#1 2023-07-20 5:21 pm

Ricsca

Member

Registered: 2012-08-14

Posts: 11

Why do you use Fluxbb?

Why does this site, which is the reference for all the forums, use fluxbb?
A forum that hasn't been updated since 2018 and that has been abandoned for a year and the official website is no longer even online?

pedigree

uıɐbɐ ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ buıʎnq ɹǝʌǝu ɯ,ı

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 7,059

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

simplicity really.  it was integrated, perhaps mistakenly, a long time ago.  I do have it on my backlog to replace but it's no small job sadly

sklerder

Member

Registered: 2012-10-11

Posts: 336

Website

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

Hi !
As this is not a closed subject, at least as far I understand it, and to complete pedigree's answer I'd like to bring here my personal point of view.
When this forum started (over ten years ago), FluxBB was one of the most lightweight and efficient forum frameworks out there.
Several forum administrators (as I did) chose this CMS at this time because it offered a good compromise between simplicity, lightness but with the expected minimum functions.
Unfortunately, like many others, the "end" of FluxBB has fallen on us, and for the moment there is no official equivalent (to be checked anyway, "followers" of this CMS have created "forks").
Note, however, that some forums, like those of Ubuntu or Archlinux, use the same CMS, even if some of them are considering a migration to Flarum, the official "successor" of FluxBB.
When we, webmasters of forums, made the choice of a CMS, we could not, ten years ago, predict what will happen today.
Like StopForumSpam, I chose to use FluxBB, with my own modifications to "stick" to what I expected, and I don't regret this choice, far from it.
But neither SFS nor my forum (neither Ubuntu nor Archlinux) can be held responsible for the disaffection/disinterest/abandonment of the team that managed FluxBB.
That's life, things change, evolve, there is no other solution than to move forward...

Ricsca

Member

Registered: 2012-08-14

Posts: 11

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

Yes, I don't doubt that it works but an old forum suggests that this site is no longer updated...
This site works for all forums so it is important that it has a state of the art forum using SFS.
I think xenforo is a must.

Visman

Member

Registered: 2019-12-14

Posts: 6

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

Ricsca advertises xf so unobtrusively.
I remember there was a case in our forum (by fluxbb). The new man advertised xf too. Well, in response, we went to their forum and wrote about fluxbb, so immediately the user who wrote about it got banned.
That's their duplicity.

P.S. https://github.com/MioVisman/FluxBB_by_Visman

Ricsca

Member

Registered: 2012-08-14

Posts: 11

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

you're wrong, I have nothing to do with XF, in fact I find it scandalous that they haven't released a new version for three years but I have to be objective and I admit that the only two forums worth using today are XF and IPB and since XF configures itself automatically to you (I migrated one of my forums to XF two months ago and I had 3 blocked users who reported the block due to ip on SFS without me ever configuring anything in SFS) I think it is important that you use their forum as it is the only one professional.

Precisely for blocked users I returned to visit your site after many years and I had a hard time understanding if it was active or abandoned.

Alex Kemp

Moderator

From: Nottingham, England

Registered: 2009-12-02

Posts: 2,424

Website

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

I returned to visit your site after many years and I had a hard time understanding if it was active or abandoned

Neither. It just is.

SFS is NOT it's forum. SFS offers an API to discover + report spammers. That is it's purpose and, if you look at the Statistics, you will discover the extent to which it is active or abandoned (17k unique IPs querying the API yesterday, which is not a lot, although the summer *is* the nadir for numbers).

---

Alex Kemp

IP Aggregation (Help) · Easy Firewall Generator (Help)  · Conteg v0.13.14

Ricsca

Member

Registered: 2012-08-14

Posts: 11

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

Today I requested the API that I entered on xf and being a normal user (not too expert) it took me a while to understand and above all I thought that this site was no longer updated.
Your site lives thanks to the users who add your bees, if you don't care you will have fewer and fewer users...
If you are experts, it does not mean that others are experts too, on the contrary, 90% of those who use a forum are not programming experts, so things must be explained to them very well.

pedigree

uıɐbɐ ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ buıʎnq ɹǝʌǝu ɯ,ı

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 7,059

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

we dont want to turn this into a flame war

that stats are a little out of date as the API is now served out of the Cloudflare Workers serverless system.  For speed, I don't then push the client IP into a system for unique measurement.  I don't keep API logs either but Cloudflare is telling me there was about 170,000 unique API users yesterday.

Xenforo were very nice to give me a XF license but there is a lot of more required to port this forum to a XF forum, and this forum act as the site wide authentication system for non-forum functions, which will also require time to port.

stopforumspam doesn't pay the bills, about the absolute furthest from it.  I'm lucky to get $20 a month in donations which doesnt go anywhere near the amount required to fund a developer to do the necessary work, and I'm slammed for time in the job that does pay the bills, bills that get swallowed up on mental health care for a child.  a real catch 22 huh?

Ricsca

Member

Registered: 2012-08-14

Posts: 11

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

Mine weren't criticisms, just advice...
I understand that on projects where you don't make money it's hard to find time but given the great service that your site gives, it would be important that it be renewed because as it is now, to less experienced people (like me) it seems like an abandoned project.
When I see sites using forums other than xf or ipb at first I immediately assume that they are not very active.
Maybe if you manage to renew the site, you could ask for sponsorships from hosting but also from platforms such as xf or ipb

Maikuolan

Member

From: Perth, Western Australia

Registered: 2011-08-09

Posts: 799

Website

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

Not sure why using XF or IPB in itself would somehow qualify a website as not appearing abandoned.

Having many years of experience as a webmaster and forum administrator, and even outside those years, having spent many years participating in numerous communities, there's no shortage on the number of forums I've encountered before, and among those encountered, no shortage of the number of them which were abandoned. In fact, a significant proportion of those abandoned were IPB forums. Not because of any particular problem with IPB, mind you; but, IPB has been pretty popular for a long time now, and the higher the number of forums using any given system, the higher the number of abandoned forums you can expect to find using that system, statistically speaking.

Simply seeing which system a forum uses doesn't tell you anything at all about whether that forum is abandoned. On the other hand, just actually using one's eyes to see whether there's been any recent activity at that forum should serve as a much stronger indicator for whether that forum has been abandoned or not.

I know some communities which still use still phpBB2 as their main forum system, which hasn't been maintained for many years now. For that matter, I know communities which still use IRC as a primary means of communicating with each other. The age or continued maintenance of the systems behind a community mean nothing in the context of whether that community is still active.

Also, even if the SFS forums were, hypothetically speaking, to become abandoned, so what? That wouldn't have any bearing on the continued operation of the service itself. There are plenty of API providers and similar services on the internet which don't have forums attached at all, or any particular form of community whatsoever, yet they still operate.

Ricsca

Member

Registered: 2012-08-14

Posts: 11

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

@Maikuolan My first forum (still online) is 18 years old and over the years I've used just about every major major forum phpbb, smf, mybb, vbulletin, ipb, bbpress, vanillaforums etc.
It is impossible to deny (and those who do it know they are lying) that until 10 years ago the best forum was vbulletin, today xefonro and ipb while all the other programs are obsolete.
An active and functioning forum must be done with a functioning program because an active community needs updated functions to keep the interest ever more active.
Exceptions exist (joomla.org uses phpbb for example) but exceptions remain.
Anyone with an active community has a few euros to pay for an xf or ipb license while almost all the no longer active communities use obsolete forums and that's why when I see obsolete forums I immediately think that the community is not active.

sklerder

Member

Registered: 2012-10-11

Posts: 336

Website

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

Hi !
Perhaps should you reconsider your position ?
You seem to mix community activity and system maintenance ...

From my point of view, an active community is, first, a community where people exchange regularly. And, though SFS is an active community, it can take several days or even weeks without a new publication. But everyday, users register to the forum and the API (the forum and API registration are bound).

The choice of a CMS is not only linked to the idea of having "up-to-date functionalities", the ease of its administration, for example, is a major criterion for making or maintaining the choice of this CMS.

So, please accept criterias of other webmaster/forum owners, your criterias are your own criterias, not necessarily others criterias.

Alex Kemp

Moderator

From: Nottingham, England

Registered: 2009-12-02

Posts: 2,424

Website

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

Hi sklerder

I think that that is the best-reasoned position I've ever seen you make. Nice one.

---

Alex Kemp

IP Aggregation (Help) · Easy Firewall Generator (Help)  · Conteg v0.13.14

pedigree

uıɐbɐ ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ buıʎnq ɹǝʌǝu ɯ,ı

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 7,059

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

I would love to extract the registration/user requirement out of the forum.... I sometimes (ie always) wish that I had never done it the way that I had... foresight is a fantastic thing.  I would love a forum that is integrated into the site rather than the other way around.  I'm not entirely sure that this would drive traffic to the forums though.  If I was a real dev instead of someone that used this site to learn to code then I would sink a lot more time into migration of the site to a framework that could better be supported going forward.  Maybe Flarum is an option here, or phpBB or even Xenforo but all that requires more time than I have at the moment, so its a bit of a moot point

Ricsca

Member

Registered: 2012-08-14

Posts: 11

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

Ok, you are arguing that it is better to use a Ferrari built in 1983 than a Ferrari built in 2023

pedigree

uıɐbɐ ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ buıʎnq ɹǝʌǝu ɯ,ı

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 7,059

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

I'm not arguing at all, I'm simply saying that I can't afford a Ferrari so I do with what I have

Ricsca

Member

Registered: 2012-08-14

Posts: 11

Re: Why do you use Fluxbb?

@pedigree i wasn't addressing you that you have to manage this site and you explained your more than valid reasons.
I was addressing the others who responded arguing that an up-to-date forum isn't all that important...