Ongoing forum & community construction works

poVoq

You might have noticed that these new forums are undergoing some renovation works after being left as is for quite some time. This was mainly due to trials with other forum software (Discourse, Lemmy, NodeBB etc.), but in the end I decided to stay with Flarum.

Also see the related discussion on: Splitting the freegamedev forums in two was a mistake

There are currently a few ongoing & planned works:

Add related discussions and keyboard short-cut extensions (press "h")
Add invite-code registrations to combat spam (needs more testing)
Move forum to F-hub.org server (likely in the coming days)
Real-time updates and performance improvements of the forum
Integrate chat and forum with F-hub.org community terms and policy
Move primary domain for IRC network to irc.f-hub.org
IRC account integration with F-hub.org code forge (in addition to Nickserv)
New Matrix and XMPP gateways on F-hub.org domain (docu here)
Moved IRC web-client to IRC network portal page
IRC Chat widget on forum (still needs proper plugin)
Maintenance / migration IRC server and Discord bridges
Better IRC Bot (replace Limnoria with Bitbot)
Different primary tag structure (under discussion, needs suggestions)
Matterbridge Matrix appservice integration (better bridging)
Mumble server with Matterbridge and Bitbot integration (WIP)
Mumble-web in-browser client (broken until I change my router setup)

Under investigation:

Different RSS feed extension for forum (better performance)
Integration with FGD Planet (automatically posts and comments on forum)
Web-ring for open-source game projects?
User donations integration (OpenCollective, Patreon, LiberaPay)?

Together with this changes I plan to start locking the old forums more and more. All the non-active project forums have been already locked and are an archive only.

The new "News" tag is primarily meant for FGD Planet posts and administrative announcements. It also replaces the blog comments forum from the old Forums, although the FreeGamer blog continues to be not active.

Wuzzy

Nice to know there is activity behind the scenes, much appreciated. This totally could add some fresh air into the community again.

If I had only one wish for the new forums, it would be changing the font to a sans-serif font. Because monospace just keeps triggering me. Seriously. This is a discussion forum, not a source code editor. And I'm 100% sure I'm not the only one who feels like this. :-)

Will there be an archive of the old forums? Because it'd be a real shame if years worth of discussion would be deleted from the Internet.

poVoq

Wuzzy can't you just block your browser from loading the font? I kind of like it and got used to it by now 😅

The old forums will be successively locked and should act as an archive, however I can not say if there might be still server issues in the future. A while ago I briefly searched for ways to turn a phpBB forum into a read only html page, and there seem to be ways of doing that, but it's low priority for now.

Modanung

I don't mind the font, but I do think it's a bit big and - mainly - that the lines are too tall; 13px/1.4 looks better, I think. This also mitigates the spaceousness of the monospaceness.

poVoq

Ah and I disabled the Event Calendar plugin for now and replaced it with an "Event" secondary tag. The plugin is not well maintained upstream, doesn't work very well on mobile and in general wasn't used much, so I think disabling it is the better idea.

poVoq

Migration to the f-hub.org server was completed yesterday and things seem to be back running smoothly for the most part. This server gives me full access to run session management via Redis etc, so it should at least in theory improve the performance of this forum once I have configured this and other things that were not possible on the previous shared php only host.

poVoq

Small incident while trying to upgrade to Fedora 38. Need to reconfigure some services. The XMPP gateway is effected a bit longer as I will take this opportunity to switch to Ejabberd (as I need better LDAP support). Edit: and the work in progress Mumble server is also affected.

~~Edit2: xmpp gateways should work again (the one on irc.freegamedev.net)~~

Edit3: the one on irc.f-hub.org is not the primary and only gateway address.

poVoq

I give up on getting the two XMPP gateways working simultaneously. I think I hit some very strange edge case that prevents it from working in this specific configuration on Ejabberd (I think it was working for a short while when I still ran Prosody).

So I will turn off the irc.freegamedev.net XMPP gateway in favour of the irc.f-hub.org XMPP gateway in the coming days. You can just switch over, but remember to configure the IRC SASL login again. Also any history from the old gateway will be lost as I am not transferring the database.

poVoq

New IRCv3 bot it up and running using Bitbot.

It can be invited to any channel (nick: bitbot) and responds to basic commands. Try it with !help.

I still need to configure various add-ons and use it to query the Mumble channels, but it should overall work much nicer than the previous one. You can try it on #botplayground

Please let me know if you have any suggestions which modules to use specifically.

I will also enable the webhook functionality that allows easy linking to Github/Gitlab. I need to figure out if it is also fully compatible with Gitea/Forgejo. There is some older module for Gitea.

Edit: Incomplete documentation of the bot: https://wiki.f-hub.org/books/irc-network/page/channel-bot

poVoq

Took a bit longer than expected, but now the XMPP gateway is on it's new address at irc.f-hub.org.

MAM history is reset and will be scrapped after 30 days from now on. You also need to re-configure your IRC SASL logins as I had to switch the database backend and there was no migration path. Hopefully it will be stable from now on. Sorry for any invonvenience caused.