I know it's been discussed a few times but I'd favour another technology migration for the forum, probably to Discourse, a relatively well supported forum technology still in the vBulletin lineage (rather than being more of an IRC-alike technology like Slack or Discord).
It has an easily affordable official hosting option, off the shelf full text search and official Android and iOS apps.
Burnwinter seems you don't get a custom domain until $100/month level? I don't know our stats, but is 20k/month page views enough?
Other options include a Digital Ocean droplet - they have a one-click install for Discourse. The annoyance might be the mail server? Looks like there are lots of solutions, though.
Coombs I think it'd probably be as "easy" to set up and run on Digital Ocean as Flarum has been for Peps, the main job would be the proper migration of the content and users, and setting up a sexy OMITT theme etc. That isn't necessarily a small job, I've had a look and it's the usual story where one or two people have hacked a script that helps together, and the rest is up to you.
I like Flarum a lot and advocated it, but as these things tend to go it looks as if the project has slowed down. Discourse has more and bigger corporate users so it probably has a brighter future.
On the other side, a platform that's open enough you can actually get directly at the database seems vaguely important for us, it would be a shame for the OMITT archive to get walled into a closed platform.
Burnwinter if we moved platforms then it seems Discourse on DO would make a lot of sense in terms of cost, archiveability, and accessibility (social sign on, mobile app, etc.).
In the meantime, I don't see why we couldn't start poaching users from other platforms who might appreciate a more "local" feel to their international online communities. It's probably just a matter of someone taking on the task of regular posting in strategic places.
Coombs I think the ads are definitely a nice idea, no idea how to craft them or where to put them but others probably have a clue. Agree there's no reason to make technology / promotion tasks blockers for each other.
Burnwinter I know it's been discussed a few times but I'd favour another technology migration for the forum, probably to Discourse, a relatively well supported forum technology still in the vBulletin lineage (rather than being more of an IRC-alike technology like Slack or Discord).
Why? I think flarum works well for our needs at the moment for the most part, what benefits do you see from moving to another forum?
I agree that the user base needs expanding but don't really have the energy to do anything about it. Would love someone else to take the baton though. There's still money in the kitty for it.
Pepe LeFrits Firstly I don't think it's urgent or if it'd be the right call.
Otherwise because of the reasons I mentioned.
Postgres-based, full text search capability (I feel we miss this). Also performance generally—check how quick pages load here after the initial page load (that's the CFL forum which uses it, but there are lots of others in the showcase here).
It seems to have become a bit of a clear front runner in the category. The code base has very high activity and it's currently used for community building by lots of huge companies. That's what gets you relatively solid mobile apps and so on.
No silver bullets but hey …
I just had a look at Google and we're on the first page for arsenal discussion but only page 3 for arsenal forum, so I've tweaked the working on the intro pages to see if we can move up a bit. Might help.
Pepe LeFrits -- tweaking the title tag and meta descriptions will help. Would also recommend the team thinking through where we can generate some backlinks from. I believe a few posters also blog on the side - could they offer backlinks from their sites?
and/or could a partnership (even if paid) be made with a well established Arsena/soccer website happen?
Maybe guest blogs could be produced based on some of the better/longer posts made here?
Ok, bots are now signing up and flarum amazingly doesn't have any out of the box functionality to stop them. Who wants to setup Discourse?
Pepe LeFrits very suspicious that this happens right after @Burnwinter suggested that we move platform.
QuincyAbeyie When you regularly offer up correct opinions, history vindicates your claims with a correspondingly great regularity. This alignment appears to the friendly idiot as divinity, and to the hostile idiot as conspiracy, but to the wise it is no more than the currency of other wisdom. Of course, I remain alive to the chance you may be less familiar with these principles than others.
Burnwinter operates in the half-space between causality and chaos.
Qwiss I'm glad talking wank online is only my hobby ... the way I see it, that Paddy tweet could feature many iterations of:
$> @ChatGPT same but make it more masturbatoryin its administrative genealogy. Like Comrade Dula the progress of my forties has only recently occasioned a modest dilation of my refractory period, but I imagine it is a quite separate contributor to anxiety for many professional masturbators, operators of impressive cadence and aggregate output even if they possess less distinctive technical gifts than my own, that these so-called machine intelligences don't have to account for chafing.
Burnwinter I don't get to have an opinion given how little I post these days but xenforo like AM uses is brilliant. All the perks of a traditional forum like a proper search function, DM functionality and good legibility plus it looks great on mobile.
Also you can post pictures direct from your phone and it doesn't embarrass you when linking online pics like some internet-disabled boomer.
