Thanks Sb for your time and dedication.
I would offer to help but I doubt I am qualified for any position openings.
I tried Discourse once before and was confused but thats just me …… gettin old sux
I’m late to the party, but what’s wrong with a good old phpBB ? This is a highly standard and decent forum engine.
Discourse, OTOH, looks cluttered and closer to Reddit. I don’t like that interface as it doesn’t feel optimised for long discussions.
Hi Bougie, thanks for the comment.
phpBB was not considered because it was one of the forum platforms that experienced frequent security vulnerabilities that I mentioned in the first post of this thread. That may have changed, but its reputation was damaged in my eyes. And its official site does nothing to change that for me. The banner for their “latest” version mentions support for PHP version 7 as one of the top features, despite the fact that the support lifecycle for PHP7 has already ended. Also phpBB is fairly sparse at its core and does not natively support some of the newer features that we identified as desirable, and even lacks some of the functionality of this Drupal forum. Its functionality can be extended, but the third-party extensions would be just another concern for security, and future maintenance support for them is dubious at best. And as far as I can tell it would not be possible without extensive coding of a massive custom extension to maintain our community moderation system in phpBB for automatically handling offensive posts and spammers.
I have made major progress with adding functionality to the import script for Discourse and have tested multiple migrations of the BLF forum data. I’m quite happy with the way it handles some of our legendary off-topic endless discussions and also BLF Special Edition development threads with many thousands of posts.
Thank you for this explanation SB, I hadn’t considered the security aspect and had assumed that phpBB’s code was frequently maintained. That’s pretty disappointing to hear, in fact. That forum engine deserves to be better treated.
I gave a quick look into the possibility of making Discourse look more like an actual forum, but the lead dev doesn’t seem to care : Possible to emulate old-style PHPBB like design? - ux - Discourse Meta
Hi Bougie, yeah, going back to phpBB, I don’t want to malign it either. I can’t say whether there are currently any security problems with phpBB. There are several server OS distributions that still support PHP7 with security patches, as a matter of fact BLF is currently running securely on PHP7 still. But the point is that the constant development churn of PHP always causes massive headaches for web applications that use it if they don’t proactively adapt their code to work with it. I’ve always received the impression that phpBB is usually “a dollar short and day late”. The very latest release of phpBB from November is the first one I can see that claims to have “improved” support for PHP8, but in my experience you either fully support a PHP version or else it doesn’t work, there’s not really a middle ground. And I know from experience here that the additional complication of add-on third-party extensions introduces another nightmare for PHP compatibility— Let’s say that phpBB upgrades its core to fully support PHP8 but we depend on a third-party module that hasn’t been updated for years that was coded for PHP7. It’s really quite a complex patchwork of issues. So if we’re going to go through the massive ordeal of migrating to something different, I would prefer for it to be a complete package that won’t get us into the same quandary that we’re currently in with Drupal 7. And as I mentioned, from a functionality standpoint phpBB simply can’t do what we need it to do either, nor can almost any of the other offerings.
As for Discourse, I agree that out-of-the-box its default configuration isn’t ideal. It should be noted that most implementations of Discourse that you find at other websites are usually just intended to implement a quick forum for an existing website, and as such they usually don’t put much effort into customizing it. But it can be customized, for example I just made a quick change to the CSS of the thread you linked to increase the width of the post content:
Before
After
Hi everyone, I’ve been doing a ton of work on adding features to the migration script and testing it with backup copies of actual BLF forum data. I think it’s now ready for you all to kick the tires:
https://blfdev.site
A few import notes:
- All users will need to reset their password on the test site (and on the final migrated BLF forum once we get there).
- The new forum engine allows logging in with your registered email address in addition to your username. Logging in with your email address is the recommended option to obtain initial access to your migrated account, because the imported username may have been slightly modified.
- There may still be problems with emails from the blfdev.site temporary domain ending up in your spam folder.
- BLF usernames containing special characters such as ä ö ü á é will be converted to the closest regular character equivalent. (The BLF username Brillé would be converted to Brille).
- The user’s original BLF username (including spaces and/or special characters) will appear under the new full name field of the imported user profile.
- Users will be allowed to change their imported username for a time after the site migration to re-introduce the special characters, you can try it now on the test server. Please do not change your username to something unrecognizable or completely different.
- The test migration site is currently running a snapshot of BLF data through 6:00AM (GMT) on 2023-01-07.
- Check for your imported private messages both in the “Inbox” and the “Sent” messages folders. There are a few quirks regarding PMs:
- Here on the current forum, PMs that you deleted do not actually get deleted from the database, and they are still visible in the other recipient’s messages. So unless you and the other recipient both deleted the same PM, it will be imported and visible for you again on the new forum.
- Here on the current forum, your PMs that you sent to a user that was later banned are still visible to you, appearing as a one-sided conversation of only your sent messages. Such one-sided conversations will not be imported into the new forum.
There are still a bunch of minor tweaks that need to be made to the theme and the way the forum behaves. Please let me know how it works for you. Also please let me know if you see any mangled formatting of imported posts (first please check here on the current budgetlightforum.com to see if the original post also had formatting problems).
I hope you like it! Have fun.
Just did another test post after resetting the password.
Thanks! It worked.
I like the new favicon. 
I was wondering if anyone would notice that. :innocent: It’s just a color-inverted copy of the original so I can tell the two sites apart in my browser tabs.
I have noticed some import problems, for example in my reviews:
https://blfdev.site/t/review-cyansky-k3-v2/215886
- Linked images are not supported
- Headings are not supported
- Sometimes bold text (via asterisk) is not applied correctly (for example the second paragraph, which includes a link at the end)
I will have to get used to not having page links at the top or bottom of the page. Just that little date range scroll box to the right. Not sure how handy that will be with large threads like the Simon or Hank threads.
Thanks a lot for reporting.
This is a limitation of the Textile->Markdown converter. I suspect the developers would probably say that linked images aren’t technically supported in Markdown, although it definitely is possible. I’ll try to see if I can parse these cases separately with regexp.
The problem here is mixed HTML and Textile markup in the original post. If the post was using the Advanced Post Editor then the <h2> tags would have been converted to Markdown headings, but since it was using the Simple Post Editor it would have expected h2.= in Textile markup, and it simply discarded the HTML heading tags.
I’m surprised the Textile->Markdown converter failed with that one, I’ll file a bug report.
Yep, that’s a change for sure. I’ve been testing it with those really long threads, and I think it does work quite well. Especially for a thread with thousands of posts, the traditional paradigm of dividing it into 30 per page doesn’t work very well either in my opinion. And another advantage that I can see of the pageless design is that the last post on the page doesn’t get lost/ignored. That is a real phenomenon with traditional forums, to such a degree that some of the more advanced forum engines post an automated shadow post at the top of the next page to the effect of: “UserX posted in this topic on the previous page”.
Yea, I’m sure I will get used to it. I’ve come to like the date / scroll feature in Google Photos, so I’m sure I’ll come to like this. Thanks for taking this task on.
Some pictures are stretched, I’m guessing this is due to the ”Specific Height x Width (px)”
Here if you put 600x600 it’ll limit the larger side to 600, on the test site once imported it stretches it to a 600x600 square.
Does Discourse support signatures?
I noticed that https://blfdev.site doesn't seem to have people's signatures. 
Hmm you’re right, and yes it appears to only happen in HTML (Advanced Post Editor) posts that use a specific height and width like <img src="https://i.imgur.com/UceteGw.jpg">
Discourse displays the image correctly with just the raw link i.e. just https://i.imgur.com/UceteGw.jpg
I could fix those instances by adding another line of code to the importer script, but I’m not sure if that will be a common issue. I’ll make note of it, thanks for the useful feedback.
I was wondering if you would ask that. 
Let’s just say it doesn’t natively support them.
Most of my posts with stretched pictures used the simple editor