Oh look it's a forum

[tangent]

I didn't expect this to be good or easy, but it's a bit worse than I expected. And now that I'm figuring it out more, it's not that bad.

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This is an example post in your phpBB3 installation. Everything seems to be working. You may delete this post if you like and continue to set up your board. During the installation process your first category and your first forum are assigned an appropriate set of permissions for the predefined usergroups administrators, bots, global moderators, guests, registered users and registered COPPA users. If you also choose to delete your first category and your first forum, do not forget to assign permissions for all these usergroups for all new categories and forums you create. It is recommended to rename your first category and your first forum and copy permissions from these while creating new categories and forums. Have fun!

[tangent]

So I just finished making this thing work, only to find that the system I used to set it up is deprecated.

I mean, I knew I was taking a risk deciding to use phpBB3 of all things, but I didn't realize it was already outdated and deprecated.

So anyhow, I might have to join the dark side and set up a discourse or something else instead..

[tangent]

To be clear, deprecated 8 months ago... :\

[tangent]

I learned how to merge topics.

[tangent]

Two days ago, views measured in the double digits at most. Today, everything is in the thousands. I assume this means bots finally figured out I have a new domain, since no one has said anything. xD

[don't_know]

I didn't expect this to be good or easy, but it's a bit worse than I expected.

you have not stated what you have expected.

and worse in what way?

[tangent]

you have not stated what you have expected.

and worse in what way?

Despite knowing phpBB is a very old project, I thought it had been updated for longer besides just security patches, so I expected it to be less clunky.

[don't_know]

that makes sense. i guess php is the mark of a dead project anyway. it was popular in a day when php was better than i forgot which solution. back when server side scripting was called cgi followed by a question mark in the url. in those days microsoft was the bad guy, not the glorious protector of the small ones from the evil of google. amusing. thank you for reminding me that. i am glad those days are gone.

[tangent]

While I am not abandoning it yet, I do have ideas for what I'd want to make this better.

• Tags: Having forum sections can be useful, but organization based on a hierarchy or exclusive categories has always failed for me in the past. It should be possible to organize in multiple ways to make finding things easier.
• Style options: What's the difference between a blog, forum, reddit, and something like Twitter or Bluesky? While there are organizational differences, and format differences, to me the biggest difference is styling. Reddit is just a blog post with a hierarchical reply structure. Forums are just a blog but with threads instead of posts, and multiple authors organized on boards based on most recent comment instead of categories and organized by original posting data. Twitter/Bluesky is just the same thing again, but with a super small character limit. Switching between these styles can help one think about something differently. Setting up multiple places doing similar things like I have leads me to forget to share the same info in multiple places - or waste time having to share the same thing in multiple places! Both sides of that can be annoying.
• Markdown. I dislike BBCode.
• A more flexible permissions system. Instead of all permissions being solely from the top-down where the owner (me) has to set up groups and such if someone wants to have their own space, allowing users to make their own areas and decide what criteria allows entry or whatever.. I'm bad at explaining what I mean.. I guess I'm thinking a bit like a chat app, where you have private messages and groups, and the users make their own groups and such. Going back to styling.. that's "just another style" in a way.. But.. making it default to public groups, with the ability to make private stuff would be useful. Also deciding within any particular area that "just this post" is public or private can be useful too. There's weird risks here with accidental revelation of private data when it comes to allowing granular permissions.. I'd have to think about it a lot more / plan it more.. but I want flexibility.
• No automatic conversion of emoticons. I hate that shit.

This is more of a wishlist than anything. It's been a while since I programmed a website. I want to do it again, but I also have no real dev setup to work in, and a lot of shit on my plate. :\ I can achieve something, because I've done it before, but I don't know if I can achieve the degree of flexibility I want to.

[don't_know]

woderful project. but aren't you going in too many directions at once?
1. blog
2. forum
3. obsidian notes, and now
4. improvements to the forum.

your observations are very articulate, but is it worth it?

- tags are wonderful, tags are the best concept there is. i NEVER‌ get to make them work. the best i can use is links to custom searches, both in the email and calibre. is that a problem with the interface of the tags of today? i guess it has more to do with my mind not working as expected.
- blog, forum, reddit, twitter? i think branding is the only difference. and you can add telegram to that, and facebook, and a few more. the only difference i can notice is between the icq, yahoo messenger, irc, matrix, chats and the blog, forum, reddit, twitter. and the difference stands between arbitrarily imposed structure and no structure.
- i used to love markdown. i started using it back when aaron killed himself. two years ago i tried org. i loved the power of emacs over the markdown solutions. folding was the game changer, but other things also. still, it's 1970s ways of the emacs break the cut and paste used by everyone else. the shocking observation some 14 months into switching to org was : markdown feels weird. the only thing that markdown does is nested quotes. org can't do anything that is flexible: nested quotes, strong and emphasis. that is all.
- that's over my head.
- unicode is the way. have and if the poster puts it there

what are you expecting to gain from programming a website?