From: Austin Appel via rockbox-dev <rockbox-dev_at_cool.haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 11:59:57 -0700

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the forums largely are there for historical reference.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.
Received on 2019-10-22