The Song Fight Bulletin Board

jb wrote:I'm ok with people hacking on the forums if they want, as long as we have a rollback plan. Just FYI.

AutoMod makes that straightforward, at least.

One of the advantages of something like Discourse is that it would have a very rich API out-of-the-box, since it's already built as a client and server. Every function would be available via an API.

Discourse does look nice, but being a Ruby on Rails app means that even a self-hosted instance is going to require a lot more server resources than Dreamhost can really provide well, without moving to a VPS, and I wouldn't be comfortable hosting it on my personal VPS or whatever.

It also looks like its phpBB importer is problematic and strips out all BBCode (instead of converting it to whatever markup mechanism Discourse uses). So, not ready for prime time just yet. I'll keep my eye on it though, since of all the "forums reinvented" OSS projects I've seen it's definitely the most-baked.

That said, bbPress looks like it's made great strides since the last time I've looked at it (although the fact they keep on releasing security patches makes me somewhat less confident - I mean it's good that they're addressing security issues, but not so good that they're showing up in the first place).

There appears to be one abandoned sad little JSON API mod for PHPBB, who knows if it was finished or if it works. If you wanted to pick it up and finish it or whatever, we could try that.

JB

I just saw this and have no idea if it's real or vapor or good or crap:

https://nodebb.org/

I assume running a NodeJS app would have the same implications as running a RoR app, though, right? So also a non-starter regardless.

Yeah not likely. That Node app requires a bunch of modifications to your Apache (to run it with Apache that is), so there's no using Dreamhost's shared Apache. So basically, they're expecting you to essentially run a server for this app.

Rails is theoretically possible, as Dreamhost will run a domain on Passenger. But when I looked at the setup requirements for Discourse, it looked a bit hairy. Maybe not impossible, though certainly not as one-clicky as Dreamhost makes PHPbb.

JB

And it looks like Discourse requires Redis to run-- Redis is an extremely fast in-memory data store (you can use it to power things like live chats), which by nature is a constantly running process and hence verboten from Dreamhost shared accounts.

JB

While we're at it,

although that's more of an apples-and-oranges thing.

Seems Song Fight! is stuck with PHP until/unless the financial investment level goes up. Where do I subscribe to help pay for better boards?

wow, xtranormal got bought and totally screwed all their users. sheesh.

Man, I forgot how funny those were. I'd never watched the Node one before. Best part is when the "reasonable" guy mentions Lisp. LOL

EDIT: Dang, though, that second one, um, wha? I've seen what people claim is "good" PHP code and it made my eyes bleed. Yuck. I just can't get on board with that, sorry...

This was actually kind of a pain in the ass to make. Turns out there's no real "scriptable" text-to-speech function easily available somewhere. So I had to use Automator and a series of "Get Text" and "Speak Text" actions, plus the free trial of "Audio Hijack Pro".

I've used this JavaScript text-to-speech library a bit. That it works at all is kinda amazing to me. But aren't we going way off topic?

http://www.masswerk.at/mespeak/

Lunkhead wrote:Man, I forgot how funny those were. I'd never watched the Node one before. Best part is when the "reasonable" guy mentions Lisp. LOL

EDIT: Dang, though, that second one, um, wha? I've seen what people claim is "good" PHP code and it made my eyes bleed. Yuck. I just can't get on board with that, sorry... :P

Well, the "reasonable" guy mentioned LISP, too, so... Also I think the reverse-proxy model of application hosting makes a lot more sense than the CGI model in this day and age, and node.js is actually a pretty good way of doing things (as are other frameworks such as Python Twisted and even Ruby On Rails), but god DAMN is there a lot of religion and parroting-without-understanding about the various models of things.

For TTS I just use OSX's built-in "say" command.

Anyway, hosting-wise I'm hoping that someday Dreamhost figures out a reasonable way of supporting reverse-proxied application servers on shared hosting. They already support FastCGI for things (actually this was causing problems for me a while ago because of how they have it set up) and wsgi makes even more sense in a shared-hosting environment. What I'd really like to see them do is let people optionally move over to nginx. I suspect that the intersection set of "people who want cheap shared hosting" and "people who want nginx and reverse application-server proxies" is pretty small, though.

Everything I've read says that FastCGI is waaaaay old junk. Not true?

fluffy wrote:For TTS I just use OSX's built-in "say" command.

(I assume you didn't listen to the file.) The trick was switching voices from Question to Answer. There's no easy automatic way to do that now that xtranormal is gone.

jb wrote:Everything I've read says that FastCGI is waaaaay old junk. Not true?

It's waaaay old but it's only somewhat crufty. It's built around the classic model of process-per-worker, rather than thread-per-worker, which is pretty much how Apache was built in the first place, and that still supports better concurrency than things like Node.JS which are based around programmer-managed cooperative multitasking. I think newer versions of mod_php support proper threading, but that only applies to PHP, obviously. wsgi is built for Python but I think there's support for other languages as well. There's a lot of ways to do things and all of them have pluses and minuses.

FastCGI is also still way the hell better than classic CGI, and adapting classic CGIs to FastCGI generally isn't hard.

jb wrote:

fluffy wrote:For TTS I just use OSX's built-in "say" command.

(I assume you didn't listen to the file.) The trick was switching voices from Question to Answer. There's no easy automatic way to do that now that xtranormal is gone.

Eh, I'd just have done a bunch of "say" commands with the different voices and then used sox or whatever to splice them together. I am a commandline junkie though and haven't done a whole lot with Automator (except to make simple droplets that just run a shell script on them).

You guys went way over my head a while ago, but I figure that any upgrade, in order to be an improvement on the status quo, should have at least one of...

1 - Better security, more effective anti-spam policies.
2 - More intuitive embedding (Grabbing just part of the URL to embed a Youtube video? I mean, I get it, but I don't hold it against people who have trouble with this concept).
3 - More consistency of features between themes. (And more themes maybe?)
4 - Some "Social Media"-like features such as the ability to tag other users into a thread, or a "like" button.
5 - Um... Other cool features that we don't yet know we want?

Regardless, as Paco said, as long as there's a place to come to, I'll be coming here, and I do think the system in place has few enough problems that we should be wary of upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. But seriously, change whatever you want, and as long as you don't nuke the board completely, I'll keep coming back, and I won't complain much.

1 - I actually think PHPBB has done ok for us in this regard. A few outbreaks that we are able to snuff? Seems "reasonable" in this day and age.
2 - That's probably my fault for coding the BBCode weirdly. I'm probably not going to change it.
3 - FYI any change to another system will mean FEWER themes. PHPBB is the theme-obsessed forum software, not the rest of them.
4 - Yeah we've said these would be nice already
5 - This was just to have a number 5, right

jb wrote:There appears to be one abandoned sad little JSON API mod for PHPBB, who knows if it was finished or if it works. If you wanted to pick it up and finish it or whatever, we could try that.

I've volunteered and we've discussed this before. You redirected me to fluffy and fluffy said he was waiting on you. Two years later... eh...

Sorry, it must have fallen out of the ticket queue that is totally a thing that exists.