MigrateToFlarum Lab, the health scanner for Flarum

user1993

Thought everything with our forum was perfect, until we got a D and the following report:

Your vendor folder is currently being served by your webserver. This could expose untrusted scripts to the world and compromise your security. Use a rewrite rule to prevent your webserver from serving this folder.

Any idea how to fix that on a shared hosting?

OrdinaryJellyfish

user1993 In your forum's .htaccess, find lines 9-14 and uncomment those. That should fix the error.

clarkwinkelmann

MikeJones yes there's one listen for www. and one for bare domain, they could be merged but it should work fine the way it is.

The redirect "issue" is on line 5. Replace return 301 http://www.seekadventure.net$request_uri; with return 301 https://www.seekadventure.net$request_uri;

user1993 great if it's fixed 👌

user1993

OrdinaryJellyfish Thank you.

MikeJones

clarkwinkelmann Looking at my nginx configs It looks like I have two listens on port 80:

If I get rid of one of those, could that be it?

MikeJones

clarkwinkelmann perfect will try that when I get to some wifi.

clarkwinkelmann

Hi guys, following a suggestion from @luceos I implemented a simple first version of a forum showcase feature at https://lab.migratetoflarum.com/showcase

The idea is as follow: any forum that has been scanned publicly (without checking "hide from homepage") will be added to the showcase tab. A ping is made every few weeks to check if the forum still exists and to update the metadata.

Anybody can scan your forum and therefore get it on the showcase (which is kind of the point here actually), but I know not everybody will want to end up in the showcase. So I also took the opportunity to implement a proper opt out feature at https://lab.migratetoflarum.com/opt-out

To opt out, you will have to add a meta tag to your forum, and it will instruct the lab to never show your forum in public results, including both the showcase and public scans. Users of the lab will still be able to scan the forum, but no link will appear on the homepage of the lab.

I will probably retroactively add some previously scanned forums to the showcase once I'm sure everything is working correctly. Right now I've only pinged some well known forums to get started.

Let me know if you notice any issue, it's an early version of the feature. Consider contacting me privately via the email in the footer if you have issues or concerns with the opt out feature.

If you see a particular issue with your website, consider opening a GitHub issue so we can better track the resolution.

Planned features (coming soon ™️) :

forum screenshot
ability to order by number of discussions/users

What do you think of the feature ? Any suggestion for future updates ?

Ralkage

clarkwinkelmann love it!!

Maybe extend search in the future to sort by HTML metadata? (more specifically by keywords if anything) 🥰

matteocontrini

clarkwinkelmann very nice!

An idea would be to have a way to filter forums by language. I think the HTML "lang" attribute could be useful for this, but it seems it's not always populated 🤔

luceos

What you forgot to mention is that this alleviates the issue with the Showcase tag and the discussions related to showcasing existing Flarum forums. The ping mentioned, checks whether the site is still serving an active Flarum installation and as such the Lab is able to provide an index/list of Flarum installations still used in production.

I think there's huge potential in such an index, thank you for jumping onto the idea 🤗

YusufYldrm

I gave detailed information here

https://lab.migratetoflarum.com/scans/1b7e58f3-dbea-44f5-8786-7f9941aa6c60

clarkwinkelmann

YusufYldrm anything you want me to comment on, or are you just sharing the results for us to enjoy ? 😃

Alkir

clarkwinkelmann tell me what is the problem and what I need to do

clarkwinkelmann

matteocontrini language is totally feasible. You can't hide the language packs you use in Flarum, so even if the lang attribute is not correctly configured I should be able to get the language.

Question for all: would you be interested in a "MigrateToFlarum Showcase" extension that you can install on your forum so the lab can get better statistics with less requests, as well as letting you able customize a few things ?

For example, the following could be done:

Get the number of discussions without hitting your API, as well as get number of discussions above 50k
Get the number of discussions if your forum requires registration to see discussions
Get the number of private discussions. Based on settings, could include discussions behind a paywall or private discussions between users for example
Get the number of users even if you don't allow user listing
Get activity stats
More frequent update of statistics
Automated addition to the showcase without having to scan the forum first
Ability to opt out from the lab without manually adding the meta tag
Ability to customize the forum description for the showcase
Ability to select showcased discussions or pages from the forum
Ability to select your forum market category or audience to sort out forums in the showcase

These are just the ideas I had. They would all be optional if implemented. There's no timeline for such an extension, I'd love to hear your thoughts first.

Also, what if it was a paid extension, so it supports the lab and offers you a bit more visibility in the showcase ?

clarkwinkelmann

Now live on the lab:

If your forum url ends with a public folder, we check for misconfigured web root and offer a link to https://flarum.org/docs/install.html#customizing-paths
Made the exposed storage folder test compatible with beta 8
In the showcase forums are now sorted by discussion count by default
Added the ability to sort by discussion and user count
Descriptions now show under beta 8 forums in the showcase
And last but not least... SCREENSHOTS !

Check out the showcase here https://lab.migratetoflarum.com/showcase

Not all websites have gotten their screenshots yet, this should come with the next automated refresh for those I didn't manually trigger.

Already noticed:

I realized a few websites didn't load fast enough and have a "loading" page visible.

Due to how the lab works, a forum will only be removed from the showcase if it has not been a Flarum for multiple weeks. However the screenshots will continue to be made, hence some error pages getting in the screenshots. I'll check how to work around that.

luceos

clarkwinkelmann some of the showcase items are already did links or have JS errors. Is there something to be done about that? Lots of interesting installations I've found I pushed into the lab, there are now almost 100 registered. Could you have a look at how to keep the list cleaner, even if that means temporarily disabling items that seem to have compilation errors? Just a thought, I love the showcase.

clarkwinkelmann

luceos yes I've seen that, I'll need to do some manual cleaning.

Right now forums are scanned every two weeks and removed after two unsuccessful Flarum detection, so it can take a month before it disappears automatically. I could scan forums more frequently but as there is no way to control it I don't want to put unnecessary stress on the forum servers. How frequent would be too frequent ? Technically, I could scan every day, but it might be a bit too much...

EDIT:

Manual cleaning done, the list now looks a lot nicer.

Most of the broken screenshots are because of some forums that were scanned via a non-canonical url... I'll try to come up with a fix for that. Most notably, forums accessible over HTTPS but with a canonical HTTP url 😐️

luceos

clarkwinkelmann How frequent would be too frequent ?

What would probably make more sense is to:

have health checks run every week
in case the health check returns non-healthy, do a daily
if the daily fails for 3 or 4 times, just remove it

Remember it's fairly easy to re-add them, but having an unreliable list looks pretty bad imo.

clarkwinkelmann

Good news, I finally looked up which fonts I needed for the screenshot feature to correctly render chinese, japanese and many other languages. I also triggered a manual new screenshot for the most popular websites impacted by this.

If you notice your website is incorrectly rendered, please let me know !

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