Are you interested in paying for a more sophisticated version of a forum/discussion?
Yes
No
0voters
Don’t get me wrong, Matt, I highly appreciate, the work you have done here and without it I wouldn’t even be able to make the following suggestion:
Should we pool some money monthly for a better forum experience? Now is the time, because we have to start somewhere anyway and it would be great to do it NOW. Maybe we would even be able to migrate the old content, which would immediately add a significant value to the new forum.
Here is some pricing listed and that is exactly, where someone with more experience could add their 0.02$: https://www.discourse.org/pricing
Which package would we need? (page views, emails etc.)
How to pool the money? As a non-profit association?
How much would how many people be willing to give? (As a new immigrant to Canada, who is severely underpaid (42k/year) by a greedy employer, I cannot give much, but I would be willing to add a monthly donation of 3-5$)
Is there even an interest to do something like that?
Other suggestions?
We can fund the forum in other ways. Right now I’m not worrying about it because I have other resources, and this is essentially piggy-backing on left over resources from other projects. This situation can last a year or so. Advertising and/or sponsorship are ways to fund it. I also have some thoughts about premium content. I don’t want to establish user donations as a model.
Discourse is selling server space/bandwidth, which is the one thing we are getting for free right now. I just want to focus on making something interesting first, because we have that flexibility. In time, when we see what we have we can worry about how to keep it going.
I’ve seen small informal organizations like this use Patreon or similar to raise money for maintenance fees. They may handle varied currencies. I’ve also heard that at some point, Patreon raised their fees and that there is a better option. I just can’t recall its name.
Another easy option is just a Donate via PayPal button on the front page, maybe elaborated on in a single post.
I second this. Most here are avoiding the sophisticated experience. I too would like a cleaner editor, but I’m also ok with plain text mailing lists (except for lack of pasting images). I do agree there are some bits and pieces that could be made better, but I browse and have used some other forums that I’m pretty sure use this same framework, they are not small.
If there were to be some pay method I like that you brought up Patreon, I’ve started supporting a couple projects that I use through that system. I think it works well enough.
I wouldn’t mind pitching in some, but I also wouldn’t mind if Matt added some advertising to help pay the bills. I can ignore ads with the best of them.
By the way, I don’t know anything about the mechanics behind it, but I belong to an aquarium forum that has unobtrusive aquarium related ads from Amazon. It’s my understanding that any time a member clicks one of those links and orders something the site owner gets a little money. matt, if you’re interested I can put you in touch with him.
I’d really love a modern alternative to a BB forum, this feels like going back in time 10 years. Jive is bad and 3DEx is an enterprise facebook, the wrong kind of modern, but I hope there are better options
You’re going to have to be more specific than that. You must be pretty young, going back 10 years isn’t that far. We could send you back to the email list and days of dial up boards if you like.
There are several styles/themes you can apply from the user control panel which change the look. I’m researching extensions that add functionality, I’ve already added a few.
Most of the modern forum software (if you can call them that) seem to have gone the minimalist approach with some mix of forum and social media stream. Even Jive tries to do that some although I skip past it and go to Content.
I think this place has a few of those. Nice mobile view, splitting/forking, it can do 2fa but I haven’t set that up (I think it would be a pain to use), I set the paging to a high number but I can set it higher, reply by email is in here.
I do wish it had tagging, indented replies, better sorting, and a few other things.
Answer validation is a mixed bag. Half of the answers marked as Correct Answers on the SW forum were incorrect, or incomplete, or didn’t really answer the question that was asked.
I tell you what. When this place starts making money, we can spend a little money on it. Until then, it’s free, and it’s just what is needed. I do search through the phpbb extensions, and have implemented a few:
Pages is something that I haven’t done anything with yet, but plan to. It’s to make static pages for announcements instead of loading down with unneeded forums.
I’ve tried a couple of things to get an event calendar in here, but it’s all been pretty clunky.
I looked at an instant messaging thing, but it took too much prime real estate - might be able to edit it.
If you’re willing to write some php extensions, we can talk!
10.000+ posts of mine have gone under with old forums, don’t worry. But no, I’m not ‘email list’ old. phpBB feels slow and looks old-fashioned. The software hasn’t really changed in the last ten years or so, while the internet grew up really fast. Stack Overflow and GitHub have great editors with live previews, code support, markdown formatting, modern emoticons, gif support, Q&A, support for wider screens, 2FA.
I am reading this to see if anyone else is having terrible experience in the new 3DEx forum crap thing.
I have issues with it that I feel are almost intolerable.
I have used forums for many years and I actually quite like this one.
It is a tried and true format that works.
The search feature works well enough to find what you seek.
It is easy to use and importantly, it is fast.
I cannot really say any of that about the new version of SW user space.
Trying to find anything specific is troublesome and the whole interface feels unintuitive.
I really do not like that I cannot open links in new tabs.. Every post MUST be opened in the same window.
I find myself frequently hitting the back button. At the speed that site loads, and the way it indicates little progress while it does is frustrating as hell.
Meh .. My 2c..
Far be it from me to defend that so-called platform, but that hasn’t been my experience. I can right-click on a link and select “Open in new Tab”, which works fine, but I usually just click on a link with my scroll wheel (one of the many things I’ve learned from gupta9665 over the years). That opens the link in another tab, but keeps me on the current tab.
Two years ago this thread was about this forum. Now it has shifted to the 3dx swymp? If you’re talking about this place, we can upgrade, but it’s going to require a chunk of change on an ongoing basis. We’ve had a few people make very generous donations, which has helped tremendously, but doesn’t really get us into the realm of what a paid “pro” forum would cost. Advertising so far has been slim, as you may have noticed, for better or worse. I’m just not an advertising magnet or salesman. Again for better or worse.
If you’re now talking about DS, only a hopeless optimist will think that there is anything salvageable there. DS is not going to be like the company SW users knew 15 years ago. The corporate philosophy is different. They’re just not that into you. If you want to work with a company that is actively interested in mainstream/midrange users, you’re going to have to go somewhere else. Some of you keep trying to save this relationship, but it’s been over for years.
