Cherry Audio Forums

Oh no. phpBB. Ancient technology. Dear me. This is not fitting for a cutting edge company.

May I politely suggest as you have made this change that you consider Discourse instead, very widely used and infinitely more capable and visually and technically more attractive and, ahem, modern? I have considerable experience setting it up and I'd be happy to do it for you.

This is a retrograde step. Not all things retro are good!

https://www.discourse.org/

You can use the community version.

And not only that Discourse supports 95% of a traditional email mailing list as well without you having to do anything. This is a great feature.

Almost every technical computing topic I am involved with uses Discourse. Amusingly I just this minute signed up for the LLVM compiler forum and sure enough, it's Discourse. It's very widely used. I run a certain forum on Discourse and my experience is that because it so good member use it a lot more and are very encouraged by it, and I see a lot more traffic using this platform than you would expect. That's good for your brand and customer happiness.

Also worth pointing out that Discourse supports image posting as well. In 2020 having phpBB which can't do images is a strange idea.

[And I don't think the facebook group is any substitute for a forum or a Discourse forum.]

andro wrote: ↑Sun May 17, 2020 1:26 am Oh no. phpBB. Ancient technology. Dear me. This is not fitting for a cutting edge company.

Agreed! This platform is as old as dirt in internet terms.

Hi Cherry Audio, it may have been a good idea to ask the users about a forum platform change before launching into it. After, it's for the users, isn't it?

My offer to do Discourse for you - no charge of course - still stands.

I think you are going to cop a lot of flak over this poor decision.

Spam can be an issue with php forums. I see some has already appeared in one of the sub forums here.

I can append a list of disadvantages of phpBB the length of my arm. I confess I have been in shock all day. The old forum, while not a patch on Discourse, was at least quite nice.

I know that you CA are busy with the release tomorrow, but the ball has been dropped in this aspect.

Hope we can rectify this, and as said, I volunteer to help.

+1

Hi,

These forums have always used phpBB, but in the process of getting ready for the big Voltage Modular 2.0 release, updates to the web page software hosed our forums. So, what you're seeing here is phpBB without the visual theme we were using before. We're currently working to update the visual theme, but it's - you know, Sunday.

That said, thanks for your feedback! Yes, phpBB is certainly showing its age and our web staff would love to see it go, I'm sure. From my perspective, having less spam would be a killer feature of any new system we adopted.

Greg

Hi all!

I know I don't post here much, but let me go into a few more details on the hosing the forums experienced on Friday. In upgrading the server to the latest version of PHP for the soft launch of the store, the forums were hosed because phpBB doesn't play well with anything modern.

But like Greg said, the forums have always been phpBB they just had a nicer window dressing than most people expect when viewing a phpBB site.

So in the rush to get _something_ up and running on a weekend for our community members I got this phpBB up and running on a different server than the store. This is not a perfect solution, and I don't want to put the old theme back on the forums because it doesn't seem to be actively maintained anymore.

Last night, I worked on creating a new phpBB style to make this match our Cherry Audio branding, and not look soooo out of date.
But I am the first person on the Cherry Audio team that would like to move away from phpBB. I have been looking into Discourse and Discord as possible replacements, but didn't want to make a sudden drastic change on a weekend and so close to the launch of Voltage Modular 2.0 and updates to the website and store.

So please let us know if you would prefer Discourse or Discord!

Thanks for the helpful info Greg and Andy - appreciated Glad to hear that an alternative is being considered - I don't know enough about the potential replacement candidates to have a preference though..

I have a lot of experience with Discourse. I feel it is better than Discord.

I will help you create it. Just contact me.

I suspected phpBB was underneath the forums, but now the ugly truth is exposed. And lo, the disadvantages - not working with contemporary software.

Of note is that over the road there VCV Rack uses Discourse for the community forum. Just sayin'!