What i like and don't like about Flarum.

neptronix

First off, i want to give the developers a major tip of the fedora for this concept. It's extremely promising!

About about the perspective this is coming from..
I run a DIY electrical engineering oriented board and have not found a candidate to replace PhpBB and have always came back empty handed...

Vanilla forums does nothing that phpBB can't do with extensions, and has a much less logical way of navigating through categories, although i like how it categorizes replies. That's the only big plus i can think of.
Discourse is off putting for a left brainer and uses algorithms to suggest content rather than allowing you to easily navigate on your own and is way too different than most media platforms. Considering how user friendly it tries to be, the markdown editor and refusal by Atwood and CO to change that is a kick to the balls. Also, the ruby language running through rails is a resource hog.
VBulletin, Xenforo, Simplemachines, etc might as well be duplicate works of phpbb.

I am a PHP developer, UI designer, and server administrator by trade and have thought about contributing to phpBB but their system has too much legacy cruft and the team is not seeing far enough into the future.

So that being said, my PROs for Flarum:

Clean modern user interface with minimal clutter.
The posts/replies being at the bottom of the screen is excellent because replying in phpBB and referencing previous content is a nightmare. This is one idea that discourse hit the bullseye on and should be standard on all web forum software.
'Likes' functionality being baked into the cake - this is great for generating post popularity data.
Categories on the left, which is an excellent use of desktop browser space.
Post navigation thingy is a wonderful evolution over Atwood's.
Unlike Atwood's creation, the dates are a lot more meaningful. '7d ago' or '7h ago' is literally the difference of two characters and is hard to speed read.
Emoji support is a huge plus.

My CONs for Flarum:

The minimalistic markdown editor will only be understood by web developers and stack overflow users. This is actually worse than phpbb's BBCode. Discourse at least gives you a tutorial and upload buttons, but their system is still severely crippled in ease of use. Dropping in Quill or something similar would be such a huge and code-cheap improvement - don't reinvent the wheel, someone else has done all this work already!
This is my #1 dealbreaker; because editor plugins are often broken by board software updates.
It is not readily apparent how to navigate back to categories. This format could use breadcrumbs ( or some other similar system ) to make the navigation through it much easier.
In the category list on the left, it should be apparent that a category has sub-categories underneath it. This lack of indication goes a little too far into minimalism.
Category display on a mobile device would be very poor on a large board like mine with a diverse set of Categories and sub-categories. This is where PhpBB gets things right. Instead of the current crippled view, just have a link to the main overall categories list.
The header that says that post name and the subcategory could take about 1/3rd of the vertical space with a breadcrumb system that basically says home > category > subcategory > post name on desktop mode. I have this implemented in PhpBB through a template hack and it works well and looks good.
My preference for dates would be more like 11/10/2018 @ 3:30pm. Hopefully there will be an option to change the date format.
More detail in lists of posts is very possible on desktop a la phpbb. What i find lacking here is the original poster versus who recently replied. The current set of info is fine for a mobile phone, but us power users on desktops would appreciate more detail.

That being said, thank you devs for your hard work on this project. I will be watching it closely and hell, if you are receptive to some of these changes, i'll donate some of my own code time for the cause.... because i am tired of being stuck on PhpBB with no upgrade in sight..

jordanjay29

neptronix I'm really happy you took the time to lay out your thoughts on Flarum like this. It's useful to get varieties of perspectives so we can keep improving Flarum.

neptronix 'Likes' functionality being baked into the cake - this is great for generating post popularity data.

A note here, you may or may not be aware, but while Likes is an extension that comes with Flarum by default, it is not in the core software and can be disabled or removed at will. Which also means it can be replaced by a user's preferred extension (such as Reflar Reactions).

neptronix Post navigation thingy is a wonderful evolution over Atwood's.

Another note, Discourse developed their post navigation after Flarum, and seemed to follow many users admiring and suggesting a navigation feature like Flarum's on their official community. Take that as you will.

neptronix The minimalistic markdown editor will only be understood by web developers and stack overflow users. This is actually worse than phpbb's BBCode.

This is something that has been discussed and thought about by the devs, but is a lower priority for now. There are several editor extensions available from the community (you can browse our Extensions tag or flagrow.io which has a comprehensive listing of all Flarum extensions at the moment.

There is an Upload extension that adds a button to the post editor, fyi.

neptronix It is not readily apparent how to navigate back to categories. This format could use breadcrumbs ( or some other similar system ) to make the navigation through it much easier.

Does the back [<] button at the top left not satisfy this? Hovering over it on desktop mode also displays the topic listing from your last visited discussion lists, whether All Discussions or a tag to allow direct navigation from one tag to another. The logo/forum title also takes one back to the index page.

I'd be interested to see a breadcrumbs extension if this could be improved, though.

neptronix Category display on a mobile device would be very poor on a large board like mine with a diverse set of Categories and sub-categories. This is where PhpBB gets things right. Instead of the current crippled view, just have a link to the main overall categories list.

Could I suggest you break this into its own feedback post? It seems like it bears a deeper comparison between the two and how Flarum's could work better, or better for you.

neptronix My preference for dates would be more like 11/10/2018 @ 3:30pm. Hopefully there will be an option to change the date format.

This is something that could probably be changed by extension. There is a place in the code where Flarum configures the date/time system, and could be altered.

neptronix More detail in lists of posts is very possible on desktop a la phpbb. What i find lacking here is the original poster versus who recently replied. The current set of info is fine for a mobile phone, but us power users on desktops would appreciate more detail.

You may be interested in Toby's proposal for a new discussion page or the Koseki extension which shows a different layout for the Flarum index.

neptronix That being said, thank you devs for your hard work on this project. I will be watching it closely and hell, if you are receptive to some of these changes, i'll donate some of my own code time for the cause.... because i am tired of being stuck on PhpBB with no upgrade in sight..

We're always happy to have contributors at Github or here on these boards. You can also join us on our Discord server, our #internals channel is a good place to discuss some of this.

Thanks for the feedback and for finding us.

neptronix

jordanjay29 A note here, you may or may not be aware, but while Likes is an extension that comes with Flarum by default, it is not in the core software and can be disabled or removed at will. Which also means it can be replaced by a user's preferred extension (such as Reflar Reactions).

I wasn't aware of that ( haven't installed flarum, literally just heard of it today and have been reading about it for 1/2 the day ). My bad.

However i imagine it is a functionality you will support over time.. am i correct about that?
Extension or baked into the cake doesn't matter.. a feature being supported long term is what's important here. I have this problem with phpbb.. you get a cool feature for a few years.. phpbb dev team makes changes that break it.. extension developer abandons it or maybe updates it 3 years later.. and you get punished for moving to the latest version and have to explain to your users why some features suddenly disappeared. Not a good scene..

jordanjay29 Another note, Discourse developed their post navigation after Flarum, and seemed to follow many users admiring and suggesting a navigation feature like Flarum's on their official community. Take that as you will.

Ooops 😅 sorry about that, i wasn't aware.

jordanjay29 This is something that has been discussed and thought about by the devs, but is a lower priority for now. There are several editor extensions available from the community (you can browse our Extensions tag or flagrow.io which has a comprehensive listing of all Flarum extensions at the moment.

There is an Upload extension that adds a button to the post editor, fyi.

Right on about the editor. The problem with plugins though is if you ever have to change them as things change with the platform, IE if one becomes outdated and abandoned in Flarum v1.5. There has to be a way to transform the content, and operating on the table the contains post data will be a huge problem.

For example, i run a board with 11 years of history, and about 3 gigabytes in the phpbb_posts table. Touch that table and it crashes/freezes unless you have 16x more memory than it requires to operate a standard load. Even still, users are looking at downtime. Had to do this to fix unicode conversion issues many times and it suuuuuuucked.

So i if i had my way, i'd pick something well supported and actively developed but maybe use extensions for user input as a fallback in case your editor's developers go ghost.

jordanjay29 Does the back [<] button at the top left not satisfy this? Hovering over it on desktop mode also displays the topic listing from your last visited discussion lists, whether All Discussions or a tag to allow direct navigation from one tag to another. The logo/forum title also takes one back to the index page.

I'd be interested to see a breadcrumbs extension if this could be improved, though.

Ok, the back button does satisfy it, but it's not immediately apparent as to where it goes exactly. It also is at the top left edge of the screen, which might be a problem for those with a 4k screen viewing the content through a narrow porthole.

I didn't even think of hovering over it.. is that a listing of newest posts?

jordanjay29 This is something that could probably be changed by extension. There is a place in the code where Flarum configures the date/time system, and could be altered.

re dates; i'm glad this can be extended easily. So i take it you have some kind of global date reformatter function then?

jordanjay29 You may be interested in Toby's proposal for a new discussion page or the Koseki extension which shows a different layout for the Flarum index.

I'll check those two things out re the categories. Thanks.

jordanjay29 We're always happy to have contributors at Github or here on these boards. You can also join us on our Discord server, our #internals channel is a good place to discuss some of this.

Thanks for the feedback and for finding us.

OK, will do. Happy to hear that you guys are at least receptive to taking feedback. Did not have that experience with the phpbb or discourse team.

Will start a new thread about the category issues.

Ralkage

neptronix an initiative that @luceos started himself with his group (Flagrow), ReFlar (my group), and hopefully more experienced developers to come is the Friends of Flarum group. Unlike many other forum software communities related forums out there, FoF was simply created to maintain important and highly used extensions that have either been abandoned, the original working developer has no time to maintain it, or even those developers that need help with maintaining their extensions altogether 🙂

It's an initiative that not all communities take under their belt and become part of their commitment to the community itself so we are grateful to have created such a group. I too, don't like when a developer abandons an extension or add-on I really liked because of whatever reason they had and then I either had to suffer without it, wait until someone made a redux, or simply pay someone else to custom upgrade it to work on the latest build of the forum software I was using at the time.

I hope this helps ease your mind 🤗

neptronix

That's awesome. Quite the ecosystem you folks are creating here!

Prosperous

Some really good feedback here and thank you for taking the time out to gather your thoughts and share them. We do hope you stick it out and see just how good Flarum can be. Extensions thus far are definitely taken care of actively and are updated as each version is released.

I have always found it to reflect negatively on a community if feedback, however positive or negative it may be, is removed, ignored or not discussed. It bothers me to see it and not have at least some sort of notice or recognition.

neptronix

PS, i notice that you've upgraded this forum to have buttons that encapsulate markdown in selected text.
Very nice addon. Not the WYSIWYG i was hoping for, but less cumbersome than PhpBB's bbcode.

A wonderful hat trick would be to rip off phpbb's media extension code and bake the ability to auto-embed a link into the cake.. discourse does this to great effect. It's a low hanging fruit code job with a huge benefit.

( link here for testing )
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1057010155332628481

jordanjay29

neptronix that's something that already has an extension (written by the same person who writes the text formatting library for Flarum to process Markdown and BBCode) .

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/647-s9e-mediaembed-embed-videos-and-third-party-content/

neptronix

I see. There's some talk in there about it becoming part of Flarum though or at least a core team supported extension.

If flarum becomes a thing, and i can figure out how to work with the codebase, i find this kind of extension so critical that i'd raise my hand to maintain it as part of the core. No joke.