Thanks for making Nth available again HG.
I hope my very blunt reply as my very 1st post here will not bring any offense...it is just my own POV, expressed to the best of my ability.
The original forum was a great resource with loads of helpful info that could be used as a highly valuable reference.
Now that it is gone, that is lost, which saddens me greatly.
In the past - when other forums have made such changes some admins have also allowed access to their 'old' forum in a read-only mode with searching enabled so that members would be able to find info that remained important to them;
If that could be done here it would be very helpful for folks like myself who have gotten great solutions for problems from other members who had helpful info they shared.
This new format with all its cutesy stuff is more aimed at the social media crowd, which this member avoids as much as humanly possible - and its editor is rather insipid - lacking options for text colours, underlining and text size - which are valuable in making verbal-only exchanges clear and FAR better (IMO) than anything which silly emojis can ever do.
The original forum was a wonderful place to gather again after the demise of RP, and having watched this new place for several days before having to re-join, it seems to be in a wait state - with very few posts.
Hopefully most of the good folks from before will also opt to re-join here.
For the old forum content, I'll see what I can do. But as I mentioned in the announcement, restoring the posts (even in read-only) is a non-trivial effort.
Also, for additional context, the old forum software was and continues to be a security concern (at least in my opinion), since it relies on components that are simply outdated and not maintainable. I did the best I could to keep the whole website secure, but there's only so much I was able to do to mitigate risks. For example, the most recent change I implemented on the old system was an overhaul of user profiles and private messaging. That change was not necessarily meant to add or improve functionality. Rather, it was primarily to address security concerns. And even after the update, the whole system still wasn't as unified as it should have been nor was it very well-supported by active development.
I'll take a look at the editor to see if there's anything that can be improved. For me personally, I'm a big fan of markdown, so I don't find it very limiting. Markdown doesn't support underlining or coloring text though. And for resizing text, that's the job of header styles (header1, header2...).
One other thing to consider about the editor is that it supports markdown and bbcode as well, I believe. You need to know how to write the mark up for either though, since not all formatting options are available via toolbar button.
But anyway, I'll take a look to see how this can be improved. Thanks again for bringing up these points and please keep the feedback coming!
Ok, I just checked and it looks like BBCode is not supported by default in the forum, but it should be something I can add in soon. (Discourse BBCode - plugin - Discourse Meta)
Also, as I already mentioned, this won't give you easy toolbar formatting buttons, like a "rich" text (WYSIWYG) editor. But BBCode will allow for more formatting options, like text color, size, etc. Once I add this support, additional formatting will be available via BBCode markup tags. For example: [color=#381]Text to color[/color]
And of course, I expect sometime soon for someone to figure out what my old nick was at the 'old' forum (if'n it ain't already obvious !!)
Aside of that - @HG:
If the prior s/w is up, but with ALL functions disabled/hidden so that ONLY viewing & searching are enabled - could that be possible minus very much effort ??
I know that other forum s/w (i.e. phpBB) can be set up with very strict controls.
It depends on how it's done. The easiest would be to simply run two servers, one for the old forum (in read-only) and one for the new. Although that'd be the easiest, it'd be my least preferred approach. For one, it'd require me to pay for two servers. Operating this new server already cost me double or triple what I was previously paying for the old server. A Discourse forum is simply more resource intensive, which is why I'd avoided making the switch in the past. But, with that said, it's not like it costs an outrageous amount of money. It's effectively the same as what I pay Netflix every month, even though only my spouse seems to benefit from it.. but I digress. As you all know, one reason this community even exists is because we're all basically cheap...umm, I mean frugal. And, as you all may have guessed, this website doesn't generate any revenue.
The second reason I'm reluctant to run both servers is because, as I've mentioned, the old system has security vulnerabilities, simply based on its outdated tech stack.
The best option, if I find enough time to do it, is to actually import all the data from the old forum to this new one. I know (from prior experience with ETL) that doing that correctly is going to be a challenge. But I might take a preliminary look into it in the next week or so.
The other not great, but possibly acceptable solution would be for me to figure out a way to host both old and new forums on a single server. That also would take some work, considering the old forum uses a completely different (possibly incompatible) tech stack than the new server.
Either way, I'll explore some of these options and we'll see what I can come up with. In the meantime, I hope everyone enjoys their weekend! Oh, and remember to file your taxes!
Thanks for the offer @One! I'm looking into a data import option now though, so I may be able to maintain a single server for both old and new forum content. I just posted a comment about this in the announcement thread.
