XCore Exchange

Hi everyone,

xcore.com is currently running Drupal integrated with phpBB for forums - both are in urgent need of an update. Before I make that update however, I’d like to get your feedback on some changes I’m proposing.

The forum is the place people go 99% of the time when using the site. Rather than spend the loads of time and effort to update Drupal, phpBB and reintegrate back together again, I’d like to simply ditch Drupal and make the phpBB Forum the entire site.

There are a few things that Drupal is currently being used to provide on xcore.com:

Projects - this would be copied to an area within the forum
Groups - this would also be copied to an area within the forum
Friends - dropped (we know who our friends are, we don't need to display it here)
User Profiles - functionality to be handled by phpBB
Private Messages - functionality to be handled by phpBB
Points - dropped (will simply use post count and registered-on-site age to denote users experience and activity level)

I don't have any plans to change the site design or anything, at this time.

Does anyone have any reason to not push ahead with these changes?

Regards,
Miguel

How would moving the projects section to the forums work with the hosted files? Will they still be available and do we need to host our own files for new projects?

You can upload file attachments to a forum post, so we will do that for projects where the files have been uploaded rather than hosted on github or sourceforge or somewhere else.

I hope this is taken as constructive feedback.

I've only been on this forum a couple of days and do not find it inviting, apart from the wish to learn and ask about XMOS!

1) My posts seem to take a long time to be approved
2) When they do appear, they seem to disappear at random (caching issue?)

Something like Discourse is much more fluid and easy to use. I really think an inviting forum is important for a product. I am a JUCE developer and since they moved their forum to Discourse it has been much nicer to use, and I think busier as a result.

I also have a strong dislike of Drupal (I used to be a web developer) - but that may well be just an opinion!

Also - please can you switch off moderation and allow posts through, maybe once a users' first post has been approved?

Hi Adamski,

Only your first few posts need approval.

Cheers,
Henk

I think Adamski is asking for only first post approval - seems reasonable.

Yeah, perhaps.

At the moment it's the first 3 posts, need to be approved manually and then thereafter posts will be automatically approved.

However, we can probably tell after the first post if a person will be a spammer or not, unless they simply post something like "good post", then you can't really tell if they are a genuine person or a potential spammer.

I think first three is better than first one - first one could be 'Hi' in introductions. Approve that and get an advert for homework writers next?

As long as we do approve them quickly it should be alright? Most people go beyond three posts very quickly.

Cheers,
Henk

I've setup http://new.xcore.com as a demo of what the updated xcore.com will look like.

I've tried to keep the design close to what it is currently, but it's a new theme.

Let me know what you think.

Miguel