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Tony Henrich wrote:
I asked the other day what forum module the forums are using and was told it's the core forum module with some bug fixes from the corp. Now my question is if the the core forum module is what the corp is sponsoring and using, why would developers spend time maintaining another forum module? When AF was acquired, the corp said it would be switching to AF for the forums. It never happened and I have no idea what's the corp's position now on AF. I also made the comment about why splinter volunteer developers' work on two competing forum modules instead of joining forces on one module and making it awesome. I only saw AF in action at active module's support forum some years ago and it looked much better the core forum at the time.
The Core forums module hasn't seen any public activity since 12/5/2011 and even than that was code that never saw the light of day.
https://dnnforum.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets
It hasn't been, and will never be developed as a public module again.
ActiveForums on the other hand is continually getting updated, so definitely go that route.
Corp chose not to upgrade the forums here because they couldn't implement the functionality (my opinion) within their EVOQ Social discussion thread, and they weren't willing to invest the time to convert to ActiveForums (even though I told them I could help them with that).
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Joined: 12/15/2008
Posts: 838
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cathal connolly wrote:
that's not quite correct, the corp is not sponsoring the forums module - what I posted on the other thread is:
"Both ActiveForums and the old core Forums module are open-source projects, and not something that the Corp controls. There is sometimes confusion with this as the main (really only) core forums developer was Chris Paterra (building off Tam Minh's earlier work) and he is a DNN Corp employee - however Chris worked on the forums in his spare time and he is no longer interested in developing it. ActiveForums has already been forked (project is somewhere on github) and I would expect the old "core" forum to end up similarly getting new life in a fork.
FYI dnnsoftware.com runs the core forum with a few bugfixes we made (that we will contribute to anyone who takes on the forums project)"
Regarding AF, our original intention was to make it an opensource project and then contribute to it and move these forums to it - however some analysis showed this would be substantial work and we simply didn't have the resources to do so in a timely fashion (so made the source available so people could fork). As such we simply fixed a few issues on these forums that we see in the eventlog. If we need additional forums functionality, we'll have to decide if we contribute it to the forums project or contribute to the active forums fork. BTW the active forums fork is https://github.com/jbrunken/ActiveForums - I'm sure Jason would welcome contributions.
I meant by sponsored is the corp uses the core forum on its website and I think it's the one available during DNN installation, and not AF. AF was acquired in Feb 2011 so after two years and AF is not used, it's implied the corp stopped considering it.
Well.. Which is a better forum module, the core or AF? I have seen people asking for AF. If the work to migrate from core to AF is substantial, why doesn't the corp make the forums data available to the public and let volunteer developers do the conversion. Forking the source only doesn't solve everything. Make the data available the same way like StackExchange does, unless the corp is saying the data is their own property. OK, make a subset of it available as sample data and the developers can work off that. The conversion requires both the source and data.
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I wouldn't use DNN's use of the module as an indication of which way to go. To illustrate why you shouldn't focus too much on what DNN Corp thinks or does: they've substituted the old Blog module for Ventrian's news articles. This happened before I released the update to the blog module. I can understand they didn't want to use the old blog module. But now they're stuck on this other module and migrating back is going to be tough. And at the end of the day, they'd rather pump a new feature into DNN than devote countless hours perfecting this bit. It's totally understandable. But it means you should no longer look at this site as the showcase of what you can do with DNN Platform (Community Edition). As has been stated over and over again in this thread: DNN Corp has gone its own way.
If they find the core forums the best, so be it. From what I know, though, they'd love to move over to AF but the migration is proving to be a lot of work. I, personally, prefer AF. And I think "the community" is feeling the same way given that AF is actively being developed, whereas the old forums have been all but abandoned. The only reason you're not seeing daily updates on the forums stuff is that it is a big beast. I.e. lots of code, and hence lots of work. And given its age, I'd guess code refactoring is consuming a lot of time.
Peter
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Tony Henrich wrote:
"Heyhey. So this is where the forums are. Cool. I found them again."
Did you think the forums were gone or did you have a hard time finding them? Some people were complaining about how the forums are buried in the new site. You seem to be a proof!
Hi Tony. I have come to this site a few times since the renewal, and couldn't for the life of me find what I was looking for. As I'm an impatient man, I just moved on. So, yes, I am proof of what has been said before about this. My remark was meant as a cheeky confirmation of this.
Peter
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Joined: 1/31/2005
Posts: 771
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I think Chris is probably correct. The forums module is not being updated or replaced here because it could not be integrated into the social discussion thread concept very easily. This is true, social threads and forums are two completely different beasts with only a visual similarity. This is probably also the reason why most of the support has moved to modules like the Q&A module instead of the forums, and the link to the existing forums was added into a sub-sub-page almost as an afterthought.
This is a trend in the current online society, in that people are used to fast-paced and short conversations. Like Facebook and Twitter, you post something short, people reply with short answers, and the topic is then lost after a couple of hours. New topics are created, they have their own short lifespan, and then people move on to a new topic, over and over again.
This is all well-and-good, except that for "support" purposes this approach is a nightmare. Ever tried searching through a Facebook page for a post you remember seeing months ago? You won't find it. Thus, "support" topics are moved to something like the Q&A module, which bears a similarity to the short discussion trend, but is at least searchable.
Longer, meaningful, discussions are only really possible in a forum, but society is telling us we don't need forums anymore. This reminds me of back when I used to teach the Operating Systems class at the local University. They kept telling me that I didn't need to teach DOS, because nobody uses command-lines anymore. I tried many times to explain to them that even the modern operating systems still use command-lines extensively, but they wouldn't listen and eventually discontinued the course.
Is the desire to keep forums around just nostalgia or a need?
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