if I had to.

? Offline

Imagine that i am forum user and not web devel.
I just want to communicate as usually.
Ofcourse it is not about me but about abstract user.
Sure we may use any forum software as IT-related people.
But how about regular players??

For the support of site, hosting, etc we need more ppl.
This forum for a long time still stays devel oriented.
Who may help - only regular players because you may count active devels by your fingers ;(
What we may do:

to make more user friendly site
to post more intresting content
So unstable and supernew engines and forums immediately disappear. But when it be superhuge community with not only devs then will be no where to go for regular users (haha) - only then we may think about $$$ engines or non familiar forum/site software

Personally i prefer http://alternativeto.net/ and to check myself My ego tells me that mybb is simple and stupid and it works instead of vanilla at SC that is overloaded

FriendlyFire

I’ve already investigated both MyBB and Vanilla. Vanilla feels extremely barebones and limited compared to even the shit that is Xoops’ built-in forums we’re using right now. If I recall correctly you can’t even make subforums by default.

MyBB is essentially phpBB with another dev team. phpBB would also work, especially if they can release 3.2 soon, since it’s a fairly massive overhaul.

If we had unlimited money, XenForo would be the way to go, but it’s rather expensive and its ecosystem is also largely paid-for, so gettng the modules we’d need would run us up into the hundreds of dollars.

NeXoSE

@HeIIoween

Maybe it’s my bad English make you misunderstood my point … It’s always flickering so …

There is no difference between IT-related and regular people, in fact, IT-related people is regular people too (I’m a human, what you are thinking there ) …

I rather believe IT guy had higher UX requirement than others, because they use too many software. However …

@FriendlyFire

I know that you want now.

Yes, I tried myBB. It’s appears more function rich. But after I checked the code, I can’t say it’s a maintainable choice. So as phpBB. (It’s procedure-oriented)

XenForo is not the good way, I rather pay for IPB or vBulletin.

I also tried the esoTalk, but now I think it’s too light for this task. Vanilla forums has suck code style …

Well, looks essentially I don’t actually know what forum software is good, they all suck for me, just some light-weight applications less suck …