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ISS is the best forum software I've used

  1. #1
    ORACLE Naturally Camouflaged
    Now when I stumble upon another forum, it feels like shit. I don't know how niggers are still using vBulletin and shit. They are so janky and dogshit. Look like shit too. And ISS is much more performant.

    You could literally sell this shit commercially and obliterate those shits. Yeah there aren't as many "features" but 99% of those can go fuck themselves anyway.
    The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
  2. #2
    Cly African Astronaut [foredate your moneyless friar's-cowl]
    Yea, ISS is pretty cool.
  3. #3
    Cly African Astronaut [foredate your moneyless friar's-cowl]
    vBulletin was jank
  4. #4
    Cly African Astronaut [foredate your moneyless friar's-cowl]
    vBulletin… It came and went
  5. #5
    -SpectraL coward [the spuriously bluish-lilac bushman]
    Nothing beats heavily modified UBB.
  6. #6
    Cly African Astronaut [foredate your moneyless friar's-cowl]
  7. #7
    blaster master victim of incest
    The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
  8. #8
    ORACLE Naturally Camouflaged
    Originally posted by Cly

    In America we just call them SEGA Genesis
  9. #9
    ORACLE Naturally Camouflaged
    I honestly, 100% genuinely believe that dogshit software is what contributed to the death of forum culture. Holy shit forums were fucking garbage forever as features kept getting piled on and things got more and more bloated and shitty.
    The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
  10. #10
    Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Dark Matter [my scoffingly uncritical tinning]
    Originally posted by ORACLE I honestly, 100% genuinely believe that dogshit software is what contributed to the death of forum culture. Holy shit forums were fucking garbage forever as features kept getting piled on and things got more and more bloated and shitty.

    It is. I looked at setting up a forum before, and the options were all so shitty it was hard to believe.

    And it seems with software that as times goes on everything gets slower and harder to use, worse, not better.
  11. #11
    -SpectraL coward [the spuriously bluish-lilac bushman]
    In today's backwards world, better means shittier.
  12. #12
    blaster master victim of incest
  13. #13
    -SpectraL coward [the spuriously bluish-lilac bushman]
    Originally posted by blaster master SpectraL is like 2k1, he liked the internet better when you had to dial into it and moonies hadn't ruined it yet.

    No, "better" really is shittier, in the vast majority of cases.
  14. #14
    Lanny Bird of Courage
    Aww

    Originally posted by Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country It is. I looked at setting up a forum before, and the options were all so shitty it was hard to believe.

    They really are. It's amazing given how mature the space really should be. I liked vB3 and ISS takes a lot of cues from it but there was still plenty of jank there. 3 hasn't been patched in a long ass time and 4 and 5 are trash (especially 5, I fucking hate vB5 so so much). I think SMF is probably the best offering (besides ISS, but I mean I'm clearly pretty biased there) but then that has its fair share of problems and questionable design decisions.

    I'd love to see ISS adoption beyond NiS but there are a few road blocks. On the technical side, I need to upgrade to python 3 by end of year to keep getting security patches which is necessary but it's going to be tedious and unsexy work. Then I want to make the extension system a lot less jank, right now it's kind of kludged together and you have to rebuild the UI any time you add or remove an extension for reasons that improve site performance (resource bundling) but make the idea of distributing an extension that's not in the core repo kind of a nightmare so that's a pretty big roadblock to any kind of third party extension ecosystem. The major PHP BBSs all do the economically smart thing and make plugin authoring very easy in terms of getting something started and distributing plugins, but there's a cost in maintenance (ambitious extensions that need versioning for e.g. vB is a sisyphean task) and performance (we've probably all seen the horrors of a forum where the admin got plugin happy and just threw every shiny looking thing into the config).

    Then there's semi-technical stuff, a few people have gone through setting up a dev environment and it's not exactly a one step process. As far as I know I'm the only person who's ever even tried to set up a production instance of ISS and you need to probably be a professional level developer and/or ops person to do it all correctly. I've been thinking of setting up a dockerized build which I hope would kill both the development and production birds with one stone, but I've never gone though that process before so I'm not sure how much is going to be involved there. Heroku would also be nice for the turn-key installs but I don't really like tieing it to a commercial closed source product.

    And then there's the purely social stuff, i.e. anyone outside of NiS even realizing ISS is a thing and convincing them to use it. Two big selling points in this space are ease of installation and plugin ecosystems, which as mentioned are both pretty weak for ISS at the moment. I invested in stuff like performance, code simplicity, and broad useragent support early on and all of these are kind of afterthoughts for people when shopping for forum software. You have to actually have a forum and traffic on it before you start caring a whole lot about things like performance or supporting lynx or anything like that. Most forum admins aren't programmers and will literally never care about simplicity of a codebase directly.

    So yeah, I think there are cool things about ISS beyond it just being a pet project, but it's going to take a lot of elbow grease before it can be a meaningful competitor to commercial software like vB or large OSS forums like phpbb.
  15. #15
    Cly African Astronaut [foredate your moneyless friar's-cowl]
    Bring back the cuck button, soley for candyrein.
  16. #16
    Cly African Astronaut [foredate your moneyless friar's-cowl]
    And make it so candyrein is the only one able to get cucked.
  17. #17
    ORACLE Naturally Camouflaged
    Originally posted by Lanny Aww



    They really are. It's amazing given how mature the space really should be. I liked vB3 and ISS takes a lot of cues from it but there was still plenty of jank there. 3 hasn't been patched in a long ass time and 4 and 5 are trash (especially 5, I fucking hate vB5 so so much). I think SMF is probably the best offering (besides ISS, but I mean I'm clearly pretty biased there) but then that has its fair share of problems and questionable design decisions.

    I'd love to see ISS adoption beyond NiS but there are a few road blocks. On the technical side, I need to upgrade to python 3 by end of year to keep getting security patches which is necessary but it's going to be tedious and unsexy work. Then I want to make the extension system a lot less jank, right now it's kind of kludged together and you have to rebuild the UI any time you add or remove an extension for reasons that improve site performance (resource bundling) but make the idea of distributing an extension that's not in the core repo kind of a nightmare so that's a pretty big roadblock to any kind of third party extension ecosystem. The major PHP BBSs all do the economically smart thing and make plugin authoring very easy in terms of getting something started and distributing plugins, but there's a cost in maintenance (ambitious extensions that need versioning for e.g. vB is a sisyphean task) and performance (we've probably all seen the horrors of a forum where the admin got plugin happy and just threw every shiny looking thing into the config).

    Then there's semi-technical stuff, a few people have gone through setting up a dev environment and it's not exactly a one step process. As far as I know I'm the only person who's ever even tried to set up a production instance of ISS and you need to probably be a professional level developer and/or ops person to do it all correctly. I've been thinking of setting up a dockerized build which I hope would kill both the development and production birds with one stone, but I've never gone though that process before so I'm not sure how much is going to be involved there. Heroku would also be nice for the turn-key installs but I don't really like tieing it to a commercial closed source product.

    And then there's the purely social stuff, i.e. anyone outside of NiS even realizing ISS is a thing and convincing them to use it. Two big selling points in this space are ease of installation and plugin ecosystems, which as mentioned are both pretty weak for ISS at the moment. I invested in stuff like performance, code simplicity, and broad useragent support early on and all of these are kind of afterthoughts for people when shopping for forum software. You have to actually have a forum and traffic on it before you start caring a whole lot about things like performance or supporting lynx or anything like that. Most forum admins aren't programmers and will literally never care about simplicity of a codebase directly.

    So yeah, I think there are cool things about ISS beyond it just being a pet project, but it's going to take a lot of elbow grease before it can be a meaningful competitor to commercial software like vB or large OSS forums like phpbb.

    You are being humble, like a fag.

    I really do think that if you make the installation clean and easy (and I guess cheap/free), and get the word out, it would get some grassroots adoption. The biggest "forum" in the world is Reddit and you can't do shit on it. People just wanna post.

    You could even do a 2 tier system: 1 base version that is just free to install and has this simple, stable, fast forum functionality with no bullshit. And then if you want additional bullshit then you can pay for the development branch where new stuff is added.
  18. #18
    the man who put it in my hood Black Hole [miraculously counterclaim my golf]
    open source is smexy fuck corporate software
  19. #19
    ORACLE Naturally Camouflaged
    Fuck I hate it when admins install 46 different brand of dildo in your ass that you never wanted
  20. #20
    the man who put it in my hood Black Hole [miraculously counterclaim my golf]
    are you talking shit about new totse
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