Splitting the freegamedev forums in two was a mistake

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
- ...
...

poVoq

Indeed that is possible, but I think those sub-sub-sub tags and other ideas are unecessary. It similar to Discord "servers" having dozens of channels that rarely get used. What's the purpose of that supposed to be? It just complicates the interface.

If at some point a general category becomes too "busy" you can think of splitting it, but why do it preemptively when there is no need and you can only guess what subcategories are actually needed?

Elouin

poVoq First of all, it seems to be something people want(i would like to see that too). And second, with the way Flarum presents it, it wouldn't really make a difference imho. Like you see all threads, no matter what tag, as default view. Before you see the subtags in the sidepanel you have to click on the parent tag, where you see all threads from that parent tag, no matter what child tag. You could basically have the same structure, but an interface, where its easier to see all discussions, no matter what category they are in. So the only difference to few top level tags would be, that you can sort threads easier. The rest would be the same, as flarum goes the other way round to showing you the forums activity compared to phpbb.

poVoq

Hmm, I am open to proposals on additional sub-tags, but I can't think of any that would make sense and actually get used.

Edit: ah I see your edit above now. But that just seems to replicate the old phpBB structure, which IMHO was never very good.

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