I've been working on a forum recently (past 3-4 months I would guess) on and off, and I have a few questions I want to ask here to help me decide on a few things.
1) Since the forum will be "tree-ed" would it be logical to allow deletion of posts?
2) What are some things you would like included?
3) What are some of the biggest gripes you have about phpBB/IPB/[some other popular board]?
I plan on it being modular (with a comprehensive API for ease-of-use), themed, 100% HTML/CSS valid, JS-free, 100% Python backend.
Some of the features I have mapped out already:
--Archives for programs
--Links section
--News integration (posting a news article creates a corresponding topic in the forum)
--Most of the features phpBB has
I think the biggest complaint any of us have is the lack of security from bots...
tifreak8x wrote:
I think the biggest complaint any of us have is the lack of security from bots...
I have measures against it already set up. Board administrators can add their own registration images as they see fit. So instead of words to copy back, the image can have a question and then the user types in an answer. It wouldn't be hard to use .htaccess to write a script and have it dynamically create images as phpBB does.
I third Dan and Thomas. I'd say one of my gripes about phpBB is the lack of subsubfora (ie, nesting within subfora) without mods. IPB provides it, and I'd like that kind of native functionality in a board of the quality of phpBB. Is this project going to be opensource?
Yes, unlimited nested fora are permitted natively. And yes, it is going to be open source as well. I even have expanded the PM inbox to have nested folders and such. I can't really keep it closed-source, since Python is interpreted and there's no other feasible way to distribute a forum
. I also will allow, since the forum is threaded with posts, locking of posts and such so that entire topics aren't caught up. Oh, and should I break the topics into pages since it's threaded?
I think splitting it into pages would be an excellent idea, cf. ticalc.org. Do you have a beta of this up anywhere yet?
No, I can't get mod_python to work on Windows at all, and I'm rarely in Linux, where CGI takes care of most of it, but still chokes on some things (like DB connections), so the code is all concept and should work.
The problem with splitting into pages is that the posts are displayed recursively. I think I may have a way to determine how it is decided, but it would take some tweaking, and the number of pages would be hard to count, so it would just be "<< prev next >>" unless I can think of a way to count the right way...
Sure, that would work. You would have to recursively count the number of posts under each toplevel reply.... hmmm. Oh, and you need some new news on your site frontpage.
No one visits my site anyway. The only activity has been bots that register on the forum.
Yes, the counting is easy, but counting the total number of pages that are in the topic is the problem.
Oh, and what BBCode would you like to see added? I have checklists, codeboxes, spoilers, and the typical stuff already in.
kirb wrote:
No, I can't get mod_python to work on Windows at all, and I'm rarely in Linux, where CGI takes care of most of it, but still chokes on some things (like DB connections), so the code is all concept and should work.
The problem with splitting into pages is that the posts are displayed recursively. I think I may have a way to determine how it is decided, but it would take some tweaking, and the number of pages would be hard to count, so it would just be "<< prev next >>" unless I can think of a way to count the right way...
mod_python doesn't work on Windows for anyone.....however you can use CGI on Windows apache to trigger python scripts anyway. you really should get comfortable on Linux though....
I am in Linux when developing for the forum/other projects, but Civilization 4 is just too addicting...
From above: Any ideas on post deletion (due to it being threaded)?
How about an automatic formatting of /me stuff? I think that would be cool. An online/offline indicator under the avatar would be good, of course, and make it easier to add account names for services other than AIM/ICQ/MSN/IRC/YIM.
kirb wrote:
From above: Any ideas on post deletion (due to it being threaded)?
For the thread->post trees, just set a deleted post to type(None), easy enough 
(Then do an if(<post> == None): post_was_deleted_message())
Thanks Kllrnohj. I think I'll delete the post data (subject/text) then if it can't find it, it'll post the deleted message. It's using MySQL, so I can't really do a type of None at all.
Ah. Since it was in python, and you made no mention at all of mySQL, I assumed you were using Python data structures
But still, it'd be the same idea with just a message length of zero
