There's a lot to say here. Ultimately, there's three things that I think say it best:
1: I think that parsing the HTML of the old forum will be a lot harder than you think. There are a lot of issues to dealing with it. I also think that integrating it into the new forum is going to be very difficult, without, say, wiping out user accounts. Doing that also puts the "historical context" at the far back of the regular site, which is "fine" (maybe even "ideal") but I think I like it better the way it's presented now.
I don't disagree that it would be ideal if we could write our own CMS/forum/wiki/blog et al, but I think we got something pretty good with Invision, and I'm okay with the compromises that we got.
2: The reason we're going in the direction that we are is that even though the wiki is better for the ultimate task of "writing an encyclopedia" -- we have a culture on the site that prevents editing because of the poor integration with the site, visually and technically. In addition, it's more difficult to maintain both, and because they use two separate subdomains, SSL certificates cost more and the infrastructure is more complicated to configure.
If the argument is that we shouldn't have or port, say, the spec pages over, then that makes the case for using IPB even better because those are one of the most straightforward uses of tables. (Although there's some other things, such as the list of video cards, which I don't believe are fully replicated elsewhere.
3: The whole reason I posted this thread was to aggregate ideas on what would be appropriate to post in our pages. I tossed out some initial ideas, and while I think the other part of this discussion is valuable, it does take away from the idea of "what content should be on the site." (Although I do think a lot of that is that there's not an awful lot of that at the moment, which is fine.)
I can split this topic if you'd like or we can post another one on the technical issues, but I will say that for the most part, this discussion will mostly apply to whatever forum software we switch to 7-10 years from today, since our investment in this platform is sunk and we haven't even finished what we consider to be our migration tasks yet. (the images, for example, a great example of how little time we have to dedicate to things like maintaining two crusty old installations of software we didn't even install ourselves.)
1: I think that parsing the HTML of the old forum will be a lot harder than you think. There are a lot of issues to dealing with it. I also think that integrating it into the new forum is going to be very difficult, without, say, wiping out user accounts. Doing that also puts the "historical context" at the far back of the regular site, which is "fine" (maybe even "ideal") but I think I like it better the way it's presented now.
I don't disagree that it would be ideal if we could write our own CMS/forum/wiki/blog et al, but I think we got something pretty good with Invision, and I'm okay with the compromises that we got.
2: The reason we're going in the direction that we are is that even though the wiki is better for the ultimate task of "writing an encyclopedia" -- we have a culture on the site that prevents editing because of the poor integration with the site, visually and technically. In addition, it's more difficult to maintain both, and because they use two separate subdomains, SSL certificates cost more and the infrastructure is more complicated to configure.
If the argument is that we shouldn't have or port, say, the spec pages over, then that makes the case for using IPB even better because those are one of the most straightforward uses of tables. (Although there's some other things, such as the list of video cards, which I don't believe are fully replicated elsewhere.
3: The whole reason I posted this thread was to aggregate ideas on what would be appropriate to post in our pages. I tossed out some initial ideas, and while I think the other part of this discussion is valuable, it does take away from the idea of "what content should be on the site." (Although I do think a lot of that is that there's not an awful lot of that at the moment, which is fine.)
I can split this topic if you'd like or we can post another one on the technical issues, but I will say that for the most part, this discussion will mostly apply to whatever forum software we switch to 7-10 years from today, since our investment in this platform is sunk and we haven't even finished what we consider to be our migration tasks yet. (the images, for example, a great example of how little time we have to dedicate to things like maintaining two crusty old installations of software we didn't even install ourselves.)
Last edited by a moderator: