Why don't you have a shoutbox?

[Channy]

I'm sure you're getting sick of seeing my face in this section of the board, poking my nose in places and asking questions from 2 years ago...

But, what can you do? I saw the IRC (I think??) but yeah, no shoutbox?

 

[Ⓐaron]

The last time we had one it caused undue strain on the server. We've actually been discussing putting one in recently in the staff section, but haven't come to any real conclusions about what to do yet

 

[Channy]

Put it to a vote.

 

[Starling]

What purpose does a shoutbox have that can't be fulfilled by forum posts, visitor messages, PMs, IRC and so on?

 

[Channy]

Inane chitchat with everyone online at the time from a visible stand point rather than trying to find the IRC in the corner of the forum?

I mean, look at it, it's all dusty it's hardly ever been used.

 

[trash panda]

I do really enjoy shoutboxes. ^.^

 

[Cat Rage Room]

I'm not opposed to a shoutbox, but I thought it was one of those cluttery, middle school forum sort of things that people didn't use anymore.

 

[Channy]

How many middle school forums do you frequent, Mog?

 

[Starling]

Actually, the IRC has regained activity since the remake was announced. It's really just a matter of opening another tab for it when you're browsing the forums.

 

[Cthulhu]

The discussion about the thing in staff has been sticking in the back of my head for a while now, and I need a side-project to fiddle with. I might just build one for shits and giggles, . I'm thinking to make it as simple as possible (I have a tendency to over-engineer shit); persistent back-end server running in Go (memory footprint of maybe a few MB depending on what frameworks I use - if any), some output logging as persistence (probably shouldn't bother with a database), and a link to the forum database for getting the username colors and smileys - although we probably should go for a subset of those, given how our smileys would kinda fuck up the layout, .

Front-end a simple JS script that connects to the server via a websocket, so you get live updates. That would make it more like a chatbox than a shoutbox, but the difference between the two is negligible anyway.

Any other feature requests? . I should start off as simple as possible (I'll remind myself), it really shouldn't take too long to build.

 

[Fangu]

I can relate to the over-engineering... just start with the simplest version possible (plain text, etc) and then make a backlog for the wants as they come in

Getting the thing to work with the vB login is going to take enough hours anyway

 

[Cthulhu]

Nah, I'll just get the user ID from the cookie (bb2userid) and go from there. Anyway I think I did pretty well so far; simple HTTP server (no external libraries, I got stuck on that one last night), POST/GET support, JSON parsing and encoding, and even some input sanitizing. Bonus forum puns.

https://github.com/fwielstra/gobox/blob/master/server.go

Also why is the default go indentation fucking 8-wide tab indentation? My eyes!

 

[Fangu]

JSON <333333

 

[Lex]

I mean, look at it, it's all dusty it's hardly ever been used.

It was very active for a while a couple of years ago, but it slowly died.

@Yop, oooo awesome, looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

 

[Channy]

Simple and clean is all that we need

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

It's the way that you're making me feel tonight.

 

[Cthulhu]

JSON <333333

JSON is the shit . My OCD self is pondering a binary format though (BSON? or Cap'n Proto), not because it's necessary (as it stands it could probably deal with thousands, if not tens of thousands of requests a second already) but because I can.

Actually, supposedly Go has built-in support in its testing library for performance tests. Hmmmmm....

never mind, I should probably get cracking on a client.

 

[Channy]

It's hard to let it go.

 

[Flintlock]

Aren't we possibly moving to Xenforo or something? Will it be easy to make the necessary changes if you first build it to work with vB?

 

[Cthulhu]

Probably. The basic functionality - sending and reading messages - is easy enough, and I intend to just build it as a html / js snippet. I doubt Xenforo's database structure will be too esoteric to adapt to. But we'll probably need to disable the shoutbox for a while again if we ever move.

I haven't heard a big push to move / upgrade forum software though; I think most people are like "Ehh don't really care".

 

[Flintlock]

I thought you were going to look into it.

Anyway, at the risk of turning yet another thread into a forum software discussion: we shouldn't only think about our existing members; we should try to find out if a different setup would encourage more people to sign up and be part of our community.

 

[Geostigma]

I always thought Xenforo forums were a little on the ugly side Is there an upside to that software over vB?

 

[Flintlock]

I honestly don't know, which is why, for the nth time, we need someone to look into all our options and decide what the best one is, even if that's sticking with what we've got.

 

[Geostigma]

My googlefu is low tier but aside from the facts (That its sleek , has top tier social features and mobile integration etc.) everything I find is super biased in either direction. The only thing I've found is that apparently the Admin CP and other administrative tools are lacking.

 

[Ami]

Oh Channy, you're just reminding me of FFF's shoutbox now.

Mind you, that's where I spent most of my time when we were on there...