Okay Sentinel, you got me. Let’s roll with discourse.
Do we need designer? I know a guy
For the reasons Sentinelrv listed I am in favor of Discourse
I’m in favor too. Although, maybe it would be more appropriate to create a separate topic for this with a poll.
Sentinel - Very slick. I like it.
i like the looks of discourse, the only problem i have with it, small things like when sharing a link it adds ?u=irritant maybe it could be disabled or something to leak less , make it more anonymous friendly, but idk… maybe im just nagging about nothing, i do like the way it works
[quote=“peerchemist, post:15, topic:3336”]Okay Sentinel, you got me. Let’s roll with discourse.
Do we need designer? I know a guy[/quote]
I’m not sure who Super3 was talking to here, but we do already have the designer who created the new peercoin.net, TheWildHorse. He would be the obvious choice to make sure the forum and website are aligned.
Alright. Will this be a bounty type project or fundraiser via Peer4commit?
I’m not exactly sure who we’re paying here yet. For web design, Super3 can pay TheWildHorse out of the peercoin.net fund. But the bigger question is about setup, maintenance and management of the forum. As Fuzzy posted here, he would need to learn the new forum software, since he doesn’t have experience with it. Will he require compensation to do this for us? I think we should pay him for all of this work, especially since he’s had to sell a lot of his Peercoin, as he said in chat last night. We can’t ask him to do all this for nothing.
There’s also the question of how exactly to port the old forum over to Discourse. In my opinion, I think the existing forum should be archived as read only. The domain name PeercoinTalk.org will continue linking to the old forum and discuss.peercoin.net or Peercoin — The Pioneer of Proof-of-Stake will be the new link. This way, all the URL’s around the internet linking to threads on this board will continue to function. We can include a link on the Discourse forum to PeercoinTalk, so anyone can read our previous history before the move. The new forum would be a reboot, with updated categories and sub-forums.
The only thing that should be ported are the existing user accounts, to prevent people needing to re-register and identity impersonation. I linked Fuzzy to this importer tool, but I’m not sure if that will work or not.
I would prefer if Super3 keep the server, but transfer the peercoin.net domain to Fuzzy. This creates a separation of powers in case something happens to one of them. Another reason is because Super3 has not been that active here for a while, although he may just be lurking. I would feel much more comfortable if both website and domain name were NOT in the control of only one person. Split that control up.
As for Primecoin, we could keep the Primecoin boards operational here until their supporters figure out what they want to do. The reason Primecoin wouldn’t be transitioning over to the new forum is because it’s being integrated into peercoin.net. Primecoin has no place on a Peercoin specific website.
I’d like to hear Fuzzy’s thoughts on all this. I haven’t heard from him since last night.
I’m not exactly sure who we’re paying here yet. For web design, Super3 can pay TheWildHorse out of the peercoin.net fund. But the bigger question is about setup, maintenance and management of the forum. As Fuzzy posted here, he would need to learn the new forum software, since he doesn’t have experience with it. Will he require compensation to do this for us? I think we should pay him for all of this work, especially since he’s had to sell a lot of his Peercoin, as he said in chat last night. We can’t ask him to do all this for nothing.
There’s also the question of how exactly to port the old forum over to Discourse. In my opinion, I think the existing forum should be archived as read only. The domain name PeercoinTalk.org will continue linking to the old forum and discuss.peercoin.net or Peercoin — The Pioneer of Proof-of-Stake will be the new link. This way, all the URL’s around the internet linking to threads on this board will continue to function. We can include a link on the Discourse forum to PeercoinTalk, so anyone can read our previous history before the move. The new forum would be a reboot, with updated categories and sub-forums.
The only thing that should be ported are the existing user accounts, to prevent people needing to re-register and identity impersonation. I linked Fuzzy to this importer tool, but I’m not sure if that will work or not.
I would prefer if Super3 keep the server, but transfer the peercoin.net domain to Fuzzy. This creates a separation of powers in case something happens to one of them. Another reason is because Super3 has not been that active here for a while, although he may just be lurking. I would feel much more comfortable if both website and domain name were NOT in the control of only one person. Split that control up.
As for Primecoin, we could keep the Primecoin boards operational here until their supporters figure out what they want to do. The reason Primecoin wouldn’t be transitioning over to the new forum is because it’s being integrated into peercoin.net. Primecoin has no place on a Peercoin specific website.
I’d like to hear Fuzzy’s thoughts on all this. I haven’t heard from him since last night.[/quote]
Hey all thanks for your input… and I love how the thread about SSL for peercointalk has turned into a forum software talk 
Regarding SSL I am having to have some verification papers sent to my home address so it will be 5 - 10 working days to sort that. The plan was to get a wildcard ssl certificate for peercointalk.org this would allow all the subdomain services setup to also run off the same ssl, so wallet.peercointalk.org and chatboxhistory.peercointalk.org etc would all be on https.
However if we are looking to run off the peercoin.net domain for the forum then the ssl would need to be for that domain. If not a wildcard ssl then the same cert would not work for the peercoin.net site and the discourse.peercoin.net but this is something to be considered.
Couple of things that need to be considered in my opinion.
-
url redirect / seo / new user confusion. - If we were to switch to discourse the old forum here could be kept on but for archive purposes and any new posting or sign up can be disabled… kinda costly if still running on current server so I would need to copy it across to the new server on peercoin.net. But we would loose a lot of reference links and articles that have been written or tweated out if we do not keep the old forum. not sure how confusing this will be for new users etc, but eventually i guess a full migration could happen with posts being rewritten if needs be that are referenced from the old forum a lot.
-
What will we port across? if we keeping a backup for the external urls, and we can not port the passwords across then I would suggest we just start a new forum up? porting with passwords PM’d to users sounds more work and for what benefits? someone could impersonate old users from the forum here but we could get that from a hacked account with me PMing passwords just seems to be asking for troule when 3000+ people.
-
Ok initially i said I would look into discourse… now u all seem sold on it. to be honest last time this discussion came up people familiar with bitcointalk know how the forum works as same format. As i said in chat the reasons why I do not like the nubits forum is that i miss topics i am interested in and its not easy to get a big long list of threads in each topic as we have here in my opinion… but this is cos i am used to SMF and not discourse I appreciate this could change with enough use of the new software. I guess my concern here is what are we really getting from the migration? it like if we drive a ford foccus or renault clio… both a fairly standard car that will get you from a to b as you need but not something that will blow people away with or let you down and break on you. which leads me to number 4
-
chatbox will not be on the forum unless custom written as far as i am aware. this also means the chatbox history i wrote from scratch will be redundant. The ads for the forum plugin i wrote will be redundant. The spam filtering and user registration requirements for posting will be lost and we will have to deal with spam or put appropriate filters in place. Basically what i’m getting at is that there is a lot of behind the scenes stuff that is tried and tested to hold up for all we have needed so far and it has not failed us yet. We will be loosing that and going back to square one essentially.
To avoid this last issue I would suggest that I familiarise myself with discourse more and run a site alongside this forum where we get everything in place and test. Part of the issue with the wiki is that again I do not know the software completely so I have to learn as we go along. As soon as the site gets spammed people see, google sees and it looks really bad very quick. Usually removing the spam takes some time, at least a day to start with to find out how to bulk remove on the platform and to put a syatem in place to try stop spammers getting through. Yet they do, the forum had 3 separate levels to stop the spammers and I expect the wiki will need tightening up and more layers added over time. Be prepared for this to happen to the peercoin discourse forum. It will need some time put into its security and setup.
But basically all of this is possible and do-able but I would have to say that this is far beyond the normal relms of maintaiining the forum and to do a proper migration I would need to dedicate a decent amount of time and this may end up being costly. As I also said in chat though I do not want to be a blocker on this and I want to do what the community wants.
Another thing…
If the forum running off peercoin.net then I would need access to that server thus breaking the rule of shared responsibilities and what not. I would be concerned if the server went down we then lost both main peercoin sites, homepage and forum. Also the domain ownership would be less needed in this case if I was to maintain the discourse forum as would be more important to have server access for setting up and backups etc.
I do feel the primecoin users are being sidelined here… there is no talk of them migrating with us, even more the other way, just feels bad as not even a vote on this just chat happening in a thread that has now gone off topic.
Ok and on that note I will leave it open to move this discussion to a new thread please and keep this on SSL certificate for the current forum.
Fuzzybear
Fuzzy’s right. We need to be careful about seeking change merely for the sake of change.
Yes. This would be an extreme amount of work and not accomplish much. My vote is on building on what we have.
This is about more than just changing because we felt like it. Integrating the forum with the main website draws more traffic to all the website content that we spent so much time on when redesigning peercoin.net. New members on the forum (through the main website navigation) will be able to learn about Peercoin, watch informative videos, find and download our wallets, etc… We’ll also be adding more pages to the website, like our newsletter and a resources or tools page. Right now all that important information is completely separate from the forum and peercoin.net suffers low traffic, since there’s never really a reason to return to the site. Merging forum and website will combine that traffic and enable newcomers to be exposed to all the content we’ve created and organized for them.
We can’t merge the website and smf though. They just don’t go together visually. Smf works as intended, but it’s visually outdated and lacking of modern features which increase user engagement, some of which I’ve mentioned like notifications, liking posts, live posting and editing, assistant or tip bots that work inside the forum and much more that can be created. As I’ve shown in my concept image, discourse merges seamlessly with peercoin.net in a visual way. I believe it will also provide the community a psychological boost of energy, the feeling that we’re moving toward something great. Over the past several months I’ve been getting this stagnating feeling when coming to this forum and I don’t like it. In addition to the benefits mentioned above, everything will feel fresh and it may alter the perception around the crypto community that Peercoin is stagnating and falling apart. It will require more focused development to sustain that perception, but a nice fresh new forum shouldn’t hurt.
As mentioned above, what we currently have does not fit visually with peercoin.net and is increasingly becoming outdated technology when much better options exist.
Yes, this is why I suggested keeping the old forum visible and archived, so links spread throughout the internet on other websites will still link back to their appropriate places. All these links continue to bring people to our forum and Peercoin. Any important threads or ones that are still being actively used can be reposted on the new forum, for example important sticky threads. As for potential confusion, I think all we need to do is add something to the header of the forum (where it will be visible from every page of the forum) that tells everyone that we’ve moved. It needs to be clear and it needs to stand out so everyone will see it. It also needs to provide a link to the new forum. Maybe we can alter the image banner header with a message.
I think you’re right here and maybe I’m exaggerating the potential for impersonation. The Nu forum started from scratch and many of our members also post there. They haven’t seemed to run into any problems yet with this, so maybe starting with a fresh forum is the best way to go and requiring people to re-register. This will save us all the work with porting accounts and so on. If a well known member reports that their user name has been taken by somebody else, we can look into it to determine if it’s true.
As to what we’re getting out of the migration, I replied to this in my first response of this post, plus the other benefits I mentioned in my post with the concept image in it. As for your hesitation with using the NuBits forum, there’s nothing I can really say here except that I was hesitant about the discourse software as well when I was first invited to the Nu forum (pre-release). It was new and different, but after starting to use it and relying on some of the features like notifications or user mentions, I love it. Coming back to this forum after experiencing discourse…it just feels stale and outdated. I’m not sure if your mind will change as mine did, but I think you should at least give it a chance.
This is one of the disadvantages of moving, but I’m at least willing to deal with the loss. Fortunately, it looks like I won’t have to, as CoinGame from the Nu team is working on something in his spare time that will add IRC chat functionality. As I said above, this is one of the benefits of switching to discourse, the ability to share resources and coded features between the two communities. Check it out…
https://discuss.nubits.com/t/community-chat/1229/12?u=sentinelrv
[quote=“FuzzyBear, post:23, topic:3336”]The ads for the forum plugin i wrote will be redundant. The spam filtering and user registration requirements for posting will be lost and we will have to deal with spam or put appropriate filters in place. Basically what i’m getting at is that there is a lot of behind the scenes stuff that is tried and tested to hold up for all we have needed so far and it has not failed us yet. We will be loosing that and going back to square one essentially.
To avoid this last issue I would suggest that I familiarise myself with discourse more and run a site alongside this forum where we get everything in place and test. Part of the issue with the wiki is that again I do not know the software completely so I have to learn as we go along. As soon as the site gets spammed people see, google sees and it looks really bad very quick. Usually removing the spam takes some time, at least a day to start with to find out how to bulk remove on the platform and to put a syatem in place to try stop spammers getting through. Yet they do, the forum had 3 separate levels to stop the spammers and I expect the wiki will need tightening up and more layers added over time. Be prepared for this to happen to the peercoin discourse forum. It will need some time put into its security and setup.
But basically all of this is possible and do-able but I would have to say that this is far beyond the normal relms of maintaiining the forum and to do a proper migration I would need to dedicate a decent amount of time and this may end up being costly. As I also said in chat though I do not want to be a blocker on this and I want to do what the community wants.[/quote]
This seems like the most difficult part, familiarizing yourself with the software, ensuring security and finding systems to prevent spam. I understand this part can be time consuming, which is why I don’t believe you should be doing this for us for free. Please feel free to think about how much you think this should cost, and we’ll see if we can get the funds together to pay you. It’s only fair in my opinion.
Another important thing here is that you’re not alone in this. The Nu team is here to help you around the software if necessary. I’m sure Ben would take the time to help answer your questions and explain the systems they’ve put in place to minimize spam. I honestly haven’t seen spam on their forum yet, so they must have done something. Don’t feel you need to do it all on your own when we have a whole team available that is experienced in the same software. I don’t see why they wouldn’t help when they have some spare time.
[quote=“FuzzyBear, post:23, topic:3336”]Another thing…
If the forum running off peercoin.net then I would need access to that server thus breaking the rule of shared responsibilities and what not. I would be concerned if the server went down we then lost both main peercoin sites, homepage and forum. Also the domain ownership would be less needed in this case if I was to maintain the discourse forum as would be more important to have server access for setting up and backups etc.[/quote]
I’m not sure of the technical details behind this. If you say it’s more important for you to have server access, then I trust your judgement. I’m sure this is a discussion that Super3 will need to be involved in. Should I email him to check this thread out? Also, should we have more trusted people that have access, such as Ben? It’s important that the website and forum can be restored in case of failure, and if somebody with access goes missing, it’s good to have somebody else to rely on. For example, remember when you were absent for a while and we were trying to get in touch with you the whole time so we could send out a newsletter about something? If a couple trusted people have access as well and have backups, we shouldn’t have that problem.
I understand what you mean here, but why would Primecoin have a forum board on peercoin.net? It’s a Peercoin specific website, so it doesn’t belong. Primecoin supporters would still have the smf forum to discuss things. If their community became larger and motivated enough, they can do the same thing and integrate with http://primecoin.io/, but I don’t think Peercoin supporters should be obligated to pay for this to happen. They need to work these things out on their own and they’ll have smf until they make their decision.
I posted this in the previous thread about forum software, so there might be some redundancy to what was said previously here.
Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse about spam. Discourse has a trust level system to assist as well.
Using Discourse without JavaScript doesn’t completely kill it, but does indeed cripple it badly. We are creating something futuristic here, and NuBits seems to thrive despite the fact. I would of course prefer to not leave anyone behind.
How many people are really using software too outdated without recourse? These are the requirements:
Discourse is a JavaScript application designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum web browser requirements are high:[ul][li]Internet Explorer 10+[/li]
[li]Google Chrome 24+[/li]
[li]Firefox 14+[/li]
[li]Safari 5.1+[/li][/ul]We do officially support Internet Explorer 9, but some functionality will be unavoidably broken.
[ul][li]Mobile Safari, iOS 6+[/li]
[li]Mobile Chrome, Android 4.1+[/li]
[li]Mobile IE, Windows Phone 8 or later[/li][/ul]
— Discourse FAQ
Discourse is designed for mobile from start. While SMF works on mobile, it’s far from ideal. Tapatalk might be an argument for some, but how many people will install an app to use a forum? One could also argue the notices for it are disrupting for new users, but I’m sure that can be disabled if desired.
Initially I was admittedly a little intimidated by Discourse, but it really is a wonderful software after having familiarised with it. I am not as enthusiastic about XenForo anymore. I’m happy many of you are excited over the Discourse example! I think it’s beautiful. 
The chatbox is a popular feature that we wouldn’t want to lose. CoinGame says he’s working on IRC integration for the NuBits Discourse or site. I hope it turns out great, because I would love to have the IRC channel linked.
While writing this I miss the Discourse editor that displays realtime what my post will look like. SMF resets the size of the edit box after each preview. Bolding/italics shortcuts only work one-way in SMF. Experimenting with font sizes is a major hassle. You can’t browse while composing. There’s a whole bunch of improvements with Discourse that may not be obvious at first glance.
About the user accounts, the concern is that without migrating them people may impersonate others and it would be difficult to know who is who.
I want to keep the users, but leave the posts archived on PeercoinTalk. The reason is that it would likely be messy to fit them into the new software even if there are scripts to export and import. An obvious notice would be displayed on PeercoinTalk that we’ve moved, with a link and explanation for how to proceed with their new account. There’s a script for migration that should be useful for account credential migration, but needs some modification. The idea is to generate new passwords and deliver them in private messages to each corresponding user here.
I love how Sentinelrv integrated the Peercoin.net menu into Discourse. Someone would have to create the CSS and make sure it doesn’t break the mobile view.
Will have to go attend other matters now, cheers!
I suggest reading about Discourse and trying it out.
Continued:
Another screenshot with colorscheme changes. Made the heart golden. It shows how the Peercoin logo appears when scrolling down. I thought it gives a good balance of graphics so we don’t plaster the coin everywhere.
I’d like to reiterate that nothing is set in stone, but I really believe a move to Discourse is in our best interests.
Thanks to the chatbox I’ve come into contact with some of the people here, who I would otherwise not have contact with. Indeed, I think the chatbox is very important. Especially since the community is to small.
re-reading this thread and the original discussion a year ago Cryptoblog - notícias sobre bitcoin e criptomoedas! about the forum software I am failing to see what has changed technically since the original discussion which was one main point for keeping SMF?
As Jooize pointed out the min requirements for Discourse are much higher that SMF. Currently SMF works on my android mobile through taptalk but I would not be able to run the discourse site
Comparison of forum software threw up these articles http://www.quora.com/How-does-discourse-org-compare-to-simplemachines-org-and-Vanilla-Forums for me the interesting 2 quotes were:
Vanilla and SMF are written in PHP. Discourse is Ruby on Rails. This limits your choice of hosts
Many forum communities are doing just fine on the old platforms
Main difference listed here is the idea of Threading Flat (SMF) vs. threaded (Discourse)
Can you clearly define your Pro’s for Discourse please because looking at it from my perspective it is “features” you are after and css styling / themes for the forum that make it look like it has true peercoin branding.
what we currently have does not fit visually with peercoin.netThis is a case of a Theme here for SMF, If we wanted our own custom theme created we could develope one ourselves or ask someone in the SMF community to help but I think I / we could create what we need with a little time.
and is increasingly becoming outdated technology when much better options existYou seem quite convinced that SMF is outdated? and that discourse is "better". Technically they are very similar as the wiki article shows besides the idea of flat over threading.. it has been discussed here http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=255510.0 and they say that yes to change SMF to a threaded forum would take far too much change to the core codebase, but people were writing mods for it so you could view the forum in threaded layout
Both our communities share many of the same members. This means many people at PeercoinTalk are already familiar with Discourse and are currently using it.I get this as an argument for using discourse over say vanilla or other opensource software as no need to make users learn another forum software, but the original userbase here is familiar with SMF and a change to discourse for them is going to potentially put them off the site.
In fact, the Discourse forum is many times more active than PeercoinTalk. Not only is this due to the excitement Nu has generated, but because it increases user engagement and keeps people far more connected through modern features like notifications, live updating, etc...
The idea of live updating seems desirable to keep you immediately updated on new posts, and from jooize’s comments would make preview posting easier and styling your post, this is the difference between clientside and serverside code (javascript is clientside, php serverside) its something I can look into for SMF to see if there is a better interface, it was asked in the past for the homepage to update at the bottom automatically when a new post is posted in the forum, so i’ll see what I can find on this. Agreed I can see live updating being a pro, currently on discourse not on SMF but might be an addon.
I can see the desire to drive more traffic to peercoin.net but I think to migrate the forum to drive up the traffic would be a weak marketing move and we can do better! You have returning users to peercointalk as there is new content and information being posted here, setting this domain as an archive with no new posts will slowly kill off the seo and domain spots in search results. Until the new forum has as much relevant and seo content it will not be replacing the losses from peercointalk. If you want more traffic to peercoin.net i would suggest setting up something else like a blog, news articles etc the dogecoin community just launched their own newspaper style info board that scans tweats for #suchandsuch and posts them on the site so new content being generated that pulls users back.
I know of 2 sites that I was contacted about that wanted to get an RSS feed or JSON feed from peercointalk so they could cross post on their forum. Again another consideration for the marketing damage by essentially shutting down peercointalk domain for the sake of driving users to peercoin.net
I’m interested to see the old tablets and devices that people still have and use like [member=28779]Cybnate[/member] mentioned here Cryptoblog - notícias sobre bitcoin e criptomoedas! What is commercially available in the West is not what everyone is running off and I think we would be cutting out a large userbase by setting the entry bar to high on something as simple as a forum
one of the pro’s outlined for discourse would be that we could drawn on the Nubits community for technical help with the forum and sharing apps written for the forum. Discourse is a Ruby platform and coded software, this means simply that you need a ruby dev and you will have issues not running the forum on linux os. I am not a ruby dev, and I am happy on a linux server but not an expert, if something went wrong I would realistically have less knowledge on how to fix it and would be going off trial and error and looking for help from users. So it would be a one way flow here we would only gain what the nubits team develops, unless the community wants to pay me to train to be a ruby developer? but there is better use of your money. For me I would like to see a chatbox developed on discourse and full archive like we have on chatboxhistory.peercointalk.org before we consider the migration. Intergration with freenode is all well and good but do you have an archive of that? Sunny does not like freenode as less annonymous right? hence why he liked the chatbox here, able to access via Tor. We MUST consider these things seriously of who is our userbase and not just be driven by something new and shiny that has been there to play with for the last 6 months to a year through Nubits forum.
You like the @mention on discourse?? Ok I have just implemented this feature on SMF [member=890]Sentinelrv[/member] [member=28779]Cybnate[/member] I assume this is how the discourse feature works? You can set the notifications to send you an email if you get an @mention I think there is a lot about SMF that we have overlooked or never implemented. The idea of tipping each other through the forum would be awesome and the bitcoin community wanted to see it on bitcointalk. So I understand you can tip on the Nubits forum, why can we not hire them to develop a tipping system here on SMF? then we could actually give this back to the bitcointalk community. I think that would get us noticed just a bit and be the best marketing by attracting new users and old bitcoiners to the Peercoin community if we develop SMF tipping package to be implemented on bitcointalk?
Fuzzybear
If this were discourse, I’d be able to “like” @FuzzyBear’s post.
But I can take the time and write it. 
Btw. I’m writing this post on my mobile using tapatalk. Using tapatalk on mobile is waaaaay more convenient than using discourse on mobile - at least if you don’t have a top-notch mobile (it might be different then, I dunno)…
I compeletely agree to @FuzzyBear’s post.
Discourse is cool, new and works very well.
But this SMF here customized by @FuzzyBear doesn’t need to hide!
[quote=“jooize, post:27, topic:3336”]Another screenshot with colorscheme changes. Made the heart golden. It shows how the Peercoin logo appears when scrolling down. I thought it gives a good balance of graphics so we don’t plaster the coin everywhere.
I’d like to reiterate that nothing is set in stone, but I really believe a move to Discourse is in our best interests.[/quote]
This looks great with the green text, buttons and white background. I tried to make the same thing last night, but ran out of time. Something still looks a little off though. The lighter color buttons at the bottom, can they be made a lighter gray color instead? It would fit better with Peercoin’s color theme. The horizontal line right above that would need to change color as well.
is a dark theme is possible too? for people that want to save their screen/eyes from burning
and can we put this low on the priority list for now? there are some other things going on (exchanges falling, opensource motion, idk, other stuff), if the transition goes wrong for some reason we end up with some time without a forum (worst case), now you can like or dislike this forum, at least it works, and when things have calmed down (if ever?), maybe it is better to change things like these
Thanks Sentinelrv! How about this?
.btn { background-color: #EAEFEB; }
[hr]
Although I don’t expect it, I would like to express my willingness to operate the hosting. FuzzyBear has obviously done a great job with PeercoinTalk and has built up recognition and trust, which I have not. Nevertheless I want to suggest myself if it’d come to be relevant.
I’m strict with security, rarely unavailable longer than a week, and consider myself fairly competent. It’s difficult to prove oneself without much to show though. I’ll gladly describe the steps I take to secure my systems and my experience in them, but don’t want to come off as obnoxious so I won’t do that right now. I’ll admit I’m not professionally employed and would be wary of anyone making this same claim.
In either case I’m not looking to take anything over. I have a passion for this sort of installations. I don’t see myself moderating, which would remain in the hands of FuzzyBear and all the existing ones. You the community would of course have to decide if I am trustworthy enough to carry this responsibility. I’m happy as long as the job is done well.
Anyway, I’ve setup the server you see in the screenshots. Approximately the following has been done.
[ul][li]DigitalOcean 2 GB RAM, dual-core, 40 GB, 3 TB transfer, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Runs at $20/month. Scalable.[/li]
[li]Mandrill account for SMTP (email sending).[/li]
[li]SPF and DKIM records in DNS for Mandrill.[/li]
[li]webmaster@ (peercoin.net) forward necessary for some emails from providers.[/li]
[li]HTTPS/TLS (need to get new certificate for .net)[/li]
[li]Daily backups to Amazon S3.[/li]
[li]Discourse configuration and slight theming as shown.[/li][/ul]
Nothing that can’t be replicated of course. I chose to use a standard setup (as per their guide) to avoid unnecessary complications.
By the way, I note the intention to use a wildcard certificate. Consider if any of the servers are compromised the attacker could MITM people going to all of them. I’ll assume Forward Secrecy, but it might not be important for our purposes.
I hesitate and refrain to release the URL at risk of slight chaos and misunderstandings.
Back to the arguably more important matter at hand:
About the accounts again, perhaps it’s not extremely important we migrate them, but I’d like to if possible (which it is, but with how much effort?). They’d have to be handled confidentially.
The chatbox/shoutbox I agree is important, and there really should be a solution we can find for it. A theme for SMF would be a welcome improvement, but customizing this forum is I think unlikely to catch it up with Discourse, and consider the maintenance with updates.
I’m not opposed to other solutions, but Discourse is solid. I don’t see any specific hurry to have this done immediately, other than a desire for improvement. It’s unfortunate that some work performed may become obsolete, but we can’t be holding on for such reasons.
FuzzyBear: The PeercoinTalk chatbox requires JavaScript as well. If Sunny King uses the chatbox over Tor, he’d be equally daring to use Discourse.
Summed up:
[ul][li]Spam – Mitigated by Discourse and its trust level system?[/li]
[li]Redirects/SEO/confusion.[/li]
[li]RSS/JSON feeds.[/li]
[li]User account migration?[/li]
[li]Chatbox/shoutbox linked to user account, without revealing IP. CoinGame’s upcoming implementation might not satisfy this. If using IRC a bot can log to an archive.[/li]
[li]Old devices and browsers.[/li]
[li]“Change for change’s sake”[/li]
[li]“?u=irritant” (funny), I concur this should be removed and will look into it.[/li]
[li]Sentinelrv’s menu mockup made into CSS not breaking mobile.[/li]
[li]Primecoin?[/li][/ul]
Alternatives:
[ul][li]NodeBB: also JavaScript.[/li]
[li]Vanilla: not open-source.[/li]
[li]XenForo: not open-source.[/li]
[li]Simple Machines Forum (SMF): theming and customization?[/li][/ul]
Primecoin
I’m not on board with the decision to leave Primecoin behind. With Sunny King being the architect of both I consider them related, and when he develops there may be discussions with overlap where it would complicate linking them together if the boards are separated. Say he implements sidechains in Primecoin and later want to talk about it for Peercoin.
What does it cost Peercoin to have a forum section for Primecoin the same as (I assume) NuBits will have? Are you worried about being associated with a “failing” coin? I don’t know where it’s going, but don’t feel right about kicking Primecoin out.
Cheers! 