Don't get me started on FuseTalk. I foolishly thought my BBS woes were over when we moved from Allaire Forums to FuseTalk, but I must say they have increased. I can't believe they built Community without global users. Rule 1 of a good BBS, the admins and users should be able to log into all the different Forums without needing a unique username for each! A lot of their marketing was misleading and I feel like we got suckered. I've spent so much time rewriting their code that any subsequent service packs will most likely but more of a pain in the ass than its worth
I totally forgot to mention phpBB as I agree. I would rate it as the best BBS out there from a user's perspective (I haven't the chance to see the code). But alas we are only running win2k servers. Our IS department being the stereotypical MCSEs would have a proverbial 'shit-fit' if we had them do NEthing with perl/unix. I'm starting to agree with you more on the light that a BBS written in CF would be outperformed with an identical architecture in JSP or Perl. On a similar note, is there such thing as a version tracking application? Like take fusetalk for example. I try to document every single change I've made. So when service packs or upgrades come out, I can make sure not to lose any of my changes. Right now I just write it out by hand, but I can see the usefulness of a small database app so I could search for a specific file and see all the changes I've made during certain timespans. Adam Wayne Lehman Web Systems Developer Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Distance Education Division -----Original Message----- From: jon roig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2002 3:12 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: Cold Fusion forum (OPEN SOURCE?) I hear you, Adrocknaphobia... there really isn't a "perfect" forum system out there. (I've been running online forums for several years, most recently for a large non-profit website...) That said, PhpBB comes pretty darn close... and it's because of the reasons you describe. A large developer community contributing code, mods, new themes, and doing code peer review, etc... has created some excellent results. The result is a top-knotch OpenSource project with the extended feature set one might demand from such a project. So... here's my question... Why bother to compete? If all you're looking for is a top knotch opensource forum, why not dive in and contribute to PhpBB? It's a pretty remarkable little project, and certainly worth checking out. Don't get me wrong -- I think CF could really use a high quality OS forum system. I know we'd use it if we could migrate from Fusetalk. I mean, fusetalk is cool and all, but I had to hack the heck out of it to get it to do what we wanted.... and now any kind of upgrade path is somewhat dubious to say the least, given all the little changes we made. I'd contribute code the code that I changed to fusetalk, I guess, but the motivation to improve somebody else's commercial products in a way that doesn't benefit me (or the community as a whole) at all isn't all that strong. Obviously, with CF, it's not that hard to build a mediocre forum system. But building a great one... well, that's another story altogether. If someone does dive into this, let us know -- I might be interested in helping out a bit as well if it's the right project. -- jon -----Original Message----- From: Adrocknaphobia Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2002 2:10 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: Cold Fusion forum (OPEN SOURCE?) Yeah, I think we have two different philosophies on open-source. I'd write open-source for the need of building the perfect application utilizing multiple developer perspectives. (To save from the headaches of rewriting everyone else's) Quite frankly, the 'perfect BBS app' has yet to be written. And I'm surprised. Adam Wayne Lehman Web Systems Developer Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Distance Education Division -----Original Message----- From: jon roig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2002 10:35 AM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: Cold Fusion forum (OPEN SOURCE?) I've open sourced small things in CF, but as for Open Sourcing a big project... why on earth would I want to do that on a platform that is inherently not free? As much as I like CF and working in it -- I do make a living from it -- I'd much rather do my open source programming in a language that presents no $$$ barrier to adoption, a platform that anyone on earth can use, regardless of financial backing. (I created OpenRealty -- http://jonroig.com/freecode/openrealty in PHP, for instance, and it's being used by hundreds of sites...) I'm not one of those little Stallman groupies either... and that's also not to say there aren't little pockets of OS CF stuff developing. I mean, look at CFLIB.org and how helpful that has been to the community. -- jon ------------- jon roig senior manager, online production epilepsy foundation phone: 215.850.0710 site: http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Adrocknaphobia Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2002 11:47 AM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: Cold Fusion forum (OPEN SOURCE?) Chris, I've dealt with UBB, fuseTalk, ezBoard, and the old Allaire Forums. If I can say anything on the subject, it's that NO ONE has gotten it right (especially on the database end). Mike D said a year ago he was going to re-write the old Allaire Forums and eventually open source it. Which, stop me if I'm wrong, is what is being used on houseoffusion.com? But I think I missed the part where he open sourced it. Last I checked in June at cfFun, he said he was still working on it. I for one would really like to work an open-source bbs project. I think there is a pretty high demand for a sturdy open source board, which can be customized at the will of the programmer. I've thrown around the open-source idea with a bunch of people but found our selves intimidated by the legal requirements. You know we have a really great community here, but I can't tell you of ANY cold fusion open-source projects. Is open source cold fusion a pipe dream? Would anyone else be interested in contributing? Adam Wayne Lehman Web Systems Developer Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Distance Education Division -----Original Message----- From: Chris Montgomery [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, December 23, 2002 10:58 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: Cold Fusion forum Howdy Michael, Thursday, December 19, 2002, 7:54:13 PM, Michael T. Tangorre wrote: > I am attempting to to try some more advanced things with an idea I > have. I am going to be building an online forum to tinker with.. can > anyone point me to some database examples? The code side is what I am > going to be playing with but need a good architecture to use.. anyone > know of one I can download? I didn't see a reply to this yet, so I'll offer one to consider: http://sourceforge.net/projects/fbopenforums/ It uses Fusebox, but you might be able to get something useful out of it. If you are wanting to explore how the database would be structured for a forums app, you might want to research hierarchical database design, parent-child relationships, or using recursion with your database. This page is an example of doing recursive joins for a forum: http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/sqlguru/q120899-1.shtml with a follow-up here: http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/sqlguru/q121799-1.shtml Another post about threaded discussion forums database design: http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=1353 with a follow-up here: http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=1602 Some good SQL sites to check out: http://www.dbmsmag.com/index.shtml http://www.codebits.com/ntm/ http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2001/07/12/aboutSQL.html http://www.sqlteam.com/Default.asp http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/ http://www.intelligententerprise.com/info_centers/database/ http://www.databasejournal.com/ http://www.sqlmag.com/ Hope that helps you somewhat. 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