<div dir="ltr"><div class="markdown-here-wrapper" id="markdown-here-wrapper-902924" style><p style="margin:1.2em 0px!important">Hi,</p>
<p style="margin:1.2em 0px!important">I agree, Discourse looks amazing! Just a few ideas to chuck around:</p>
<ul style="margin:1.2em 0px;padding-left:2em">
<li style="margin:0.5em 0px"><p style="margin:1.2em 0px!important;margin:0.5em 0px!important">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:</p>
<ul style="margin:1.2em 0px;padding-left:2em;margin:0px;padding-left:1em">
<li style="margin:0.5em 0px">Users probably want help quickly and this would mean less hoops</li>
<li style="margin:0.5em 0px">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</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="margin:0.5em 0px"><p style="margin:1.2em 0px!important;margin:0.5em 0px!important">Also is Discourse real time / do you instantly get the updates without having to refresh? That would be cool</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p style="margin:1.2em 0px!important">I am really interested in this and would love to help.</p>
<p style="margin:1.2em 0px!important">Sam</p>
</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 3:30 AM, Prasoon Shukla <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:prasoon92.iitr@gmail.com" target="_blank">prasoon92.iitr@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><i>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.</i></span></div>
<span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div>Hi.</span><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
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 <i>phpBB</i>, <i>Discourse</i> and <i>bbPress. </i>I selected these specific forums because of their ease of use, functionality and the ease of getting a forum up and running.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">To summarize things, Discourse <i>appears</i> 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.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Now, once installed, phpBB and bbPress are quite similar in functionality - so I'll just compare Discourse with phpBB instead of comparing with both.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><ul><li> phpBB is <i>very badly cluttered. </i>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 :</li>
</ul></div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div>See <a href="http://picpaste.com/pics/forums1.1394467977.png" target="_blank">http://picpaste.com/pics/forums1.1394467977.png</a></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
That's one single line of information with quite a lot of clutter.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">The topics page is even more cluttered. See this popular phpBB forum: <a href="http://forums.gentoo.org/" target="_blank">http://forums.gentoo.org/</a></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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: <a href="http://discuss.atom.io/t/custom-atom-icon-with-packages/2341" target="_blank">http://discuss.atom.io/t/custom-atom-icon-with-packages/2341</a></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><div>That in itself is good enough reason to use Discourse. But, I'll point out few more.</div><div><br></div></div></blockquote><font face="arial, sans-serif"><div style="font-size:13px">
<ul><li>The one time registration is much <i>much</i> simpler in Discourse. Just take a look at this:<br></li><ul><li><b>phpBB</b> : <a href="http://forums.gentoo.org/profile.php?mode=register&agreed=true" target="_blank">http://forums.gentoo.org/profile.php?mode=register&agreed=true</a></li>
<li><b>Discourse</b>: <a href="http://picpaste.com/pics/forums4.1394468652.png" target="_blank">http://picpaste.com/pics/forums4.1394468652.png</a></li></ul></ul></div></font><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;border:none;padding:0px">
<font face="arial, sans-serif"><div style="font-size:13px">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.</div></font></blockquote>
<blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div></div></blockquote><div><div><ul><li><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:13px">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: </span><a href="http://picpaste.com/pics/forums5.1394468781.png" target="_blank">http://picpaste.com/pics/forums5.1394468781.png</a><br>
</font></li></ul><div><br></div></div></div><div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Aside from these three very fundamental things, there are few other good parts:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><ol><li>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.<br>
</li><li> 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: <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html" target="_blank">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html</a><br>
</li><li>Active development ongoing so we're likely to see some great upgrades in the coming out in the near future.<br></li></ol></div></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><div>So, I'll vote for discourse.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Anyway, if we're willing to discuss proprietary options, then Moot (<a href="https://moot.it/" target="_blank">https://moot.it/</a>) seems <i>really </i>nice. But then again, it's not open. However, Moot does provide both free and non-free options with a very easy setup. So ...</div>
<div>You can explore Moot here: <a href="https://moot.it/prasoon2211/" target="_blank">https://moot.it/prasoon2211/</a> (it's my personal forum).</div><div><br></div><div>Anyway, that's my take on the social help feature. Comments are welcome.</div>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<div><br></div><div>Prasoon Shukla</div></font></span><div><br></div><div>PS: While proofreading this, I realized that this post reads like an advertisement for Discourse.</div><div>Oh well.</div></div></div>
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