VesperNet History,
section Macintosh Garden

Discussion Forum

The current discussion forum is the way it is because it is Drupal, and I am still investigating from time to time if it is feasible to make an exporting utility to later import the data onto the new platform. For one thing, the posts need to be tied to user accounts, there must clearly be some sort of ownership here, however it is not possible to do so at this point in time, mostly due to the fact that no user accounts will be exported and imported.

The new platform is so very different in its execution and the way the database schema looks (which I must say, is a massive improvement). Either way, to get some sort of perspective on how it is how it will be, going from point to point as follows ...

Current (Drupal)
More or less a bit of a mess, posts and replies (or comments as Drupal calls them) are stored almost the same way regular nodes are (apps, games, wiki entries etc).

Alpha 1
This is the currently publicly available development snapshot of the site, written in PHP and moved as PHP was updated with new features, deprecations etc.,
It has an impressive feature set and might be open sourced as a standalone forum - group permissions, forum access, granular user permissions, a tracker (new/updated posts) that can scale. etc.

Alpha 2
Now that we have arrived at this point, I'll have to let you know that I hit a wall with PHP and what I could have it do, so around here I decided to re-write Alpha 1 in everyones favourite language, Python.
To be fair, it was an easy choice to make, I did try some of the features I wanted to implement in PHP but could not, saw that they worked great in Python, so here we are - but to get back to the point, the forum. This was sent back in the list of priorities, since moving everything over to Python was important, and eventually I had something that was more of a shell of its former self, so again it got downprioritized until Alpha 3.

Alpha 3
This is now, today. I've gotten as far as to be able to actually tie things together at another level, but due to the state the discussion forum is in, I have the option of either living the dream and write something that interacts with a usenet server, or continue down the same path as in Alpha 1. Let's go with the former option, I've already written a usenet server, and this is the perfect opportunity to continue working on both the discussion forum and the usenet server.

As of writing this, I've already squashed a few bugs, and we can - on the web end, browse newsgroups, create threads, write replies, search and a bit more. The forum software is using what features are available in the usenet software, and this allows users to not only use the web frontend to read / write etc., but also use a mail client, or usenet client to interact with our forums!
I think this is exciting, some might find it dumb, but it is what it is, right?

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