[Sugar-devel] Regarding Social Help project

[Prasoon Shukla]

Hi Sam,


On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 3:24 PM, Sam Parkinson <sam.parkinson3 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I agree, Discourse looks amazing! Just a few ideas to chuck around:
>
>    -
>
>    I think it would be nice to try to make the forums automatically login
>    when using sugar. This could be done by storing a uuid and a key on the
>    computer. When you go to the forum it could automatically log you in with
>    your sugar username and uuid (but let you use a different account if you
>    wish). I think this would be useful since:
>     - Users probably want help quickly and this would mean less hoops
>       - Keeping a uuid or key of some sort would still allow
>       communication with the user. This could be just a little script that used
>       the upcoming notification system
>
> Yes, exactly. I was thinking of developing a python-ruby authentication
bridge for discourse. We will need to get an account created though. This
could be done the first time the user accesses social help. From then on
however, we can save the session (much like a browser) instead of writing a
script to log them in - so that we don't actually need to log them in -
they'll already be logged in when they open the the help. I'll ask around
the discourse community for the viability of this idea.

>
>    -
>        -
>
>    Also is Discourse real time / do you instantly get the updates without
>    having to refresh? That would be cool
>
> Yes. See this thread from a year ago (when discourse was still beta) :
https://meta.discourse.org/t/real-time-updates/5151

>
>    -
>
> I am really interested in this and would love to help.
>
Why, thank you! I'll let you know if anything comes up :)

> Sam
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 3:30 AM, Prasoon Shukla <prasoon92.iitr at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> *Note : I sent this message once before but it was moderated because it
>> was too large. So, I'm replacing the inline images with links to the
>> images/links to pages. I hope that this will be enough of a reduction in
>> size.*
>>
>> Hi.
>>
>> I talked to Walter on the IRC a few days ago regarding the social help
>> project. We decided that I should explore FOSS forum software that is
>> actively maintained for the social help project. So, I tried looking at
>> some popular alternatives. The ones I found worth exploring are *phpBB*,
>> *Discourse* and *bbPress. *I selected these specific forums because of
>> their ease of use, functionality and the ease of getting a forum up and
>> running.
>>
>> To summarize things, Discourse *appears* to be clearly ahead of the
>> other two in all things except in terms of the ease-of-installation.
>> However, it has became much easier to install discourse now than it was a
>> few months ago. In fact, they now provide a docker image that can be used
>> to install discourse with relative ease. That said, bbPress wins in terms
>> of ease of installation with a WordPress like setup process. phpBB is easy
>> just as easy. Nevertheless, I think that this is a minor disadvantage in
>> the bigger scheme of things.
>>
>> Now, once installed, phpBB and bbPress are quite similar in functionality
>> - so I'll just compare Discourse with phpBB instead of comparing with both.
>>
>>
>>    -  phpBB is *very badly cluttered. *This, I think, is especially bad
>>    when we're talking of getting children to use this software.  A single line
>>    posted by a user is presented together with a whole bunch of useless
>>    information :
>>
>> See http://picpaste.com/pics/forums1.1394467977.png
>> That's one single line of information with quite a lot of clutter.
>> The topics page is even more cluttered. See this popular phpBB forum:
>> http://forums.gentoo.org/
>>
>> Now I know that with years of use, most of have gotten used to tuning out
>> the uninformative parts but that won't be the case with children. Discourse
>> does much better at this. See a sample discussion here:
>> http://discuss.atom.io/t/custom-atom-icon-with-packages/2341
>> That in itself is good enough reason to use Discourse. But, I'll point
>> out few more.
>>
>>
>>    - The one time registration is much *much* simpler in Discourse. Just
>>    take a look at this:
>>    - *phpBB*  :
>>       http://forums.gentoo.org/profile.php?mode=register&agreed=true
>>       - *Discourse*: http://picpaste.com/pics/forums4.1394468652.png
>>
>> Of course, we'll need to modify core Discourse according to our needs as
>> well. But in any case, the registration will be much easier with Discourse.
>>
>>
>>
>>    - Making an actual post is much more difficult in phpBB. Again, this
>>    is because of too much unnecessary information - dealing with tags, bunch
>>    of miscellaneous options at the end and posting permissions. This causes
>>    much grief when your long written post just refuses to go through.
>>    Discourse is simpler. See this:
>>    http://picpaste.com/pics/forums5.1394468781.png
>>
>>
>> Aside from these three very fundamental things, there are few other good
>> parts:
>>
>>
>>    1. No arbitrary page breaks, which I think is quite nice. Often I'll
>>    be immersed in reading a thread and the page just abruptly ends, which I
>>    quite dislike.
>>    2.  A great reply system - where you don't have to strain yourself to
>>    read that 6 level deep nested comment. More reading by Jeff Atwood here:
>>    http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html
>>    3. Active development ongoing so we're likely to see some great
>>    upgrades in the coming out in the near future.
>>
>> So, I'll vote for discourse.
>>
>> Anyway, if we're willing to discuss proprietary options, then Moot (
>> https://moot.it/) seems *really *nice. But then again, it's not open.
>> However, Moot does provide both free and non-free options with a very easy
>> setup. So ...
>> You can explore Moot here: https://moot.it/prasoon2211/ (it's my
>> personal forum).
>>
>> Anyway, that's my take on the social help feature. Comments are welcome.
>>
>> Prasoon Shukla
>>
>> PS: While proofreading this, I realized that this post reads like an
>> advertisement for Discourse.
>> Oh well.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20140311/fdd7e2a8/attachment.html>