What tech stack is this forum built with?

[Vinnland]

Is this forum an off the shelf app? or is it custom? If custom, how is it built?

 

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[chuckstar_za]

Is this forum an off the shelf app? or is it custom? If custom, how is it built?

IIRC there is a site which can tell you - but I forget what it is
FWIW I seem to recall that MJ has a background in coding, so it might be a barebones framework that is heavily customized beyond the normal

 

[Vinnland]

Yeah it seems custom. Its very smooth tho.

 

[heavy_industry]

XenForo - Compelling community forum platform

XenForo is a compelling community forum platform with a premium user experience, reliability, flexibility and security. There is no better platform upon which to grow your community.

xenforo.com

If you scroll all the way down, you see:

Community platform by XenForo® © 2010-2021 XenForo Ltd. Design by: Pixel Exit
The Fastlane Forum is property of Viperion Publishing Corporation © 2007-2022


@Andy Black ninja'd

 

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[Andy Black]

Xenforo, heavily customised I believe.

 

[MaxT]

Congratulations to the developer or the team behind it, because the forum works wonderfully!

 

[Andy Black]

@Andy Black ninja'd

Yeah, spotted after I’d replied that you’d nipped in there!

 

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[Vinnland]

Congratulations to the developer or the team behind it, because the forum works wonderfully!

My thinking exactly. It's brilliant.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

My thinking exactly. It's brilliant.

Glad you think so because I hate it... been looking to switch platform for years! IMO, forum software hasn't moved out of 1999.

 

[Vinnland]

Glad you think so because I hate it... been looking to switch platform for years! IMO, forum software hasn't moved out of 1999.

You defo have the top end software then because others are horrible.

Then you have the new age communities like Circles etc. They suck.

Discourse is nice though too but more suited for support communities in my opinion.

I guess the most important thing is you built a great community of big brains. Well done sur.

 

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[heavy_industry]

Glad you think so because I hate it... been looking to switch platform for years! IMO, forum software hasn't moved out of 1999.

What do you hate about xenforo the most?

Which other alternative platforms have you been considering?

 

[chuckstar_za]

What do you hate about xenforo the most?

Which other alternative platforms have you been considering?

ICQ

 

[Andreas Thiel]

When you come at this from the modern technology angle, then you could also go further and include WordPress. PHP, only MySQL / MariaDB support which is difficult to scale. Software that is tricky to extend.
XenForo minimum requirements seem to tell a similar story: PHP, MySQL

To some degree, I was surprised that modern best practices like microservice architectures and REST APIs never showed up in software products for self-hosters. I suppose there is no market for it and it is really hard to create a product.

I tried to play the thought of what a more modern solution could look like and I kept running into problems during that thought exercise.

A more modern solution would decouple parts of the forum software so that they could be scaled more easily. But that would violate the expectation of most potential customers that they can buy and deploy one simple product.
Maybe a Virtual Machine for the casuals could help to some degree, but that would lead to support hell once they try to do something / anything advanced.

The separate microservices would have to be distributable like plugins in an easy way, but customers would want to use them in different environments (some Google Compute Engine, some AWS, some self-hosted on bare metal servers, others in their Kubernetes clusters). That complexity would be difficult to handle.
What would third party development for extensions look like? Take any programming or scriptiong language out there and a painful amount of people will cry foul (that could probably be solved with language agnostic API design).

Then, that only covers the backend and a browser based webapp. Most users are now on mobile and a modern solution should include a native app.
The customer would have to create their own native app (maybe by customizing a reference app) that connects to the server and go through an annoying approval process on app stores.

It gets really tricky when you think about how you could extend your software across the whole stack (for example a paywall with payment processing integration that extends the native client as well).

I think the current IT landscape does not provide the technologies for a good solution. Personally I think the last decades in the IT world were lost decades.
The big players love it, because it means nothing can challenge their walled garden solutions. But things look bad for the Open Source economy and self-hosters.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

What do you hate about xenforo the most?

Despite their claims, it is NOT mobile first. Most people consume internet content on their phones today, not via desktop.

 

[Andy Black]

Despite their claims, it is NOT mobile first. Most people consume internet content on their phones today, not via desktop.

I find it great on mobile, and I’ve a tiny iPhone 5SE.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

I find it great on mobile, and I’ve a tiny iPhone 5SE.

That's good to hear because I've gone to great pains to try and make it mobile friendly.

 

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[heavy_industry]

Most people consume internet content on their phones today, not via desktop.

Yes that's a very valid point!
I'll test it on my phone as well and see how it works.

Other than that, which forum software would you think about switching to?

 

[heavy_industry]

ICQ

I'm too young to understand this joke. Had to google it.

 

[Ing]

That's good to hear because I've gone to great pains to try and make it mobile friendly.

I only use it mobile. Ipone and Ipad. No issues. I love it compared to other forums. Thats maybe because I m a bit older and don’t like the modern ones (last 10 years developed)

 

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[BizyDad]

I find it great on mobile, and I’ve a tiny iPhone 5SE.

That's good to hear because I've gone to great pains to try and make it mobile friendly.

I also find it pretty easy to use on mobile. I didn't used to; I used to not like the mobile interface. Thanks for your hard work.

Then, that only covers the backend and a browser based webapp. Most users are now on mobile and a modern solution should include a native app.

Why is a PWA not sufficient? Too slow?

 

[Andreas Thiel]

Why is a PWA not sufficient? Too slow?

To be honest, I am personally a fan of the browser based approach, even though the technology aged poorly and could do with a major overhaul. I don't even know if my intuition is correct, but I just think a whole generation goes directly to the app store to search if a fastlane app exists and knowing URLs might be a thing of the past ... soonish.

Then there are the hurdles that keep popping up for webapps, like the same origin policy. I think the endgame is declaring webapps insecure in general, because evil webservers have control over your client app. Where I work at, all kinds of monetization are now tied to app stores in one way or another. I think this will only get worse, so I just assume being on an app store is a must for a modern solution. As far as I know Apple won't allow any app that can be updated on the fly without going through another review process, right?

 

[chuckstar_za]

I'm too young to understand this joke. Had to google it.

There's a Geocities page devoted to it somewhere...

 

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[BizyDad]

As far as I know Apple won't allow any app that can be updated on the fly without going through another review process, right?

Which is an argument against traditional apps, no?

I don't even know if my intuition is correct, but I just think a whole generation goes directly to the app store to search if a fastlane app exists and knowing URLs might be a thing of the past ... soonish.

I wonder if you're correct here as well.

Certainly for new people looking to find new apps to solve problems, this would definitely be the case.

But if FLF was a PWA, then all people would have to do is push some kind of CTA button on the site and it would be "installed" on their home screen, app stores and their policies be damned. Existing fans/users wouldn't need to to hunt for the app, because it's already here.

---

I saw the thread title and thought this was going to be another one of "those" conversations. I'm glad at least some new ideas are being kicked around on this, the 10,000th time this question has been asked.

 

[Andreas Thiel]

Which is an argument against traditional apps, no?



I wonder if you're correct here as well.

Certainly for new people looking to find new apps to solve problems, this would definitely be the case.

But if FLF was a PWA, then all people would have to do is push some kind of CTA button on the site and it would be "installed" on their home screen, app stores and their policies be damned. Existing fans/users wouldn't need to to hunt for the app, because it's already here.

---

I saw the thread title and thought this was going to be another one of "those" conversations. I'm glad at least some new ideas are being kicked around on this, the 10,000th time this question has been asked.

Would love to see something like that, but parts of the issues that I listed apply to PWAs as well and would require creative solutions to fix.

The idea would be that all installations work with one app that does not have to be heavily customized with code changes.

Current PWAs are developed a lot like regular apps where new versions have to be released to add features.
Giving the servers the ability to make use of extension points when a new plugin is installed ... I don't think that is a thing so far and creating something like that is very likely to be a security hell.

I am a huge fan of such generic but extensible solutions, but the whole world is running in the opposite direction.

 

[Bing]

This is the site to use to look at technologies in play, I believe: THEFASTLANEFORUM.COM Detailed Technology Profile on BuiltWith

You will find XenForo on there, as well as vBulletin (which I believe is what MJ used prior to XenForo).

Personally my favorite forum style is old-school reddit, due to the ability to have infinitely-nested threading (and direct hyperlinking to any given comment). That's to say nothing about the content over there, and why I only use old.reddit.com versus their new, slow, tracker-heavy UI.

Despite their claims, it is NOT mobile first. Most people consume internet content on their phones today, not via desktop.

I feel like "mobile-first" has just become a buzzword to mean "desktop-last." Now-a-days "mobile-first" UIs tend to feel very empty to me. For example comma.ai -- why have the menu hidden behind a hamburger button when you have all the space in the world for it?

 

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[BizyDad]

why have the menu hidden behind a hamburger button when you have all the space in the world for it

Because the more options you present for someone to click, the less likely they are to click what you want them to click...

 

[Bing]

Because the more options you present for someone to click, the less likely they are to click what you want them to click...

True, which is why we tell our clients to use a different color for their call to action button (the "Buy Now >" in this case), and to make sure it is above the fold. What I'm really getting at is too many sites seem to do this and call it "mobile first":




More detailed arguments that share my position (even the last two paragraphs) here: Mobile first: why are we getting it wrong?

 

[BizyDad]

True, which is why we tell our clients to use a different color for their call to action button (the "Buy Now >" in this case), and to make sure it is above the fold. What I'm really getting at is too many sites seem to do this and call it "mobile first":

View attachment 43527


More detailed arguments that share my position (even the last two paragraphs) here: Mobile first: why are we getting it wrong?

1. I misunderstood your point. The graphic helped. Thank you. I agree. I'll read the article in full later. I got triggered at the mention of the Acrobat redesign. Lol. So bad.

2. My agreement is still a preference. I've tested desktops layouts with nav and with the hamburger, and sometimes the one wins, sometimes the other. It's good to not have absolute "rules" about this sort of thing.

I think trends are changing and some yrs from now, the hamburger on desktop will be ubiquitous. It has its pro and cons.

Personally, I can't wait for nav and maybe logos to be just a fixed bottom bar, much like how some apps have the nav options at the bottom.

 

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[Bing]

1. I misunderstood your point. The graphic helped. Thank you. I agree. I'll read the article in full later. I got triggered at the mention of the Acrobat redesign. Lol. So bad.

2. My agreement is still a preference. I've tested desktops layouts with nav and with the hamburger, and sometimes the one wins, sometimes the other. It's good to not have absolute "rules" about this sort of thing.

I think trends are changing and some yrs from now, the hamburger on desktop will be ubiquitous. It has its pro and cons.

Personally, I can't wait for nav and maybe logos to be just a fixed bottom bar, much like how some apps have the nav options at the bottom.

The graphic and the last two paragraphs (that I eluded to) sum it up, I think. I can't speak to Adobe since I'm a (MOSTLY back-end) web developer myself. Here are those paragraphs anyway, to tip my hand a tiny bit.

Mobile-first design is great​

While I may have tried to knock mobile-first design off its pedestal a bit, I should clarify that I’m a fan of the approach and think it’s a great way to discipline your thinking when it comes to interface design.

We have to remember, though, not to get wrapped up in our worship of any particular UX solution, because UX just isn’t simple enough to have universal answers. Mobile-first design is a compromise approach aimed at coming up with good solutions on tight budgets and timelines, and it actually does a pretty good job of that, even if it’s not the One True Answer to every design situation. Mobile-first design works best when we understand it for what it is, and when we use it as a platform for progress, and not an excuse to skip true context-specific design thinking.

The opposite is just as true. I cannot tell you how many times my wife (who uses her phone ONLY) can't find a setting on a website, because ONLY the desktop has it visible. The point is to not lose track of the important things to your customer.

Hmmm, someone should write a book about that, focusing on providing value to your customer. I bet if they made a forum for readers to share their ideas it would be perfect...