Splitting the freegamedev forums in two was a mistake

Peter

poVoq Most developers moved to Discord for this

I'm not sure what to conclude from that.

Does that mean we should concentrate on the FGD chat when it comes to dev questions?

Or does it mean that the time of cross-project communication (read: one forum for all projects) is over?

Greetings
Peter

Wuzzy

I feel like the new forums are just a massive downgrade. This was probably the biggest mistake that FDG has ever made. There are so many things worse.

ALL the game forums are gone (this is a HUGE deal especially because of SuperTuxKart)
The rich category system replaced with only 7 tags
FDG has successfully split the community in half because it runs 2 competing forums at the same time. FDG is competing with itself for over a year now. :(
The UX feels very horrible
The monospace font triggers me
Outright promotes proprietary software like GitHub in login
Also promotes proprietary software/websites with the socal media icons for the profile. Over 90% of available icons are of proprietary software.

The UX thing might be a matter of taste, of course. But it's not just about GUI and looks. It's also about outright missing features. I would be WAY more willing to look over the UX stuff if the new forums had at least feature parity with the old forums. Namely:

Add the old forum categories AND sub-categories (at least the most popular ones)
Add tags for the major games (at least SuperTuxKart, SuperTux)
Let me add my XMPP address in my profile again
Make up your mind about which of the 2 forums is official. It's not healthy for a community to be split like that
Figure out a reasonable solution with the SuperTuxKart and SuperTux forums

[RANT OVER]

I admit I wasn't active for a long time but this is because of this weird forum split confusion. Maybe I'll be more active but it concers me that half of the community won't see my posts.

NOTE: I've cross-posted this forum post here: https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=19376

poVoq

Wuzzy I merged this into a similar discussion because a lot of the issues raised were already answered here.

Edit: You can add your xmpp address to your profile, there just isn't a dedicated field for it. As for the social media buttons in the profile... yeah I was actually thinking about removing those as they are not much used anyway.

ffaf

I like the new forum experience and am grateful to the staff for the — most of the time thankless — the effort they pour in daily.

I agree with you that, subforums (SuperTuxKart, etc.) might be better served with a richer tag system.

This is one of the few libregaming and developing discussion sites, I am so glad it exists!

poVoq

Add the old forum categories AND sub-categories (at least the most popular ones)

I experimented with a richer category system before here, but the Flarum UI does not lend itself well for that and IMHO having too many categories on a low traffic forum like ours isn't great either.

Add tags for the major games (at least SuperTuxKart, SuperTux)

We could add secondary tags for that, but that could get out of hand rather quickly if we do that for every game that is somewhat popular.

Make up your mind about which of the 2 forums is official. It's not healthy for a community to be split like that

Yeah, but I was frustrated with the forum situation as well and was slowly exploring other options (including shutting down the forums all together). Currently I am back at looking at ways to improve this Flarum forum and are in the process of migrating it to a better server that would allow real-time updates and a few other nice things (no major difference though).

Figure out a reasonable solution with the SuperTuxKart and SuperTux forums

Yeah, sour spot indeed, although at least STK has mostly moved to Discord it seems and while our ill-maintained forums might have played a role in this, I think that is mostly due to a change in leadership on their side.

For the ST forums I have been exploring options to host a dedicated forum via a multi-tenant option. With Discourse that turned out to be too brittle to be worth maintaining in my limited spare time, but I am currently testing a hack with Flarum that should do more or less the same via directing it to a different database based on the access url. This would be much less maintenance intensive and we could also set up similar dedicated hosted forums for other interested projects (STK seems not much interested though).

TPW

Is there a possibility to let users create their own tags?

poVoq

TPW Apparently that is not supported due to various performance problems.

Wuzzy

It is SO frustrating when free software communities stop caring about free software more and more and start to embrace proprietary shit like Discord. Why does everyone LOVE to be dominated by the evil megacorporations? Discord is especially bad because thanks to the network effect, once the community grows, it is hard to get out of it later, thus forcing everyone into this proprietary prison. Stuff like this ruins the whole movement, and the evil megacorporations win once again. :-(

A FOSS community slowly falling into the tentacles of Discord is 1000 times worse than FDG's switch to Flarum. Flarum is still free software, after all.

As for the social media buttons in the profile... yeah I was actually thinking about removing those as they are not much used anyway.

I dug a bit into it lately ... It turns out the plugin authors use Font Awesome. And I learned the reason Font Awesome has so many corporate icons is that they add company logos for a fee ... So obviously this creates a massive bias towards those with deep pockets. At least now I know why most logos are not FOSS logos.

Anyway. The feature is still useful because currently this is the way to add tons of links in your profile (although a bit clunky). The profile description is too short for links.

poVoq

Wuzzy I have it somewhere on my long todo list to fork that social media links plugin and replace the options in it with only FOSS friendly ones, but its very low priority compared to other things. If you know some php, give it a go 🥰 Edit: I see you found it already.

TPW

poVoq Sorry if you stated elsewhere, but why use this software then and not something like MyBB?

Modanung

Maybe the long list of icons could be replace with a shorter more generic one? Things like cloud, pen-nib, circle-user, user-tie, bookmark, palette, users, gamepad, key, hashtag, link, brain, robot, dice, images, clapperboard, tv, satellite, piggy-bank, map-location-dot, graduation-cap, cubes, cubes-stacked and diagram-project... to name a few.

And might it be possible to have various subforums that share accounts but with each having its own set of tags?

poVoq

Modanung And might it be possible to have various subforums that share accounts but with each having its own set of tags?

Subforums are not a thing for Flarum. In the model I have in mind for multi-tenant forums the databases are completely separate and therefore no account sharing is possible.

I'll probably set up a common oauth2 provider via f-hub.org, but since Flarum itself can't act as one, this is less useful for existing users here.

poVoq

TPW For multiple reasons, but tl;dr I really want a modern looking and mobile friendly UI as this community really has an ageing user-base problem and if we can't get new / younger people to use it, the slow decline & move to Discord will continue.

In my opinion only Flarum and Discourse (and some less forum like software such as Lemmy) qualify for that. MyBB, SMF, phpBB etc. are all stuck on the early 2000 desktop computer forum UI more or less.

TPW

poVoq The whole idea of using a non centralized community is a concept from the early 2000s if you ask me - even if your UI is the freshest shit, the kids will stick to their buzzed centralized places.
For your target audience - people who care about free licensing - usability might be more important than being able to use the board with a android device. If the software looks good but struggles with the assignment of Tags or Topics, it won't help much.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm glad that there are places for the freegaming community to gather.

Elouin

For those who want a subforum/topic based view of this forum i can recommend to set the tags view as their entrypoint.

Elouin

Imho flarum does fairly well with tags and topics. Like for example a game could get a tag, for example supertuxkart, and the would have their forum under https://freegamedev.net/t/supertuxkart and could link to that as their Forum.

Modanung

Elouin You can only browse one tag at a time though. Topics can have multiple tags, but you can't filter topics by combined tags: Only all STK topics or all Art topics, not all STK | Art topics.

Elouin

In general i would expect that it gets done like its on the Old Forums. So there is a "SuperTuxKart" tag, with for example a "STK Assets" subtag.

But of course you can filter by multiple tags. For example all posts tagged with general and gamejam here. So your example would be tag:STK tag:Art in the search.

Modanung

Elouin Ah, so it's possible, but not through the (default) interface. Maybe checkboxes could be added to the tag list to generate combined tag filter queries.

As far as I know Flarum doesn't have subtags. Only primary and secondary tags, which function the same way. The only difference is secondary tags are displayed smaller on the tags page... and you can set the ranges of allowed tags separately for primary and secondary.

Elouin

Modanung You can "nest" primary tags. In the admin panel you can drag primary tags onto another primary tag and then thats a "subtag". You can test this on the Flarum demo instance.

Edit:
The main difference, if you would want to replicate the old forum here, would be that categories are now called tags, the default view is a list of all threads instead of the tags/categories view and that you can only "nest" primary tags by one level.
So to replicate the old forum you could leave out the current top level of categories there(Community, Featured Projects, Other Project Forums) and do something like this with primary tags:

Developer
- Art & Assets
- Design & Ideas
- ...
Project Showcase & Collaboration
General
Off-Topic
Community
- FreeGamer Articles
- Forums Feedback
- ...
Stunt Rally
- SR General
- SR Bugs & Help
- ...
SuperTux
- ST General
- ST Contributions
- ...
...

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