What is your forum wishlist?
 

I'm strongly considering upgrading to XenForo. It took them years, but certain elements have now fallen into place. It was only "better" than vBulletin in certain ways, not all. Details mattered. I think those details are now buttoned up. We'll be testing it on the dev server within a month or so, I need to finish some other tasks first.

We had been patching and hacking vBulletin for years, and the server, but it's getting harder to do now. Certain aspects like SSL are a quagmire. It's now to the point where upgrading may take less time and costs (but still take time, still not cheap to do [not merely a XF license]).

So ... what do you want to see here? :)

Already, I know of a few:
- larger images
- software download center
- glossary
- mobile theme, better nav menu
- SSL

I know this sort of topic had been discussed before the pandemic, and I need to find those threads again.

I'm using xenforo over at LiveNIRVANA.com and I don't love it. Feels very patchy. It's a couple years old, but still. The grass may not be greener.

As far as SSL, the forum shouldn't be involved at all. Either put nginx in front of it with a SSL cert manually installed, or if you can move to AWS, you can run the server behind a AWS ALB load balancer with an SSL cert attached to that. Server just listens on 80 and isn't even involved in it. And they auto-renew and are free.

For years, agreed, XenForo was sparse. But there's been a lot of advances made in 2019-2022. Some were merely documentation (by users, not XF), others were major adds. For years, plugins were sparse, silly even, but meaty ones have come in more recent years. Now it looks to be a solid platform that continues vBulletin. But it'll take some stress testing to verify that. I won't switch without deep vetting.

But part of vetting is the above question: What do you want to see here?
If we're going to upgrade, it needs to be an actual upgrade. More features, better for our members, etc.
This site's server isn't a standard LAMP, and in fact the site uses more than just 1 server. And behind CloudFlare, due to DDoS back in 2015. SSL is not simple, otherwise it'd have been done years ago, it will break the site if I just flipped it on. Migrating to XenForo may remove that entire ordeal. AWS would add elastic costs -- aka unknown costs, potential to get slapped with unexpected high bills -- and that's not a path we want to go down.

The UI matters to me. Does not have to (and I don't want it to) be a heavy JS bloatware. But not plain simple and ugly neither. Will you port the existing theme? or planning to use a different theme?
The current theme is not so great, but at least is not so heavy nor bloated with useless JS animations. So that's something you want to consider to.

Let me know If you think I can be of any help!


Then don't use them :) Just use a good server (or a couple with load balancing). I personally won't complain if "occasionally" loading is a bit slower in exchange of not having you pay expensive cloud bills. (assuming we are talking about the fourm only? ofc you don't want the portal (where you might receive business, to be affected or slowed down).

Is the homepage on a different system or the built-in portal feature?

Cloudflare also terminates SSL if you weren't aware. If the servers are already load balanced behind CF you should indeed be able to flip the switch with minimal configuration. The webservers won't even be aware that they're being proxied to via https.

At least something to look into.

As far as features: Never really felt like anything was lacking.

Posting Images
A simplified system such as used over at Videohelp, so you can upload directly instead of going through the attachments manager. Their "upload image" button is great as it goes straight into the post.

Using the attachment manager is such a rigmarole that it deters me from posting sometimes.

And the things I mentioned on the other thread. :congrats:

YES, YES, YES, inline images and images in PMs!

(I could have just clicked on "thanks" button, but I felt the need to spam/emphasize on this enough with another comment)

Images are covered. Sample:

This is the post window, same in the new thread dialog, or the quick reply on-page on threads:

Attachment 14736

In the middle row, Upload a File:

Attachment 14737

After adding the image, you can choose thumbnail or full size.

(I may to alter this. Choosing "full size" makes page load speeds bad, and that hurts the site with search engines. Full size is fine up to a point, but it must be thumbnail if too large. The alternative is to heavily compress, and we don't really want that here.)

Attachment 14738

The full size uses CSS to never display larger than the container/screen width, a problem with older forums like phpBB and vBulletin, and others. Pre-CSS era, later back-hacked added (undo code, custom code, add code) -- and it never worked well, and is why it's not used here.

Attachment 14739

Either the thumbnail or the full-sized can be clicked.
- thumbnail opens in a lightbox
- fullsize just expands, adds scroll bars, breaks the site design -- but only for you

Attachment 14741

Attachment 14740

So ... that's it for the images. I'm not 100% sure that is stock XenForo, but I believe it is. TFW2005 doesn't have a lot of custom work done to their forum functionality.

So .... next! (?)

I may pay a developer to do this, in order to not bog down anything we're doing here. There forum may have to be closed for a few days if/when it happens. (usergroup posting permissions would be temporarily revoked.) Spend time on the new features and customizations, not exhaust energy on the migration.

Again ... if.

Keep the ideas coming. :)

Some past ideas that may work now:

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/news...es-coming.html
Workflows graphics
Post/threads bookmarks.
Way to curate for public, also private curation.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/news...r-changes.html
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/news...igitalfaq.html
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/news...s-threads.html
- Big curation project here, never finished. Yet.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/news...capturing.html
- Argh. Forgot about this.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/news...recognize.html
- This isn't on the live forum, but was actually implement on the dev forum. But it is stalled, reason to look at XenForo instead.

... and that's it for past conversations on this topic. :hot:

Keep those ideas coming...

- add option to avoid conversion of png images to jpg

Also part of the above XF forum image system. :congrats:

I'd like to see some kind of better forum search capability. Maybe I'm missing something, bit I've not found the "Advanced Forum-Only Search" to be at all useful. The "Search Options" within it look promising, but the basic "By Keyword" functionality is so poor that I just don't use it at all. There seems to be no "and", "or" or "not" functionality to develop any kind of specificity.

Using the Custom Google Search is way better but still seems a brute force instrument.

My :2cents:

BW

Two things I'd like to see:
1) Better mobile support
2) Embedded videos (not sure if this feasible given that many probably aren't viewable in the browser, but would be nice)

I agree entirely. XenForo has an addon called Enhanced Search, which is based on ElasticSearch 2. There's also some addons to further enhance the Enhanced Search. :laugh: I'm going to dedicated one of our VPS to powering just the search, so it doesn't fight the site for resources. While I hope it works better, let's be honest here, it probably can't get any worse. I'd actually like to drop Google Search on-site. There's a good chance that other areas of the site can also tie into this, to power site-wide searching. Not just front-end only, forum only, advanced glossary only, etc.

XenForo resolves the mobile issue. I'm probably going to use the forum designer that's helped us many times in the past 15 years. Great guy, decent prices, non-foofoo clean designs.

Embedded video is only feasible for MP4, but that is a feature. However, this is an area where we'll also want to offload certain content to other server drives or servers. Filling the main server root with video sucks, gets really costly for those SSDs. I've not looked at this yet.

#

I'm trying to tally up estimated costs for all of this, and then hopefully get some donations to make it happen. Otherwise it comes out of my own pocket entirely, which may cause delays.

The one item on my forum wishlist (been here for 15 minutes, I know) is during the transition, LiquidWeb corrects the site's .htaccess to properly redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. It drives me nuts (not really, I actually have a giggle every time), but seriously, Google does look at this with SEO nowadays. Link juice pointing to none HTTPS links is about half as powerful if it was properly directed, which I am sure LordSmurf knows. :laugh:

Disclaimer: I am not an expert with anything. Things change, humans make mistakes, and after twenty years of sharing my ideas and thoughts online via forum posts, I have yet to get my point across properly. Lastly, LordSmurf seems like a pretty intelligent individual, and I am sure he is more than capable of seeing his way through my following ramblings and taking it or leaving it right where it is. ;^)

Personally, I feel Discourse is the best online forum platform at the moment. Upside, it's open-source, and everything you mainly need is included for the most part, and there is a tutorial on how to achieve what isn't preloaded. There are plugins importing/migrating from vBulletin. You are on LiquidWeb, so you are only one Docker deployment away from Discourse. I am sure you are managed, so I should say it is only one Docker deployment away for the support team at LiquidWeb. They should take care of just about everything, I would think?

The main downside is the back-backend admin and how one plans to host Discourse on their own unmanaged dedicated servers. Discourse does not install the same as VB, IPB(IC), or Xen.

When I installed Discourse for the first time over a year ago, I ended up making $20 the hard way. Google "Is it possible to run Ruby on Rails apps (Ruby extension) with Litespeed server (also handled by Litespeed extension) from within a cPanel user account?" and you will only get crickets. I am keeping a long story short here but will explain further below for those interested. I installed (lack of many better terms) alt-ruby and alt-node.js, so cPanel user accounts could spin up Ruby and Node.js apps, including Discourse, while inside their cPanel user account dashboard. That's how I got started with Discourse. In the end, I had to develop my own methods after 3-4 weeks of reinventing the wheel.

Now, when it comes to spinning up a med-large bare Cloud server powered by Ubuntu followed by a smooth Docker fused Discourse install while pointing only one domain to a single IP, there are almost no hurtles today. About thirty minutes, you're importing your VBulletin DB while choosing the new color scheme for your community. What sent me down the rabbit hole is that I own (purchased straight out with no monthly payments) as many software licenses as I can surrounding my servers and hosting. With the hosting I offer, I own all my Litespeed and DirectAdmin licenses, and for what I paid, I am going to use them, plus being built around cPanel means CentOS.

Putting Discourse aside, hands down, between the paid Big Three, VBulletin, Invision Power Boards, or XenForo, it's XenForo 110%.

I have worked rather extensively with all three. VBulletin is going the way of UBBThreads (raise your hand if you invested $3000-$5000 in forum software with only one developer who randomly up and dies?). That's the crappy part of proprietary and paid online form/community software. They get very big (too big for their britches), get greedy, and either people start passing away, lose interest, or move on due to indifferences to create their own thing. If you are lucky, you at least get the "Well yes, you paid a significant lump sum in 2007 for a lifetime licsense, which we will still honor like we have the past ten years, but our monthly susbscription offering is so much better."

Invision Power Boards, I would only look at Invision Community, or you're basically paying for VBulletin, which would be my second option. It has a nice Admin area, is pretty secure, and will give you everything you want and more without paying a ton for developer fees or plugins. It's a bit heavy on the loading time, even slimmed and trimmed compared to XenForo. The last I checked, it was rather pricey and had gone up for some reason?

XenForo, no bad price-wise, best performance, great with SEO, all the mobile jive, fantastic admin area, coms with tons of out-of-the-box features. It's the community forum software I would recommend.

As for the other paid and open source solutions, Vanilla to SimpleMachines, I have worked with almost all of them, they are good, but personally, I would just stay with VBulletin. My opinion, of course.

I worked my way up from active user, to Pro-Staff, to Sales, Admin, then to THE Admin next to the owner with an online community that was the world's largest forums within the niche (a huge niche), it was known for. We used UBBThreads from 1998/99 (AOL chat room before this) until 2015. It was not my choice, but it was chosen to go with Invision Community. The owner shotgunned it and hired some fly-by-night transition team to "seemlessly" transition close to ten million active member accounts and the link juice created over a decade and a half. One thing led to another, and the links did not connect to the original content, and every member (including Admin) had to reregister for their accounts. People left and went to Facebook and never came back.

1) Seemless transition is a must.
2) Capturing and 301 redirecting your top 1000 links is a must, but every link to content should 301 nicely to its original content, or you are basically starting over and comp pulls ahead.
3) Improve upon what works and do not reinvent the wheel with too much advancement. It only causes deer in the headlight.

For me and LiquidWeb's support, properly transitioning DigitalFAQ's DB, static, and any dynamic content over to XenForo will all come down to one big dump and .htaccessing everything via 301 redirects to its new home.

Continuing My Discourse Discussion From Above

I admin and maintain my own dedicated servers. Initially, this was for my own domain directed towards my primary server, which runs on a Web Host Elite license with Litespeed (the crux of the headache), Cloudlinux/CentOS 7, WHM/cPanel, yada, yada. The idea was to keep the domain as an add-on domain and run Discourse through a single cPanel Admin account. My WHM/cPanel license is for 30 user accounts, and I offer clients cPanel plans with "Ruby on Rails" to pay for everything on my primary server. These clients pay a premium for managed hosting, which I know well, so they get to fly on my red carpet hosting with more benefits than almost any other hosting provider. The remainder of my hosting services run servers with the same specs as my primary but with way more space and servers running DirectAdmin control panels. Plus, this was before WHM/cPanel totally integrated with Nginx, and I like Litespeed/Apache more for what I use and need a webserver for.

Ok, I have said enough, and the above is only my opinion based on my experiences. This being the internet, I may not know what I am talking about. Good luck, and here's hoping all goes as planned.

My biggest wish:

Rework the site to incorporate a proper start to finish howto guide, supplemented with youtube content (ala technodad or lawrencesystems). This site is an amazing repository of information chronicling over a decade of experience however I often feel I'm sifting through @lordsmurf's personal journal more than following technical guide... Vendors, best practices, gear etc have all evolved over the years but without a well curated and updated manual we are forced to forensically piece it together; or worse, ask ignorant n00b questions that get repetitive for experienced members.

I know this represents a significant time commitment but I believe people pay for quality content. Heck, I would be willing to pay a fee just to access this site ad/script/facebook/garbage free.

Beyond that, yes better android/mobile support would be nice.

Thank you for all you do and pursuing continued improvement.

@CaptainKirk

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Discourse is fine for a basic forum, but lacks too many features. There's definitely a demographic for that barebones style forum, just not this one. That said, I do wish XenForo had a Patreon plugin, something Discourse and others do have. As I had eluded to earlier, for most of the past decade, XenForo was behind the curve on features, including (and quite sadly) EOL'd vBulletin version. That seems to have finally changed in more recent years.

LiquidWeb is just our main host, and are mostly hands-off at our request (we'll let them know when we need their help, which isn't often). We have satellite servers (both dedicated and VPS) at Namecheap, KVC, Stablehost, Veerotech, WebhostingBuzz, Jolt UK, EuroVPS, and some others. Plus CloudFlare and AWS. As has been mentioned in the past, this site isn't just a bare LAMP stack on a single hosting plan somewhere. It has more moving parts than our forum members realize.

https isn't just about .htaccess, but far more embedded issues. If we simply turned on https, the forum wouldn't load anymore. That's part of why a new platform is needed. (And what Google wants doesn't matter. We don't answer to Google. Google also changes its mind all the time, like a teenaged girl. Sorry princess Google, we have to do things for our needs, not your whims.)

I remember UBB. Also used Snitz, WebWiz, phpBB, SMF, MyBB, and some others. vBulletin was so far beyond what those others did, at the time.

Yes, agreed, seamless is priority #1. The XF forum will be developed first on a dev server. 301 redirects will be handled automatically, though we'll check Google Console for any misfires, add 301 as needed there. The entire reason is to upgrade the user (and Staff!) experience, Chrome usability, mobile, and a few desired features that need to happen. When rollover time comes, the site has to be taken offline for 1-2 days (Sun/Mon likely), the current server upgrades, then the new site ported over. The entire process should be fast, few hours, but 1-2 days may be needed due to bugs/unknowns. But at the start of that process, the existing site will be put on yet another server, on standby, in case things go sideways. Quick shift in CloudFlare, and we'll be back up as-is. Be prepared. ;)

@newby

Agreed. Something planned is "workflow guides" that tie together guides, posts, software downloads, etc. Curated content, with new connecting content.

Some of this will come with Premium+ type membership, Patreon, etc. Because it will take significant time. That part hasn't been fully planned yet, one step a time.

But I am amused. Do you realize that this site was started (back in the 90s) as my personal notebook, shared with others in the TV/toon collecting hobby community? The freebie Geocities/Xoom/etc sites rolled into lordsmurf.com, and lordsmurf.com was further developed into digitalFAQ.com. I was discussing tape quality, TBCs, and VCRs 25+ years ago online. I never imagined this would get me headhunted, and I'd be working for studios some years later, accidental career. (Nor that health/MS would force me to quit.)

Good progress has been made on this, research phase, faster than expected. :thumb:

I did not but it all makes sense.

Get rid of the "Read More" link at the bottom of every quote. It's normally obvious that the person is quoting a post in the same thread.

If somebody is quoting a post in another thread, it's easy enough to simply paste that other post's address.

I agree, it annoys me personally, but, the I think the goal was for when people copy from here and paste on an external website. Honestly even when I copy and paste externally I always remove the read more.

Also +1 for proper guides.

Example:
See these:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...bc-3000-a.html
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vcr-...datavideo.html
and there is a guy who said "I need to figure how to use my tbc-3000" in a post I saw few hours ago and I am sure there are others I did not see.

@ls, in these comments You shared things that are not so well known about these nor documented.

Why people opened threads? simply because there is no proper (dumped down tl;dr) TBC-3000 guide. Ideally a good guide, what these buttons do, what they are good for, different models etc....

A lot still ask for proper "comparison" of what TBCs do and what they don't. (before and after). A guide with few samples (video not only images) will be amazing.

an additional feature (plugin) that I am think about is " user templates". While it is a bit inhuman and commun in helpdesk/support, it is a feature where you save few ready answers and just import them (from a dropdown in the menu). This will simplify the life of mainly you, but other members who contribute a lot.

That way you won't have to repeat yourself for the 1000th time when someone asks "why do I have audio out of sync" or how what is a frame TBC. I don't know if you retype your answers every time, or copy some parts of them, but I am sure such thing will help reduce time wasted on typing. The downside, it introduces mistakes and inconsistencies just like when you edit something you pasted, sometimes you forget a random work in the middle of the sentence from the leftover of the orignal sentence. (not sure if I explained my suggestion properly)

Now you are in my area.

Unrealistic, not any time soon. You do realize there are entire R&D departments in companies just to work on such a thing? and no, copy pasting that tutorial from towardsdatascience does not give you something that works as you expect. These are toy examples.

+ having extra thread on same topic not a bad idea, because people have different tapes, different projects, etc. People may need to ask regardless of the existing of something close. You want to encourage people to ask! and not shut them up by a bot.

2. I agree with giving people ability to submit, but maybe LS does not want too much extra work of moderating the suggestions? idk. But it is a good suggestions

That is a very invasive feature. It invades your life, analyzes your data, and again, not realistic without using some very powerful engine, which is not free.

For the love of god, no, let us a be. This is a community after all, not an official wiki, not the army. One thing I hate with a**holes in stackeoverflow/exchange is how they are so damn strict about every single thing. Like dammit I want my question answered, I don't have to study 3 hours the entire lit. to provide motivation behind why I am trying to solve a formula (true story, happened to). The word "force" made me angry here. Suggest? yes, force? no. take it easy.

I made a similar suggestion. But this is a forum--> discussions, it is true they end up eventually solving issues, but in a lot of situations it is collaborative effort, not 1 answer. This is not a Q2A website. These are properties of a Q2A platform.

not to dissimilar from the templates idea I suggested. Just it always remain the same, no possibility to edit once on the go if needed.

Something like up voting (like Reddit) to help users identify useful posts. That's what the Thanks option is, I guess. But hopefully the posts/comments with more ups get found first in the search tool.
The thanks button exists. You are looking for a search tool that perform weighted search in every comment?. In the massive DB of this website, you will spend as much time looking for info as the time you will spend digitizing.

The cost of your suggestions (if you want them functional, not just there to say hey, these are implemented) is few thousand dollars and crazy amount of time. The sites you see these features at are multi-million companies. Not broke hobbyists spending spare money on video.

Your suggestions are creating a hybdrid sof, reddit with gmail editor, netflix search and good only knows what else: the meme in attachement really describes the outcome of these suggestions. Attribute SOF, reddit, etc, to the animals (at random).

Get off the internet a bit. You seem to very attached to those (un)fancy things Microsoft and google keep throwing in everything.

Let's keep the wishes feasible. It's LS/dfaq wishlist, not santa Wishlist ;)

All good stuff, replying to all... :)

I need to see an example. I never get that. However, I know what causes it (Tynt Tracer), and have (at least for now) removed it. It's somewhat of a byproduct of a different 'net era.

Correct.

Time. Easy to ask it be spent -- especially when it's not your own. Thus is the nature of free online help. We form communities, do what we can for others. What we can.

To an extent, this was by design. Less so now. Curation needed. But still, new threads wanted, engaged two-way comm wanted.

This was always planned, just not implemented. But it really needs to be now.

Copy/paste often. But the biggest issue is when newbies get confused. Or hostile, or stubborn, which also happens. Why confused? Because the info has changed. I've been online for decades. New items came along, some decayed badly. For example, the HR-S9600/9800 were some of the best VCRs, period. In the 1990s, and the 2000s. But as the 2010s wore on, those started to break down, the infamous DD problems. The mid/late 2000s also saw some of the EOL decks that are discussed far less (because many, many posts were made before those existed). So, again, curation.

I don't get tired (as much) to re-explain why both TBCs are needed.
But I do get tired of having to tell somebody (for example) that "no, not any AVT-8710" and "yes, great, but what you're reading is from the 2000s, not the 2010s when the black models existed".
New info came along.
That in turn, makes folks that that the opposite of new=old (NO! LEGACY!), and thus anything old = poopy bad.

This is somewhat already implemented in the new setup. :congrats:

Editing isn't allowed. Why? Because people will maliciously destroy conversations, by effectively deleting the content. I've seen this on forums, where a person edited 100s of posts going back years, and good info was lost. They had a meltdown or temper tantrum of some sort.

I wish. I hate having to read a post to know what it's about. "Help me newbie plz" is a terrible worthless topic. Even with big warnings and rules, people don't heed it. What will happen is members won't answer it.

In theory, great idea. But the problem is most people never mark as solved. So it'd fall on Site Staff, me, to mark as solved. Just extra busy work. This has been tried in other places, and it never worked.

Probably not. If you allow users to dump in variable text like that, it can be misused by spammers.

VH used to have a profile spot for computer/misc specs, where you could leave those details. But it was never used, or became dated. Very often, a person fills it out once, then never revisits it.

That's the thanks. :wink2:

The problem here is that it's gamed. So often times, downvotes are removed, merely tally upvotes for the best threads. However, another problem occurs: only the oldest posts are "best" even if not at all best anymore. It also gives the users too much control over "liking" stuff they may not understand, or "liking" for a nonsense reason ("he has a great username!") Again, this is a curation issue, and curation needs some expert hands.

Correct.

Correct. I want to use the site too, not just be the janitor.

I can't stand that site. The rules are ridiculous. They actively try to shut down conversations. I don't understand the point of even having a community. But what we ask isn't so draconian: concise, decent question, aka Jeopardy style questions. Not "VCR help plz, newbie here". I already don't care. You suck because now I have to edit it to comply with searching. So my free time will be spent fixing the post, not answering it. I'll circle back around later, maybe.

And FYI, that's already having to be spent. Specifically my time, my money. :(

Now, now, be nice. I did ask for all users to give their wishlists. ;)
Some wishes may be granted. :cool:
Some not.

Sorry I did not mean it in a rude way as in ordering you "give me your time, write me a guide". I know it takes time, I just meant it is already gonna be spent, so maybe spend in a more organized way (more organized -> in terms of readability)

For example the PAL/NTSC switch thing was mentioned few times. I am certain. So maybe instead of writing an answer in the forum. Create a page/wiki entry/glossary page or whatever it is called depending on the platform, edit quickly when someone asks for a new information. and just reply this wiki entry : <url> has been edited to answer your question.

I am willing to take some time, gathering up the information you wrote in various threads on TBCs (Like don'ts and DO's, use UPS, tbc-3000 generations, some photos of the inside, etc) and compile them in some organized articles (one per specific device) or something, I can do it as draft for you then you can approve it, edit, publish it yourself. if you want me to do it let me know :)
(though this might end up making you the " janitor" as you said in the previous comment lol)

Interesting did CMS already have it? or did you invest in it as a plugin/add-on?

Now that I read some of my comments, I realize maybe I sounded offensive a bit, @ThumperStrauss I am very sorry, I did not mean it, suggestions are ofc welcome, as LS said. But I just meant to be realistic a bit as some are really demanding as I explained. People having such features do generate huge income from their websites, dfaq is the opposite, it does not generate money, money is spent on it...

Lol, thing is, they have "how to ask a good question" guides on most SE network sites. I commonly heard this sentence from a couple of good teachers/professors I had "If you have a question ask, don't be afraid, there is no such thing as a bad question". These professors were right imho. SE approach is not the most pedogeological, but it works to build some searchable and well structured knowledge base entries, but it is flawed imho.

There is a learning curve to just ask a question. Video has already a huge learning curve. Imposing another learning curve just to ask the question, to be able to access the second learning curve about video will make things complicated for users who are barely trying to keep up with TBC, analog video, post-processing, too much to unpack.

Sorry to hear... Sad... No one ever suggested to sponsor the website or something?

I know. :)

Nice. Do it. :)

I've been on both sides of that issue. SE tries to be a true knowledge base where every question has a single, definitive answer, so duplicate questions are necessarily culled. Often the moderators get it wrong, and often they will close an exploratory-type question before helping the submitter get on the right path. Sometimes they care a little too much about curating that knowledge base to perfection. The perfect is the enemy of the good, so often the moderators are their own worst enemies.

Of course the extreme opposite of the "knowledge base" philosophy are forums where users are banned for resurrecting old threads when new information becomes available.

I think the art and science of video digitization has progressed to the point where a little more knowledge curation would be beneficial. So I like the wiki idea.

Dynamic mentions. I assume the new platform already has it?

"@X", X becomes a url to profile + user gets notified like when getting a PM ("userY has mentioned you in thread: <url of thread>")
But with this features, you (lordsmurf in particular ) will get +100 new notifications daily. So it would be great if there is a per user setting that allows each user to disable getting notifications when mentioned.

Also, It does not bother me personally, but maybe other users want WYSIWYG editor? I personally like it this way. It does not get messy when I paste here something I copied from outside (no weird grey background is kept, etc) + I can write drafts anywhere with any editor. WYSIWYG is a bit less portable/universal. Format is not always copiable, at least not outcome may not be 100% similar.

Yes on the @mentions (@lordsmurf, etc), and I need that especially. You also get notified of likes, which can help alert you to a conversation you may have forgotten about. I've wanted these features for years, but the vBulletin plugins were too buggy. It's core to XenForo. Notifications are separate from PMs/Conversations, so I wont go nuts.

Something that doesn't exist on XenForo, which I really need for my sanity, is the ability to curate PMs. Merging, splitting, like posts/threads. Nothing exists here, nothing is core. There have been many requests for it. Perhaps this is something you can help focus on? Care to learn XF? Now, PMs are threaded in XF. But when you import, folders are lost (OMG!!!), and the imports are not threaded. I lose track of stuff too easy (9 times out of 10, if you don't quote earlier PMs, I have no idea we're talking about anymore), as my PM and email boxes are flooded. I literally have more PMs than every other member on this site combined. :eek:

XF is WYSIWYG.
vB was WYSIWYG as well, until Chrome. It's still WWSIWYG in Firefox.
But note that extra formatting like fonts is disallowed.

This is progressing as planned. :)

As a re-new member here, working on my AG-5710 restoration project, I've found a few challenges that probably could be repaired with some forum improvements:

1) It's incredibly hard to find certain things, if you don't already know they exist.

Here's an example: Quasipal created a half-hour training video on addressing Panasonic K Mechanism issues. I didn't know that existed. And just now, I went looking for it and had a hard time (because I didn't remember his user name among other things)

FYI, the link is buried in this post: https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vcr...e-loading.html

* What if we could auto-collect all links to youtube and youtu.be and other video sites?
* What if search included date ranges (including "before mm/dd/yy")

2) Some posts and threads and comments have great value. A voting system allows readers to highlight such content... and a search that prioritizes such things would keep those in the limelight.

3) In this very thread are valuable links to lists of great guides, workflows etc... those lists have never made it into the FAQ or Guides section. Let's do it ;)

4) I've been around online communities for a VERY long time (1985 :) )... I'd suggest that this site is a great example of a community that would benefit from BOTH user-contributed discussion and best-practice archives/content. Implication: besides the forum system, some kind of user-editable wiki system or other way to maintain indexed, searchable, editable content would have great value.

On another topic: if you still are struggling with SSL, two things to consider:
- ACME SSL certs are pretty nice. Set up properly, they auto-update and are no cost.
- HAproxy is an open source gateway that presents a uniform SSL interface to the outside world, while forwarding a wide variety of traffic to internal systems that may range from outdated-SSL to not-SSL-at-all. VERY nice even internally -- I no longer get complaints from my web browser when accessing the web GUI for my old switches and such.
- (CloudFlare has already been mentioned. Yep, it works.)

Final thought: anybody who runs a non-profit (501c3) ought to consider DreamHost for hosting. They donate one high end account to any nonprofit. Unlimited space, domains, sites, databases, etc etc. Includes cloudflare, SSL and more. And great tech support. I gladly moved there from HG... and pay for a personal acct as well for all my other stuff.

Thanks for your input. :)

The new site will use ElasticSearch 2.0, no more Google, no more weak site search.

Curation will fix the FAQ/guides situation.

A wiki is part of the update, but the content adds will be by Site Staff only, maybe a few other members that are granted permissions. It will require too much moderation otherwise. A goal of the new site is less admin work needs, not more.

SSL seems to be working fine now, but it was a huge PITA. Some stuff is still broken, but nothing essential. The new site should be fine.

DreamHost was one of the worst hosts out there for at least 15 years, until a few years ago. Now it's really neither good nor bad, very neutral. We have mixed feelings about donating hosting, it skews reviews on quality of services, and hosts too often use the freebie recipient as a reference of why they're a good host. Very circular, very shady, dupes the masses. In fact, all the reviews you see online are the standard fake "top 10" hosting reviews, pure affiliate sites.

I get it on the "skews reviews" thing. In this case, they NEVER ask us to do a review. They simply donate the account. And in fact, we've never done a review. This is one of my only public mentions ;)

BTW, the link you provided doesn't do what you think. Went to a marketing site?!!

It's an older auto-link, and probably broken. Since new site coming, not worth fixing.