I've added a notice on my last remaining fudforum site:

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Switch to Rocksolid Light - This interface will be retired soon. You may
check out the new interface in the links below.
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it then has links to the same sections in Rocksolid Light

I only serve a fudforum site in clearnet, so it doesn't effect i2p or tor
users. This does not remove a node, as rslight and fudforum are on the same
server, so most likely if one went down, they would both be down anyway.

I will probably add another rslight site on another server soon for i2p
users only. I currently serve two Rocksolid Light sites on two different
servers in different locations:

www.rocksolidbbs.com (retrobbs.i2p, j7zbybfl5ho2rta3.onion)
news.novabbs.com (rslight.i2p, dkzerogt6z6ybhcj.onion)

Fudforum is www.novabbs.com, so those domains will be combined to serve
rslight from news.novabbs.com

I would much rather continue to work on rslight, and I'm very excited to see
the work being done on vichan. These two interfaces (plus bbs if def
decides), would be two nice and very different choices. At this point,

Also, it's good to remember that the rocksolid groups are also always
available using your own newsreader from a growing number of news servers.

Retro Guy

Fudforum has been with us for some time now, and I liked it, so I hate to see it go.
Having said that, I understand your reasoning: ff is pretty much a dead end, development has halted, and all changes are difficult to implement (compared to doing them in rslight, or vichan). However, also vichan, while exciting, is kind of a dead end. There is some development done in lainchan still, but the code is still based on php 5 so eventually something will break and nobosy will be able to fix it. The reason I work on vichan atm is just that it is really a low hanging fruit for us, and the benefits of the software are huge in terms of comfort.
I guess in the long run I will try to move away from php based software, and orient more towards something done in python (seems to me that php is really easy to learn and use, but is kind of a patchworked language with a lot of pitfalls and other issues).

cheers

trw
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Posted on def2
z5bqfv5v75kxy7pj.onion

anonymous wrote:

> Fudforum has been with us for some time now, and I liked it, so I hate to see it go.
> Having said that, I understand your reasoning: ff is pretty much a dead end, development has halted, and all changes are difficult to implement (compared to doing them in rslight, or vichan). However,

I agree that ff may not be worth the effort. It's heavy and has many more features that we really need. That said, I really like the look of def3, but the underlying code needs a lot of work. Consider things like we needed to patch it just to work with nntp, and it's advertised to work with nntp. Also, it would hang on messages, groups would get stuck permanently, until again we patched it. It doesn't consider message dates when adding them to it's database, so pulling older messages puts them on top of newer messages. It's just not done well (for nntp use anyway).

also vichan, while exciting, is kind of a dead end. There is some development done in lainchan still, but the code is still based on php 5 so eventually something will break and nobosy will be able to fix it. The reason I work on vichan atm is just that it is really a low hanging fruit for us, and the benefits of the software are huge in terms of comfort.

Newsportal was just being worked on to support php 5.0 when I found it. It was abandoned at that point. I found that bringing it up to work on php 7 was difficult, but once done (which it is), it should be much easier to tweak it as necessary for future releases. I don't see the Newsportal base as anything other than code that I took, and continued with, knowing I'd be the only one patching, or changing it from that point on.

If vichan works, and you like it (I honestly haven't had a chance to install and run it yet to see what it looks like), it could be your code. Rename it and it's a fork from vichan, if you are interested in doing that. Not sure if you want to go that route, just mentioning that it's pretty much what I did with Newsportal.

> I guess in the long run I will try to move away from php based software, and orient more towards something done in python (seems to me that php is really easy to learn and use, but is kind of a patchworked language with a lot of pitfalls and other issues).

I've been interested in python for a while, but haven't taken any steps to work with it. I have with perl, and I really don't like it (it's probably just me :) I really like the interface in kareha (wakabi), but it would take some work to interact with nntp (and it's perl :(

In any case, we have several interfaces currently, so whatever we choose to add to the list is nice, and it's important that the projects we're each working on are fun for us also! (ff is not fun)

Retro Guy

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
news.novabbs.com

>If vichan works, and you like it (I honestly haven't had a chance to install and run it yet to see what it looks like

Take a look here to check the functionality:
https://lainchan.org/%CE%A9/index.html

Most of the big chans have been running with some kind of vichan, including torchan.
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Posted on def2
z5bqfv5v75kxy7pj.onion

anonymous wrote:

>>If vichan works, and you like it (I honestly haven't had a chance to install and run it yet to see what it looks like

> Take a look here to check the functionality:
> https://lainchan.org/%CE%A9/index.html

Looks good, pretty much what I would have expected to see (which is good :)

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
news.novabbs.com

anonymous wrote:

> Fudforum has been with us for some time now, and I liked it, so I hate to see it go.
> Having said that, I understand your reasoning: ff is pretty much a dead end, development has halted, and all changes are difficult to implement (compared to doing them in rslight, or vichan). However, also vichan, while exciting, is kind of a dead end. There is some development done in lainchan still, but the code is still based on php 5 so eventually something will break and nobosy will be able to fix it. The reason I work on vichan atm is just that it is really a low hanging fruit for us, and the benefits of the software are huge in terms of comfort.

So far, vichan seems to be coming along nicely! It looks good and seems to function well.

Right now I'm at the point of trying to decide whether to delete the 12GB fudforum database still sitting on my server. I don't run any ff sites, and my clearnet users seem to have seamlesly moved to using rslight (because they have no choice, I guess). Since I don't think I'll be back to ff, I should delete the database, but going to wait a little longer. I don't have enough space on the hd to back it up locally.

I've also read that ff and rslight are easier to use on a mobile device than google groups, which surprises me (I don't use google groups). I just assumed google had a good mobile interface, but I guess not. ff on mobile sucks. rslight on mobile is useable, and much better than ff, but not great by any means.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
www.novabbs.com

if you would like to keep a backup, why don't you compress it (with tar or 7z or something). since the vast majority should be text, the compression rate should be very good, maybe you can get down below 1 Gb even.
about the rest: honestly, i don't consider mobile users at all, so it is good that someone does at least :-). i never tried, but i can imagine rslight performing pretty well in this because of the lean design approach. ff for sure sucks for mobile, because the design was done for screens. vichan could do well also, but as said i just don't care really. :-)

btw, if you keep a backup of your ff, do you think you could roll it out again if needed ? i always found that ff was extremely bitchy about this. for the cases where i wanted to use a backup of ff, i always used a backup of the vm.

cheers

trw

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Posted on def2.i2p

Anonymous wrote:

> if you would like to keep a backup, why don't you compress it (with tar or 7z or something). since the vast majority should be text, the compression rate should be very good, maybe you can get down below 1 Gb even.

I'll look into that. I don't really know how to compress a mysql database if I don't export it first. I guess they are really files on the file system I could compress, but not sure if I'll break it. I'll wait a bit to see if I can do that before deleting it.

> about the rest: honestly, i don't consider mobile users at all, so it is good that someone does at least :-). i never tried, but i can imagine rslight performing pretty well in this because of the lean design approach. ff for sure sucks for mobile, because the design was done for screens. vichan could do well also, but as said i just don't care really. :-)

rslight is meant to be responsive. I do read groups on my phone at work, and sometimes post. It's quite useable, not pretty, but it works ok. The css considers client screen size, and changes font sizes and other things to compensate. I plan to put more effort into this after I feel like I've finally got a more stable piece of software.

> btw, if you keep a backup of your ff, do you think you could roll it out again if needed ? i always found that ff was extremely bitchy about this. for the cases where i wanted to use a backup of ff, i always used a backup of the vm.

The main ff site I ran was created from a backup I had from a test site on a vm. Restoring worked fine so I assume it would again. I can't really see why I'd run ff again, but it's probably a good idea to at least archive the backup, considering how much of a pain it is to set up ff again.

Retro GUy

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
news.novabbs.com