I'm fully in favor of replacing the forums with something more modern, if Discourse/<whatever we decide> provides the features we need (which is not that much, honestly). The Haxx-hosted portions (main site, downloads, build server, git, wiki, etc.) seem to work well enough, and so I think we should leave them be (except the fossil that is Foswiki - but migrating to MediaWiki/Github is likely a pipe dream).
__builtin ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Tuesday, October 22, 2019 2:59 PM, Austin Appel via rockbox-dev <rockbox-dev@cool.haxx.se> wrote: > On 10/21/2019 9:07 PM, Wilgus William via rockbox-dev wrote: > > > Anyone have a better idea? > > I just wanted to jump in here to clarify a few things. The conversation > in here has seemed to center around things like cost of hosting, > bandwidth used up (which relatively, isn't all that much - especially > compared to what it used to be), and alternative hosting schemes. This > was not my main point I was trying to bring up in IRC. > > For more context, the forums recently went down because I forgot to > update my credit card in time. This has been fixed - not a big deal. > bagder then chimed in with a musing about just having the site and other > associated material hosted on github or something. For reference, > bagder/zagor/haxx have hosted rockbox.org (site, wiki, git, buildsystem, > etc) since the beginning of time at their own expense. I host a number > of other services like the forums, translate, and themes sites and have > for...i dunno...almost 15 years also at my own expense. > > Anyway, my main concerns center around the current state of the stuff > that I host. Frankly, the stuff is reliant on old packages and cannot > be maintained in a healthy state with modern packages. SMF is old and > the forums largely are there for historical reference. The themes and > translate sites are reliant on PHP5 and old versions of Smarty. I'd > like to be able to fix this stuff, but have not been able to find the > time (or frankly, motivation) to perform the rewrites necessary to bring > this stuff into the modern age. I would greatly like to be able to > update packages on the box again. :) Regarding the money aspect, sure > it is a thing and money would always be nice, but it isn't my primary > focus of bringing this stuff up. If people want to donate, they > definitely can. > > As Paul said somewhere else in the thread, the needs to Rockbox now are > definitely very different from the needs we had a decade ago. We have > not adapted our infrastructure to align. > > Thus, the following is needed: > > - Look into some sort of way to archive the forums in a static, > searchable way to live on through the ages, but not require me to host > broken crap (I am looking into this, but if others have ideas, by all > means, chime in) > > - Stand up some new, modern forum software and do some basic set up to > meet the much smaller needs of the community. I am leaning towards > discourse, but the current situation needs to be dealt with first > > - Themes and translate still need to be updated to run on modern > platforms. I do not have the time to do this. The code for those is in > git and should be able to be updated by anyone. Bonus points if it gets > containerised. > > - If others want to look at hosting stuff themselves and/or moving > pieces of this to alternate platforms like github, by all means, let's > see what else we can do that better fits the needs of Rockbox today. >
