This forum desperately need a moderator

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#1 Thu, 06/23/2016 - 11:51
Diabolico
Diabolico's picture

This forum desperately need a moderator

This forum desperately need a moderator. Topics containing several different problems, questions what doesnt have anything to do with each other, necroing 5-7+ years old topics... and so on.

First you refuse to use proper forum and then you are unable to keep it clean and in order. Seriously i dont get it how you think to accommodate Vmin community when you are unable to offer some proper way of communication. In mean time topics get piled up with some nonsensical crap or flooded with so many different problems that anyone who come here looking for some help or answers is lost.

Not good to make such first impression not to mention that after so many years its a shame you dont have at least some small base of people as core community.

Right now this is just one big pile of... garbage with few good topics. Even i when i use search i get tons of unanswered topics or topics where is difficult to even understand what is going on. Or another example, 2 pages of post ending in 2012 and then on first page, 4th post have someone answering or more often asking a question in 2016. Great, lets make even more confusing.

Just to make it clear, if you delete 90+% of all topics we would not lose anything thats how i see the situation.

Thu, 06/23/2016 - 15:44
andreychek

Thanks for your input!

Improving the Forums is indeed on the todo list, though some other things are currently taking the priority.

-Eric

Sun, 06/26/2016 - 13:27
unborn
unborn's picture

@ Diabolico, I am glad that you are another one to mention that! - yeah many people said that many times.. also automated email notification for forums and much more like marking topic solved or closed as solved are missing, so no one knows if the thing/issue or whatever it may be is still active or old or solved.

...to be honest with you, so far nothing was done about. I cannot even check if someone did reply to something I've replied.. you must remember exactly the forum subject to be able actually have a conversation on issue which is bad enough. For that reason I stopped posting here in this forums, just sometimes here and there I reply..

best is to just accept this and leave forums in mess as they currently are and just use them as they are, as it is not going to change. If you want you can pop in on irc channel (freenode #virtualmin) but there is no OP as well. If channel gets into mess (be it spam or troll) we just use /query and temporary go away form channel or use ingore which is also best thing as no op there. I asked guys via email about this, but same scenario - no reply.

As Eric said other things takes the priority which is good and totally understandable thing, and as this is not true community forums (yet) - no real mods or OPs for any virtualmin.com outsiders and more mess as outcome.

Perhaps forums with some knowledgeable chaps who not work for virtualmin but have great passion for gpl version and would like to say small thank you by helping on forums could be mods here together with eric and others from virtualmin which only would be helpful and great. Some people just dont want to listen others, you know options to have forums moderated by ops selected from community with virtualmin employees is just for all those years todo list in black hole. Perhaps limitation for this option is with the fact that they run this on drupal which even paid developers like me try to avoid and plugins on drupal are usually very much well out of date and behind with functionality.... or perhaps is how they want it... who knows

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

Sun, 06/26/2016 - 14:56
andreychek

Yeah the subscription system stinks, that's one of the things I'd personally like to see fixed the most.

Joe added this current one in the hopes that it would allow folks to subscribe to a thread as desired, but it doesn't seem to actually work.

I'm looking into possible using this one here:

https://www.drupal.org/project/subscriptions

I'm not sure that changing from Drupal is in the cards for the near future, but if you're familiar with a plugin for Drupal 7 that you think would help improve things, please feel free to offer suggestions!

-Eric

Mon, 06/27/2016 - 03:50
Diabolico
Diabolico's picture

There was few attempts from my side to consider Drupal in my projects but their internal turnovers and overall state didnt fit in my vision of good software. But you are now stuck with it so let it be. How things are now i see two possible solutions:

  1. Split everything - Use appropriate software for each task (forum, bug tracker, main site, etc) and connect them with bridges. It makes things a little more complicated but only downside i see is during major version change.

  2. Combine main site with forum - Leave bug tracker as it is and just bridge the forum what would reduce any complication during major software versions.

When it comes to what forum software there are many solutions (paid and free) what can be used but more or less all of them come with same basic functions. For example Avast, Comodo, Liverpool football club with over 12 million post... are using SMF for their main forum and i dont see why Vmin could not do the same thing. Only real difference between paid and (good) free forum software is addons. With paid forums you have larger amount of updated and maintained addons but usually they are not free while with free forum you have decent amount of addons but more prone to suddenly be left without updates. Nothing what few $$ at freelancer.com or similar websites cant sort in few days.

This forum is beyond repair and exporting topics to new forum will do more damage than good instead it should be locked down but kept alive so people can browse old topics hoping to find some useful information.

P.S. Please when (and if) you will consider what forum software go for classic forum not some crap what looks nice of mobile phone.

- I often come to the conclusion that my brain has too many tabs open. -
Failing at desktop publishing & graphic design since 1994.

Mon, 06/27/2016 - 18:06 (Reply to #5)
unborn
unborn's picture

@ diabolico 'P.S. Please when (and if) you will consider what forum software go for classic forum not some crap what looks nice of mobile phone.' - how it looks like have nothing to do with how it works or whatever it is running on, but having it without mobile devices support - is no way. If forums then only some good up to date open source forums. All topics should or could stay but needs to be marked as solved and email notifications thats all.. as I said before - it was said by many others, too many times before and guys know it.. so let them decide whatever they want to do. right now this is what project is using it and everyone should respect that.

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

Mon, 06/27/2016 - 19:21
jimdunn

Could I just offer some kudos to the Virtualmin staff -- for being so patient and polite.

Mon, 06/27/2016 - 22:52 (Reply to #7)
andreychek

Thanks for your kind words jimdunn!

Wed, 06/29/2016 - 13:12
Diabolico
Diabolico's picture

I think majority of people who visit this forum including Vmin devs are nice and polite but this doesnt solve the problem we are facing with forum for many years... actually too many years.

- I often come to the conclusion that my brain has too many tabs open. -
Failing at desktop publishing & graphic design since 1994.

Tue, 07/05/2016 - 01:35
Joe
Joe's picture

I've just enabled the comment_notify module, which adds a checkbox at the end of the comment field for "notify me when new comments are posted".

I'm experimenting with other modules to add more functionality, hopefully without making migrating off of Drupal in the future a disaster (I plan to migrate us off of Drupal eventually, but the amount of time required, and the amount of time I have are not at all compatible). We also have the (very real) problem of keeping the bills paid and the awesome problem of getting Webmin 2.0 out the door this year. You've all convinced me that you hate Drupal; I believe you...I just don't have the resources (time or money) to fix it. Since dropping prices and switching to monthly billing, our revenue is way down (even while number of sales is way up...it may even out eventually, but in the short term, we're running really lean around here).

We do need (light) moderation (mostly for spam, not for aggressively getting rid of posts even if they seem repetitive for old-timers), from some trusted members of the community. Are you guys volunteering? (We'd have to talk out and document what moderation policies would be, if we extended it out to non-Virtualmin staff. But, I'm more than happy to have some help around here. We're pretty much always overwhelmed.) ;-)

We, of course, need some better tools for moderation, as well..as it stands, even me and Eric can't do a lot about some kinds of organizational issues, but there are facilities to move posts (if they're in the wrong section), unpublish posts (if they're spam, though we also need to know about it in the tracker, so we can ban the user entirely), and make sure they have good titles and aren't bringing back ancient dead threads (though there's no way to re-deadify a thread that's been revived in this way, even if we could move a comment off of an old thread). But, we can ask users nicely to post a new topic when they have a new problem. A lot of times, someone sees an old error and think it looks kinda similar to their problem (even if it was 10 years ago and clearly, to us, has nothing to do with the problem they're seeing).

Anyway, I'm doing the best I can. I hear your frustration. I'm frustrated daily by Drupal issues, and lack of time/money to solve them. Let me spend some time with Advanced Forum module and get back to you in a day or two with whether we can run with it...it's a very big, intrusive module (exactly the kind I hate), and overrides themes and such in ways that are probably disastrous without a ton of work...so I may not be able to flip the switch on that without doing a lot of work. Avoiding having to theme the forum separately has always been part of why I don't want to use a standalone forum (though nowhere near the most important one...the most important is that I don't want a separate notifications system, but since Drupal can't get notifications anywhere close to right anyway, and configuring them appears in a half dozen places even when you only handle them via Drupal, it's pretty much pointless to use that as a reason to stick to only Drupal modules, I guess).

OK, enough rambling. Tell me if the comment notify feature helps address the subscription thing. I'll keep trying other subscription options, if not.

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Tue, 07/05/2016 - 15:51 (Reply to #10)
unborn
unborn's picture

THANK YOU !

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

Wed, 07/06/2016 - 02:27
Joe
Joe's picture

New forum module is up and running, along with some other changes. News item abut that here: https://www.virtualmin.com/node/41325

There's still some stuff to do, but it gets us closer to something nice, I think.

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Wed, 07/06/2016 - 10:32 (Reply to #12)
unborn
unborn's picture

I did not know you will push it out right a way.. markdown links seems to be broken within this module

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

Wed, 07/06/2016 - 14:31 (Reply to #13)
Joe
Joe's picture

Haha...I mentioned it a couple of times in our conversation; that's why I didn't want to get distracted with stuff that couldn't be done in one day. ;-)

Markdown link problem is fixed.

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Check out the forum guidelines!

Thu, 07/07/2016 - 13:10
unborn
unborn's picture

haha or aha - it works :) cheers.

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

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