SubSonic: Our Forums Suck. HALP!

Monday, November 26 2007 - Blog

I was hoping our forums project would take off and we could "dog food" a neat new forums project based on SubSonic. That didn't happen, and I'm paying the price.

I try to answer 20-50 posts a day on our forums, and with the new job, Eric getting married, and others out for the holidays, our forums are suffering a bit. We've recently had a group of developers come in to help out, but I'm afraid it might be too little, too late.

As I cruise through the forums I can see that some are getting frustrated at the lack of responses. I hear you. Believe me.

I'll keep this short and to the point: I have a tough decision to make, and I need you to help me. Here it is:

Do I improve on what we have, taking more of my time and other's time to work out a neat idea or
Do I throw in the towel and go with an established system?

I've been playing with phpBB and I really, really like it. I also like the JitBit ASPForums because they're extremely fast. Both can be folded nicely into our existing site.

PhpBB has a lot more features and community support, and is reasonably fast. JitBit's stuff is just ridiculously fast and has some great features, but is pretty bare bones.

No data will be lost - we'll roll it over and you shouldn't notice a dern thing. I hope.

If you think we need to make a change, speak up! And let me know which of the above you prefer. I apologize for the lack of support here - but I'm in a super tough spot RE my time and I can't whip Eric and Kevin much more.

adminjew says:

Monday, November 26, 2007

I think we should go with what we have. (except if it will really make a difference) And how is another system going to help get more reply's?

Rob Conery says:

Monday, November 26, 2007

RSS, subscriptions, stickies, private messages... - all the things I was hoping to get in place sooner. It will also help me organize things a bit better. We can do all those things with the new system, but my time doesn't exist and I don't want our forum folks to trip out any more :).

Rob Bazinet says:

Monday, November 26, 2007

Go with an established system. Why try to do something your time isn't really meant for right now? The core product is Subsonic, not a forum and those you are trying to support are customers for SubSonic.

G says:

Monday, November 26, 2007

I think the smartest thing to do is going with a solution that already exists (phpBB is good enough I believe) until the forums system based on subsonic is ready. Another smart idea will be charge for support.

Steve says:

Monday, November 26, 2007

Writing forum software = reinventing the wheel and wasting time.

Rob Gibbens says:

Monday, November 26, 2007

I say go with the established software if it will help keep Subsonic moving ahead. As Rob B. said above, the core product...the most important thing...is the Subsonic project. It would be nice to open source the forums and let them grow independently of Subsonic.

Chris says:

Monday, November 26, 2007

Ditto...Subsonic first. phpBB gets my vote.

John Ayling says:

Monday, November 26, 2007

Go with established forum software - phpBB looks pretty cool - agree that the focus needs to be on the Subsonic project.

Ryan Anderson says:

Monday, November 26, 2007

I'm on the same boat... What ever is fast (to implement), has a good host of important whistles and bells and can, at some point, be migrated if need be. I ironically was on the forums today as well and am seeing some annoying shinnanigans... Nothing worse than a bunch on negative, derogatory, and completely useless attitudes swimming around... Those silly nonconstructive individuals who are pissing on the cake need to be dealt with asap. Looked like you were forced to work the 3 strikes law... All the best, RA

adminjew says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

For these stuff it might be the right thing to go with an established forum. (But I think the forum project was also made for showing some SubSonic features and should not be thrown away.)

Jim Geurts says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Why not go with Community Server, out of curiosity? Their free edition supports up to 15 forums which should cover Subsonic just fine. I'd recommend not going with phpBB, personally. I used it on a project recently, and I am going to ditch it when I find the time. Some of my biggest gripes are that the support sucks and you have to hack it to combat spam. phpBB v2 has a VERY weak captcha system, by default, that spambots have no problem defeating. It might have been good forum software 4 years ago, but it's sub-par these days, imo. And version 3 has yet to be released after a year of beta/rc builds...

Luke Foust says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Scott Hanselman did a comparison of a couple of different forums on his website. He would probably be a great resource when trying to recommend which .net based forum to go with. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselforumsEvaluatingForumsSoftwareAspNetForumsAndInstantForumNET.aspx

Dave Savage says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

As much as php is a good little forum system, I think someone really needs to stand up and show that asp.net can preform. SubSonic is an awesome place to start.

Nandos says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I noticed that a lot of Microsoft sites use Community Server (www.communityserver.org) as their forums engine. Has anyone had experience with it? Also, MySpace uses the same software.

Shawn Oster says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I vote fast over features, it's why I use SubSonic over netTiers :) JitBit ASPForums because it's ASP.NET, fast and I prefer a barebones approach. A forums only as good as the information inside it and that's only useful if you can get to it quickly. After having to endure too many forums gasping for air, like The Green Button back in the day, I say speed speed speed. As long as there is speed, search and thread notification then that's all that is really needed. In fact if it has any avatar or signiture support I say please turn them off, nothing is more annoying than a one line forum message that takes up half the screen because of someone's witty idea of a signature or avatar.

josh says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

convice/hire ayende. he seems to have an infinite amount of time for coding, blogging, and posting in forums/discusion groups. (seriously, i'm not sure he sleeps ;)

Simone says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

What about using community server? Given the endorsement inside MS might be an easy thing to implement. Chees Simo

mike says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

"Do I throw in the towel and go with an established system?" Who's throwing towels? Just install an existing system and get all the good stuff up and running in a day.

Ralf says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I would also vote for using an existing forum. Don´t waste your time reinventing wheels. As far as I remember the Subsonic forum should be more an example than a feature complete forum. I think thats done. To support Subsonic core, a working and feature complete forum is more usefull then eating dogfood and trying turn an example project into some sort of feature. I know, there was the idea to have a "SubSonic driven forum control" to plug into a website, but you can do that with any of the exisiting solutions, so where is the point? Spend the saved time in Subsonic core! there is the value.

Kevin Isom says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Rob, Have you looked at http://www.yetanotherforum.net/ ? I just implemented it for a client and was rather impressed with what it offered. That would be my vote....Otherwise I'd say the ASPForums one....

Mischa Kroon says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The main question is what do you want to do: If the forums themselves aren't important then don't focus on them don't use the project and continue. Interest in the project will probably decrease (at least until MVC SubSonic steps into the light) So bad for the forums, good for supporting SubSonic. If the forums are a bit important, you can stick with them and hope that posts like this get more developers onto the forum team. I would go with the latter, because I really think the world needs another forum project :) One that is based on SubSonic and which shows it's muscles. And if it's moving forward a bit faster those functions can't take too long now can they :P

Chris van de Steeg says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I just got in as a developer on Subsonic Forums and I think we can make something great out of it. Ofcourse it's reinventing the wheel, there are better systems atm, etc. But it's a hell of a proof of concept for the subsonic project itself. And, most importantly for the devs working on it, lots of fun learning new stuff. Also, will new forum software really help you get more time to answer the questions. The people on the forum are not complaining about the software they have to use to enter they're questions, they're complaining that the questions don't get answered and that the subsonicproject hasn't released a new version for almost half a year now. IMHO subsonic needs a larger community that can offer support to the newbies. How come this always seems to be the problem with .net projects... there are only few open source .net projects that have a great community around it. People just care about getting the answers to they're questions, they don't care wich software is used for that.

Nick Dunn says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Agreed, I don't think you should be reinventing the wheel (yet). A forum should have just the number of features you need, not bloat. I've used Vanilla and it not only looks beautiful but has just the right amount of flexibility and features. What I'd suggest is moving to an established forum, and focus time on: Getting answers to questions, a dedicated newbie areaA way to port the existing forum posts into the new forum. There's a huge archive of knowledge in here, and it'd be stupid to waste it. So many of my own questions have been answered by searching the forum.

tuan says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Definitely should go with already done system for right now and a ready subsonic-based forum later on, phpBB is quite good but at the same time YetAnotherForum is also a great new thing, so why don't we give it a try on this. T

Stuart Allen says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Go with existing system. I'd much rather have more/faster Subsonic updates than time spent re-inventing the forum wheel.

Ibleif says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Go for an existing system. The time is more well spent on SubSonic. Don't care if it is phpBB or another one... just don't waste your precious time on writing it yourself.

Tim says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Check out Vanilla forum's http://getvanilla.com/

GrubNasty says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I post in the forums from time to time and try to answer a few things. I definitely see a lot of repeat questions in there, and i think forum searching should be the focus. I know right now searches default to those that have been flagged answered, but theres not always the answered flag being thrown on some questions. I think this leads people to assuming it hasnt been discussed and ending their own digging around early. I also think we could possibly stand to pull some of the repeats out of the forums and into a FAQ. Right now ours is empty. Maybe we could start a new forum thread once the new formats finalized.

LarryB says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

PLEASE an established forum. I can never find things on the new forum and have kept my mouth shut about it since it went in, but I have all but stopped visiting and helping on the forums because of it. phpBB would work.

Aaron says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Hi, first time poster long time listener?... Every hour you spend hacking around with forum software is an hour that is stolen from SubSonic. And when you do that, SubSonic cries and Jesus kills a kitten. You don't want SubSonic to cry now, do you? Aaron President, Rob Conery Fan Club

dabide says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Have you checked out Simple Machines Forum (http://www.simplemachines.org/)? It's much better than phpBB, IMHO.

Malcom says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

phpBB is very heavy duty for sql server. Go into SMF - more time to get mysql provider fixed :P

kevin says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Beast? It will at least get you some time to play with rails when yer not devving on .net 3.5 ;) But that too is light on features (which is nice sometimes), or maybe it has just enough? Punbb is another light weight forum but has just the right amount of features. I'd check that out as it's super clean and will get you most of what you need - somewhere between beast and phpbb. My 2 cents. Oh, and yes, keep the forum project download but I think we should stop using it as the main forum software. We need to be nicer to the community, they need love too ;)

kevin says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Hmm...Beast? It will at least get you some time to play with rails when yer not devving on .net 3.5 ;) But that too is light on features (which is nice sometimes), or maybe it has just enough? I'm gonna make my vote for Punbb, which is another light weight forum but has just the right amount of features. I'd check that out as it's super clean and will get you most of what you need - a feature set between beast and phpbb. My 2 cents. Oh, and yes, keep the forum project for download as you did a great job in such a short time but I think we should stop using it as the main forum software. We need to be nicer to the community, they need love too ;)

kevin says:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Sorry rob on the double post. Damn bb and lincold tunnel.

Robin Massart says:

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

I agree with using an existing forum. I can see the promise behind the subsonic forums as they seem to take a slightly different approach than something like phpBB, but I agree with LarryB, it's really hard to find anything there at the moment, even though there are lots of good and helpful posts. The other thing to ask and judging by the forums I'm not the only one wondering about this, is what's the status on Subsonic? There hasn't really been much in the way of announcement or roadmaps since you're move to Microsoft. What path is Subsonic taking for the future? I really want to start using Subsonic a lot more but am still a little weary because I am not sure what the plans are. Any news? Thanks for a great tool though! Robin

Mohamed Rashed says:

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

check http://www.llblgen.com/HnD/

Thomas Wagner says:

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

If all else fails, Frans Bouma has a free version of his forums available :) (ducking as I say this...)

Dave Neeley says:

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

I didn't know you could download the forum project... Where is it? I'd be interested in joining the dev squad. I really think that the current forum suffers from readability more than anything else. yetanotherforum.net has all of it's aspx files right in the root, and I don't think it really uses code behind files... I guess that's a matter of preference...but I wasn't interested in maintaining the code base on my site because of that. Use an Established forum? Do it! Scrap SubSonic forum? No! Ultimately I agree with what Chris van de Steeg said above.

Damir says:

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Yupp, one more vote for Vanilla forum if there's a need for a fast change. It's light and nice to look at, fast to set up and fast in action. I also think that SubSonic forum has great potential, I'd concetrate those efforts on creating the first lightweight/web-standards-based/asp.net mvc/subsonic/... solution. There realy are tons of asp.net forum projects, but most of them kinda suck when it comes to usability and web standards (I won't get nasty over the meny system on subsonicproject for now ;). So, throw out the tables, in with xhtml/css, nice url's and off we go. How hard can it be? I think the problem is finding people with enough spare time to actually get it done. And it could be just fine project to demonstrate subsonic/mvc combo. Hopefully with som jQuery love. Can it be interesting for MS to have it as a reference project? Official tutorial...? Anything...? Just my few cents...

erik says:

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

What about dotnetnuke? There is a core forum module that works well. There is also a third party forum module by www.activemodules.com that is very good. Don't hate me either for suggesting DNN.

jonezy says:

Friday, November 30, 2007

i would second a or third a vote for vanilla, but it seems kind of odd running a php forum for an asp.net product. maybe roll your own awesoome forum?