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General discussiongogie forum software (etc)(27 posts)(27 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted February 27, 2018
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Posted February 27, 2018
There was a response somewhere as it came up in the "6 gogers went to Poland and discovered beer towers" tread but they seem to be against it.

From someone who deals with forum software daily, I have to admit that finding a software that supports over 1k subforums would be an issue. I know the largest we support is about 250 and that's with a fair amount of internal fixing.

edit: I know with our clients, many of them have issues understanding vbulletin. We have a grand total of 12 installs of vbulletin. Had more but almost all have been converted to something else. It's also a target for hackers since it sits at the top of the paid forum software heap.
Post edited February 27, 2018 by drmike
Posted February 27, 2018
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Fairfox: is it feasible for gogie to move their forum software to paid models (i only kno of vbulletin bu uut thar must be other 'specific' paid-for software ) or does teh gogie user account/galaxee integration mean they are screwed an' have to rely on their own coders for teh entire site, forums an' all ( ie theyre screwed, lol) ?
Well the CD Projekt Red forums use paid software. They use vBulletin, which seems to integrate with the GOG accounts just fine.

In a lot of ways paid software would be way better than what we have now. But paid software also offers less control and customization typically then what you can create in house with your own developers. So GOG would likley have to remove some current forum features (like showing the wishlist on avatar hover, etc.)

The amount of sub forums may also be an issue. But one could argue they could probally be removed anyway as most don't get much usuage. However, you have to account for possible future growth.
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Fairfox: woulld you welcome a change? ooor do you liek status quo, as is? or would you be happy if they were scrapped in teh altogether? if so woiuld you prefer an archive fooor old info/ help or just GONE? (which does sound xtreme, granted)?
I would support paid software if it means we can get something much better far quicker. And if that means using paid software only for a few years while GOG works on an improved custom solution then so be it.
Post edited February 27, 2018 by BKGaming
Posted February 27, 2018
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BKGaming: I would support paid software if it means we can get something much better far quicker. And if that means using paid software only for a few years while GOG works on an improved custom solution then so be it.
Importing the database from a non standard install into something like vBulletin would be a pain as well.

It's not something that could be done first attempt. Too easy to mess things up.
Posted February 28, 2018
I love the uniqueness of GOG forums TBH, even though it's somewhat primitive.
Posted February 28, 2018
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drmike: There was a response somewhere as it came up in the "6 gogers went to Poland and discovered beer towers" tread but they seem to be against it.

From someone who deals with forum software daily, I have to admit that finding a software that supports over 1k subforums would be an issue. I know the largest we support is about 250 and that's with a fair amount of internal fixing.

edit: I know with our clients, many of them have issues understanding vbulletin. We have a grand total of 12 installs of vbulletin. Had more but almost all have been converted to something else. It's also a target for hackers since it sits at the top of the paid forum software heap.
Would a combination of wiki and forum work? Ie not having 1k+ sub forums, have a wiki for useful game information (savegame locarions, bugs etc) which users could add additional info too. Then the forum could be simplified down to a few sections, as let's face it, only general discussion is really used.
Posted February 28, 2018
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drmike: From someone who deals with forum software daily, I have to admit that finding a software that supports over 1k subforums would be an issue. I know the largest we support is about 250 and that's with a fair amount of internal fixing.
Why is that? From a technical standpoint, what's the difference between 250 subforums and 250,000 of them? The front end makes an API call to the back end, gets an array of subforums, displays them as a list of links. (I'm oversimplifying, of course, but the idea is the same.) Clicking on one of them triggers another API call, this time with the threads (with pagination or otherwise). Clicking on a thread is does the same.

Where's the bottleneck here? The database? Surely this problem has been solved before. Much heavier, and more data intensive sites with significantly more complex structures are all over the place. So why is forum software generally stick in the 2000s? Is it because forums are a dying (or dead) breed and nobody wants to put in any dev time?
Posted February 28, 2018
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USERNAME:drmike#Q&_^Q&Q#GROUP:4From someone who deals with forum software daily, I have to admit that finding a software that supports over 1k subforums would be an issue. I know the largest we support is about 250 and that's with a fair amount of internal fixing.
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Well with some paid software it's likely more of a limitation within the software itself, some probably hardcode a max limit. However, you would have a greater strain on the server resources with 1000's of sub forums with lots of users posting in each vs a few boards. I don't see why the database wouldn't be able to handle it though.
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BKGaming: I would support paid software if it means we can get something much better far quicker. And if that means using paid software only for a few years while GOG works on an improved custom solution then so be it.
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drmike: Importing the database from a non standard install into something like vBulletin would be a pain as well.

It's not something that could be done first attempt. Too easy to mess things up.
Simple solution is to create a new table / tables in the old database for the new forum or even create a new database completely and start fresh. We really don't need to preserve what is here.
Post edited February 28, 2018 by BKGaming
Posted February 28, 2018
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Posted February 28, 2018
At this point, I wouldn't even be mad if they nuked everything and started from the ground up, and this is not something I would have found myself saying a year ago. The issues are never fixed, they only keep getting worse by the month. I can understand this place being extremely low-priority, but I wish they'd at least, if NOTHING else, have some form of visible, equally-distributed moderation. The whole history of what's gone on here and how we got to this point is just disheartening. I feel like watching how the community is treated (or rather, isn't treated) has led to me buying a lot less from the store and going to Steam or Humble instead. I know GOG's probably never going to feel this impact or care, and that's fine, but I find myself more supporting them from afar only because they're the biggest/one of the only stores to focus on/even offer DRM-free games and no longer because I feel like can get behind the company itself.
From what I've been able to glean from what I've seen, I don't think GOG is ever going to be able to fix anything regarding the forum or even the website on the whole until they fix whatever management/communication issues they seem to be so desperately suffering from. Maybe appoint somebody to oversee that kind of thing or put a better system in place, I don't know. I just know it's awful from what I'm looking at.
Post edited February 28, 2018 by zeogold
Posted February 28, 2018
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USERNAME:drmike#Q&_^Q&Q#GROUP:4From someone who deals with forum software daily, I have to admit that finding a software that supports over 1k subforums would be an issue. I know the largest we support is about 250 and that's with a fair amount of internal fixing.
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The bottleneck comes from the main display page: the DB must be accessed for every forum, since it is showing every forum all at once. Add, too, to the fact that the viewer actually has to display all those forums at once. Given the amount of formatting etc, the customer will feel it in their browser.
Posted February 28, 2018
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kohlrak: The bottleneck comes from the main display page: the DB must be accessed for every forum, since it is showing every forum all at once. Add, too, to the fact that the viewer actually has to display all those forums at once. Given the amount of formatting etc, the customer will feel it in their browser.
No, that doesn't sound right at all. Open a dozen dabs in your browser with Amazon (or another big site) in each of them and you won't notice any slowdown. Forums are usually quite a bit less heavy in terms of load than stores are (less images, etc.) so I can't possibly imagine the bottleneck being the browser.
Post edited February 28, 2018 by Alaric.us
Posted February 28, 2018
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kohlrak: The bottleneck comes from the main display page: the DB must be accessed for every forum, since it is showing every forum all at once. Add, too, to the fact that the viewer actually has to display all those forums at once. Given the amount of formatting etc, the customer will feel it in their browser.
Do what?

Nah that wouldn't be an issue. For one you wouldn't show all of the boards at one time in one long page. You would basically index and then make them searchable just GOG does now so you are only loading a few at a time based on what you are looking for. That or even the worse forum software would likley have pagination where only a set number of boards show at once if you have that many boards (which would be a lot more than what most forums will have). With most forum software you can even hide boards from view or sub boards and then just directly link to each board which GOG can do via Galaxy or via each game in the library page.

And as Alaric said even if you have thousands of boards, you aren't going to have huge images or stuff like that to load (it's mostly going to be text) so even with a few thousand boards being loaded via a single page it should be pretty quick if you have a fast host. As how fast the database can be accessed is going to depend quite a bit on server resources. Such as shared hosting vs dedicated hosting. Shouldn't be an issue for a site like GOG.
Post edited February 28, 2018 by BKGaming
Posted February 28, 2018
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BKGaming: The amount of sub forums may also be an issue. But one could argue they could probally be removed anyway as most don't get much usuage.
I don't know about removing them. Whenever I have run into any problem with a GOG game, the first thing I do is to check the corresponding GOG forum. They have never failed to provide the solution. I consider the GOG forums an invaluable resource, next to pcgamingwiki and STEAM forums.
Posted February 28, 2018
For record, a few days ago saw a post on facebook, that CDPR/GOG are hiring web developers.
And PHP was mentioned in the post.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussiongogie forum software (etc)(27 posts)(27 posts)
(27 posts)