[The Starport News]Server Switch & Site Direction

Make it for both

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

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.

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

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.

@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 …

phpBB is moving away from procedural code - 3.2 is supposed to be the final switch towards fully namespaced, object-oriented setup. I’ve got MyBB running on another site and it’s very comparable to phpBB - not really better nor worse. MyBB is what Discovery uses, or at least used for a while.

XenForo is a new take on vB by the same devs, so I’d be more inclined to go for that than the now rather ancient vB or IPB. Any of those is too expensive for how little users we have though.

phpBB ftw!

or the end of DirectPlay support in Windows 11…

Why that? Please explain.

Problem with Linode and Digital Ocean is that when you need lots of storage (and we do because of the TLR download archive which is over 100GB), pricing becomes really bad. Otherwise I’d be totally in favor of switching to a small VPS like that. I use DO personally for a lot of things.

Ýou could just mail them though. I think that hagging and asking won’t hurt for special needs.

Source code? well, I don’t think so … as they said they lost it between servers.

Source? [Not the code, smartass!]

I decided that I will switch to a lower-cost server sometime next week.

Want….to…do…server…migrations…zZZZzzz

Another thing: Maybe it is worth considering trying to consult MS games to get the game on Steam? After all, I think this would remedy some problems of this site if successful, as would a lot of new users come to us and also bringing some old dudes back who got insane finding a backup copy.

Just some personal thoughts.

Bas wrote:

Another thing: Maybe it is worth considering trying to consult MS games to get the game on Steam? After all, I think this would remedy some problems of this site if successful, as would a lot of new users come to us and also bringing some old dudes back who got insane finding a backup copy.

Just some personal thoughts.

You say that like nobody’s ever thought of it before. Microsoft gives no fucks about the game.

But Flight Simulator Steamed!

FriendlyFire wrote:

You say that like nobody’s ever thought of it before. Microsoft gives no fucks about the game.

Thought? Or also done?

There are some MS games there at least;
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Microsoft Studios

Come on Bas, stop living of hopes and dreams. We tried to talk about it with them years ago through the contact we had for the game’s official website and they said they were not interested. From what we know, we’re not even sure they still have the source and there’s a good chance it’s using some unlicensed software as well.

You’d be better off working on the game and/or community than just thinking “Microsoft will save us.” No, they won’t.

Well, hopes and dreams kept Freelancer up and running for more than 12 years. What has changed?

The chances might be minimal but they are higher than not trying at all.
I know, its not my business actually and my words probably wont find any consideration but what do you have to lose?

You started to think about which direction this website is going to take in future… without much concept other than “lets chose a new forum software”… yet you turn down other ideas instantly.
Im not saying that its wrong to change the software (you just have to take care not to lose data or features while doing so) but in the end you still kept the status quo.
Its a FL modding website while there are nearly no modders left and 80% of the discussions over the past 2-3 years were about adoxas plugins/hacks. Adoxa deserves a very big thanks for that.

I think it was on the first page of this thread where it was mentioned that it is pretty hard to change the direction of a site and support other/new games. Out of experience I can only agree to such a statement.
If you try to jump on a already moving train you always risk ending on next to the track without having achieved something. Its not impossible… just a bit tricky and often requires more than just 1-2 tries.

Question is if you want to do that or if you want to focus a bit longer on what is your strength actually (FL modding).
If you are still interested in Freelancer and modding you probably should ask yourself at which point things went wrong.

For a Freelancer community there have been relative little… wait no… ill bring it to the point… during the past 14 months there has been not one Freelancer related news item here.
There have been multiple mod releases during this time… game magazines have released multiple articles about Freelancer and Freelancer mods… one magazine even had the original game on its DVD a few months back… and there was like every year the annual mod awards with nominated Freelancer mods (even that got totally ignored).

The forum software is clearly the smallest problem here…

I can understand that long term members got tired and lost the interest in FL but that should not be reason to let chances (no matter how small they are) just pass by. The times where we had such a luxury are long gone (to a degree because we didnt use chances in the past).

(I didn’t want to offend anyone… its just an observation)

Uh, don’t worry, got some other plans in my mind.

Better Social Network integration
There seems to be a site (the is a like button on the site, after all), but I couldn’t find it by a quick search. It doesn’t seem to be promoted much either (judging from an inactive member here, so please forgive me if I am seeing something wrong here).

TODO:
Create and maintain a Facebook, Twitter and possibly G+ page. Get users to follow there (more on this below), post updates regularly and integrate buttons into the website to share a news or forums topic, download, mod etc.
[Also enable some kind of auto-posting from the website whenever you create a news etc.]

Promote donations and social networks
It is nice that there are ranks on the forums, but other than that there aren’t really rewards and benefits for donating (or following FB).

TODO:
This might sound like a tough step, but can help TSP financially and in popularity. Allow people to select one or multiple rewards; these might include but not limited to;

• Getting a special icon on the forums or a personalized text/rank
• Get the chance to have a talk with an admin/mod/police from either the 'Port itself or from one cooperating server, do some missions or PvP
• Get some ingame benefit from a cooperating server (obviously, a list should be nearby for this) such as equipment, ship, credits, characters, reputation…

Hosting events on the website or gameserver
A step to bring some live to the website again, and making it…well, fresh!

TODO:

• Doing SP site events
• Doing events on a freelancer server together as a community. Might be simple PvP (tournaments? Ladder hosted on the website?), RP (not being very familiar with this one) or modded something (like the HC imba events when they were happening?), cheat imba equip of a mod to each player and doing PvP (might also give that mod some chance to get into a spotlight in the community)
• As rewards you could run with similiar things to the donations I suggested.
• I am quite confident that it is possible to organize a server for some hours in this community, considering how many admins are around here.

In any case, the events should be listed at the front page, clearly visible.

Minor buffs;

TS Server
Might be already somewhere, but put it visible on the website. Also might want to include some kind of TS viewer. I don’t want a discussion here about if TS should be used or Ventrilo or Mumble or CV, TS is probably the most used one so let’s keep it simple.

Steam Group
Again: Is there already one? If so, where is the info to it? Might be used to annouce stuff/events as well.

I hope my thoughts can be of some use here.

Well this is most if not all about Freelancer here. Barely something different. And its quite OK this way. I am coming here to get some news on developments of others, also about the modding.

Social Frameworks dont improve anything. Users have to use them, and honestly i dont like them at all - they are mostly deactivated for data protection reasons. Rewards, well forum rewards are actually good for? The only reward someone needs is to see how many posts he has and how long someone is a member. I personally dont care if you have an uber cool name or icon showing what you are. Bas you are already talking with admins here - so where is the problem. If you have the need to talk to one of them, you can send them PMs

Also this here is no game server forum. Each mod has that on its own. We had this discussion already in the past. TSP cannot offer that for certain reasons and it wouldnt be in their responsibility at all.

I prefer to come here for modding stuff. Thats what TSP should put its priority at. Or totally break and start something new. I wont visit TSP just if it becomes another game server site. Clearly news about Freelancer are lacking, but that again is not solely the fault of the admins. There is a community and moderators who could do that. Same as for the rest. If someone wants to make a global event, start it on your own or ask for help to start it. I dont see why this has to come from the TSP admin team in first place and why it should run to their expense.

Just my two cents.

may i ask what you gain by upgrading the forum software?

people can write posts before such an update
people can write posts after such an update

whats the benefit of such an update other than a few backend features that regular users wont even have access to?

Largely avoiding an eventual hack, because I don’t trust Xoops whatsoever about that.

But I personally don’t think it’s that urgent or that necessary, we’ve been running fine for quite some time. As for other mod releases, lots of mods seem to center around Discovery these days and those people often seem to ignore that there actually exists a community beyond Discovery. It’s disappointing, but there’s little to do about it. Looking at the average player numbers, it’s nonsensical to expect a large amount of activity. The game is very old and has a tiny community, and that’s perfectly fine, she’s had quite the long run and that’s no thanks to anyone but us.

I’m fine with this site being the ultimate repository of knowledge for modding and a good place to ask for modding help. Trying to be TLR would be foolhardy in a community which couldn’t sustain TLR.

probably true