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zsolt-ero

Zoho Forum is a pain

in Developing Cinder • 7 years ago

I've just posted to my own thread about Z-fighting and got my own post reported as Spam, thus not visible to anyone, just because I think it has about 4 links to various references.

The other day I had a longer post what I thought to have appeared, but it just disappeared.

The HTML editor is the worst I've ever used.

Oh, and now just when I wanted to click the publish button, Zoho went down for a few hours...

Can we move away from Zoho? For example to Vanilla? Lowendtalk.com is hosted on a heavily modded Vanilla, if there is a little budget for it, I think they'd be more than happy to set up and host a similar forum for us. http://www.lowendtalk.com/

Or if you are OK with a stock install, I can help self-hosting Vanilla. Also, Vanilla supports Markdown out of the box.

Replies(41)

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

7 years ago

I'm not opposed to this but going after it, like all things of its nature, it's time taken away from working on Cinder itself.

I think the reason that jQuery, Cinder, OF, Processing, Pocode, etc all use Zoho is that hosting is (basically) completely painless, completely free for open source projects, and more importantly, and administering it takes virtually no work. In the time we've used Zoho I've gotten less than 10 false positives for spam. When it does happen (as it did this morning unfortunately with one of yours), I get an email about the ambiguity, I login and correct it. We have also had virtually no spam make it through.

I completely agree though that editor for Zoho is unfortunate, and it would be interesting to have a Stack Overflow-style format as an option. I'm open to a discussion, but I'd want to hear from others responsible for administrating a sizable Vanilla forum what their experience has been. For all its flaws, Zoho has been an incredible time saver in that regard.

-Andrew

zsolt_ero

Re: Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

7 years ago

Upon looking into it more, I can agree with you. Vanilla isn't stable, and is slow, so it's not a good idea. On the other hand, Simple Machines or PunBB is, but there might be a lot of overhead managing a forum, you are right. OF actually has a massive Simple Machines forum, and JQuery has a discussion for moving away from Zoho. SFML also runs on Simple Machines

But all these take a lot of times, and while for example OF can afford to run a forum with 4K members, it might not be a good idea for Cinder, at least not now.

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

7 years ago

I can't speak about the stability or maintenance requirements of Vanilla, but I know the we switched to it for Pd-Everywhere and it's been great. The interface is smoother, there's a large set of plug-ins, very few if any errors when posting messages, and less spam than what we were using before. And the images all show up, which might fix that missing cinder logo in the top left. :)

For me, the thing I miss most on this forum is that I find it difficult to convey ideas in code. Markdown really shines in this area, whatever the host. I know that isn't reason alone to switch... as it really takes someone with the time and expertise to manage a big task like that.

Simon Geilfus

Zoho Forum is a pain

7 years ago

An interesting project is going on here:

http://try.discourse.org/

It's made (among others) by Jeff Atwoods, one of the guy behind stackoverflow and even if it's in early beta it is already looking really good! Some really promising features...

My two cents//

:)

zsolt_ero

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

7 years ago

Thanks Simon, this looks absolutely amazing! They are trying to create THE forum platform for the next 10 years. The Wordpress of forums. From Jeff I can actually believe he's going to do it.

But the try link is quite bad, I'd recommend reading their homepage:

http://www.discourse.org/

The downside is that it'll be at least 6 to 12 months from now till they are confident in making the hosted version.

http://www.discourse.org/buy/

Nathan Selikoff

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

6 years ago

Just a little update on this.

jQuery is still on Zoho. openFrameworks migrated to Discourse. Leap Motion is on Discourse as well. Processing migrated to Vanilla.

The state of the hosted version of Discourse for non profits:

If you’re part of a non-profit or educational organization that needs a great next-generation discussion platform, we can help:
For a flat one time setup fee of $200, and $10/month, we can set up a fully configured Discourse instance in the cloud for you. Unfortunately, we cannot offer any support, but we do include one future update to the latest version.

If forum migration happens, these would be relevant experiences to draw on from sister communities

http://forum.processing.org/one/topic/a-new-forum.html

http://forum.openframeworks.cc/t/new-discourse-forum-feedback-thread/13808/39

pizthewiz

Re: Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

6 years ago

I quite like Discourse - the markdown formatting is pretty convenient (no doubt another emacs vs vi), it has nice tie-ins for GitHub / thread referencing, offers configurable notifications, spam banning, and seems to promote discussion. For what it is worth, I think the openFrameworks team hosts their own Discourse install.

Any idea what the data migration options are into Discourse? I'd imagine we'd want to retain categories, posts, content and accounts but ZOHO might not make the account portions easy to migrate right?

One area of improvement I'd really like to see out of Discourse is the search experience. The openFrameworks forum routinely gets repeat questions which I think is always going to be a problem, but admittedly the search experience doesn't do a great job helping one find posts to begin with.

Nathan Selikoff

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

6 years ago

I agree - I find Discourse's search experience the weakest link. I'm not sure about data migration, but I imagine it would probably take awhile to get it right. I think it would be worthwhile to hit up Arturo for more details on the openFrameworks team's migration experience.

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

6 years ago

I agree with @andrewfb's concerns about management. A low-maintenance janky forum that's kept up to date is preferable to a whiz-bang forum that's always out of date. In light of that, I like what THREE.js does: just puts all support requests on StackOverflow. The core contributors are super responsive on SO, the questions show up on Google, it has all the niceties of SO, and no maintenance overhead.

lucasvickers

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

FWIW Zoro's google login doesn't work anymore. I tried linking my google account and got this error about using no longer supported Open ID 2.0

I agree this isn't something Andrew, Rich, or any of the core developers should be wasting their time on. Small task team, perhaps?

pizthewiz

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

It doesn't appear as though Discourse offers importers for Zoho accounts/posts, but a fresh Discourse install can be setup in less than 30 minutes when self-hosted or there are several (expensive) hosted options available directly from Discourse:

https://payments.discourse.org/buy/

I would be happy to help bring up Discourse in a Docker container on Digital Ocean or some such, not because I particularly care for dev ops but because I dislike Zoho ;0)

lucasvickers

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

It appears discourse offers 'advanced' search now. If you hit help when trying to search you see

Also you can select to search via google which gives a search page result rather than a list.

If there's serious traction I can help look into data migration, but yeah someone should ask the OF guys how they did it first.

pizthewiz

Re: Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Previous to Discourse, oF used Simple Machines Forum (SMF) which Discourse does have an importer for. There are quite a few, just not one for Zoho:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/master/script/import_scripts

lucasvickers

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Should be possible to work the zoho data into a format the base import script can work with.

I wonder if there's a way to just dump a data file or some mysql tables from zoho, if we got that guys could develop the scripts pretty safely with no risk of disrupting this forum.

Re: Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Ivick, I solved the Google login issue by going to https://accounts.zoho.com and signing in from there. I only had to do it once and my OpenID got updated.

I agree that Zoho is quite painful, but the search function in the OF forum is even worse. Some sort of StackExchange might be very nice in that sense, although it's kind of a different structure...

lucasvickers

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Thanks Adria!

I'm not advocating discourse above anything else, but I do think the interface looks good -- which is important when it comes to increasing usage of Cinder. FWIW I was told discourse 1.4 would have better search. They are starting dev on it in June. Unless people are advocating the StackExchange idea (which I'm not sure how it works for non question posts such as RFC's ), perhaps we sit tight and wait a little longer.

pizthewiz

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

I agree, I don't feel StackExchange is a great fit as it is really directed toward the question and answer format not discussion as it were, which seems to fit a fair amount of forum topics; RFCs, announcements, work opportunities, completed work sharing, techniques and papers, CinderBlock announcements et cetera.

If migrating all existing content and user accounts is a requirement before Discourse would be considered, it is certainly something we could investigate - I contacted Zoho support to generally ask about data portability, though I'm not sure how motivated they'd be in helping us move away from their solution ;0)

The Discourse search experience isn't a deal breaker for me, I already find myself using external search engines with the existing forum and scoping it via "site: forum.libcinder.org" to find what I'm looking for, so my expectations aren't all that high - my Discourse search experience is heavily colored by the oF forum with duplicate posts, but that could also be a user behavior quirk as much as technical.

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Do any of these forum options have direct integration with git / GitHub? Certainly not necessary but it would make my life easier if we could inline refer to issues / commits / branches etc.

-Andrew

pizthewiz

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Discourse will embed a slug (think Twitter Card) for GitHub repos/issues/PRs when a URL is included in the post content like this:

which can be seen live here:

http://forum.openframeworks.cc/t/compiling-error-in-the-isysroot-and-mmacosx-version-min-flags/18139/2

pizthewiz

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Relatedly, Zoho support got back to me and mentioned that they could export forum content to a CSV file, so it might not be horribly difficult to write an importer - I would think formatting (especially raw HTML) and any forum hosted files would be the real challenge.

lucasvickers

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

What are the components we'd need to consider?

Posts
Post formatting
Forum hosted files
User accounts
Private Messages
... ?

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

I think if the community can produce a working proof of concept of the current website migrated to a newer engine, that would be a big step in moving away from zoho. Getting features integrated like search, github links, markdown, the more progress you'all can make on that front, the easier it is to justify making the move.

I know one other important thing we need to evaluate is the quality of the spam filtering with discourse or whatever other solution we decide upon. Currently zoho is pretty good at this, does anyone know of how good discourse performs in this department?

paul.houx

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Seems like Vanilla has some kind of GitHub integration. Self-hosted version is open source. They can help migrating, too, but that isn't free (of course).

And there is this:

http://profprojects.com/migrate-zoho-discussions-to-vanilla/

I have no experience with any of these forum solutions, though.

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

+1 for Discourse

Bruce Lane

Réf.: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

+1
I really enjoy Discourse on the ionic forum !

pizthewiz

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

A short while back, I did some work to investigate getting data out of the Zoho forum in hope that we could migrate elsewhere. The short of it is the CSV export they provide is incomplete and has bad data, so unless they have some other form of export, I am unsure how the Vanilla folks offer migration service. I have even gone as far as writing a screen scraper which works quite well, but the big hangup remains of message formatting - Zoho's messages often contain HTML/CSS, so where ever we migrated, we'd still have a lot of old world vs. new world formatting and who is to say that the inline CSS styles will even exist on the new forum.

Re: Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

I for one think it would be OK to strip the formatting elements that weren't reproducible in the next forum platform. Although I wonder how vanilla / discourse support would suggest migrating from zoho (I'm sure it has come up before for them).

pizthewiz

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

I'll hit up Discourse and see if they have any suggestions but an arbitrary HTML to Markdown / MarkupLanguageX converter seems like a lot of work ;0)

pizthewiz

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Maybe we don't need a conversion tool but instead we could Mechanical Turk it!

EDIT: On second thought, at around 24,000 individual messages, we would have to offer less than a nickel per message to keep costs under 1k.

chaoticbob

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Maybe we can write an LLVM front end that compiles the contents down to LLVM IR and then write a backend plugin that takes the output plus CSS/HTML descriptors and write it out as type of machine code?

Re: Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

5 years ago

Might be time for a nap, mate. ;)

zsolt_ero

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Free Discourse forum hosting for community-friendly GitHub projects

http://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-hosting-for-community-friendly-github-projects/

pizthewiz

Re: Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Excellent find!

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Looks promising!

What would be the main issues with migrating to a system like this / starting a fresh (apart from the lack of time of those required to make the changes)? ....and the inevitable bumpy landing of having a deprecated forum full of knowledge and a fresh new one?

Cinder definitely satisfies their free hosting requirements.

mottosso

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Hi all,

I'm new to Cinder and and am currently learning my way around the library.

One thing that would help me I think, and maybe others too, is a more capable forum backend. I'm running an open source project, Pyblish, for which I have setup Discourse as a forum backend, and I'd like to volunteer to setting it up for Cinder as well. Our forum is running on bare metal through DigitalOcean for $5/month.

I'd be happy to dedicate my time at initial setup and also have a look at transitioning the contents of this forum to Discourse, if someone is willing to pay for hosting.

Let me know, and simply pass me a login and I'll set this up right away.

paul.houx

Re: Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Thanks for the offer, Mottosso.

There have been lengthy discussions about migrating the forum to Discourse, or a similar backend, but nothing has been decided yet. On the one hand, Zoho can be a pain indeed and a backend like Discourse would give us a lot more opportunities to build a nice community and have additional features like Github integration and the likes.

On the other hand, I am pretty sure it's a daunting task to transition the contents of 5+ years to another backend without losing cross references and links to data and images. It would also mean that all links from external websites to our forums would instantly break. It would be a huge sacrifice to make.

There is an alternative: close the current forums by making them read-only, then activate the new forums and start from scratch. But this may alienate people, too.

Because the forum is at the heart of Cinder's community, the decision should not be made lightly. And I will probably not even be involved with making that decision. But it's on the to do list.

Thanks for your input and offer, "we" will come back to it.

-Paul

mottosso

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Hi Paul,

I understand your concern, but I think they are each solvable problems.

# 1. A daunting task

Perhaps.

I'd expect this to reveal itself quickly, in which case I could report back with a "It's a daunting task" or "It's impossible". I'm offering to find out.

# 2. External links will break

We can solve this.

We can either (A) conform Discourse to the same kind of linkage scheme as Zoho Forums are using or (B) redirect existing links to Discourse a native scheme. In either case, the end user and all external links are preserved.

What I'm suggesting is we boot up a Discourse forum completely independently of this one and have an initial quick look of how much work it would involve. If there is even the tiniest light at the end of that tunnel, I can start copying posts from here to there. Once all/enough posts have been copied successfully, we can have a look at preserving linkage.

Once the "parallel" forum reaches feature parity, the intent is for the switch to be transparent to all end users.

Alias Cummins

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Zoho is a pain - but can I please downvote Discourse. It's even more of a pain. :)

Re: Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Do you have an alternative recommendation? We need to move to something else and so far Discourse is the best option for the cinder community, but of course we haven't actually made the move so should consider other choices out there too.

I know Vanilla has been mentioned but I believe it takes much more manual effort to get up and going, along with integrating plug-ins, not to mention hosting.

mottosso

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Just a heads up, my window of opportunity on transitioning the forums to Discourse is passing. Was initially aiming to have this done by the end of Easter, but might be possible to at least get it started this week, given you let me know by Friday.

Re: Zoho Forum is a pain

4 years ago

Last week I applied for Cinder to receive free hosting from Discourse as a qualified open source project, per the link zsolt_ero posted. I still have not heard anything back, but we do appear to meet their requirements, so I'm hopeful we'll hear something soon. Thanks for volunteering your time; I'll post here when we do hear something either way.

Thanks,

Andrew

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