From: Franklin Wei via rockbox-dev <rockbox-dev_at_cool.haxx.se>
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 02:42:50 +0000

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_at_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 the forums largely are there for historical reference.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.
>
Received on 2019-10-23