Upgrading Forum Software

[m712]

According to the copyright notice at the bottom, the current software on this forum is 10 years old. Can we upgrade this forum's software to a more recent version? I can help with migrations if necessary.
The most recent version of phpBB was published on http://phpbb.org/ and was released on 07 Jan 2017.

[dozniak]

If you could persuade Chase to bother...

[Js2xxx]

While I think ASP.NET 5 is better...???

[Schol-R-LEA]

This is the song that doesn't end...

Seriously, if we changed it, the first two posts on the new forum would be, "this software sucks, we should upgrade to x" and "bring back the old forum software", in no particular order and repeated five times a day for a month.

We would be more polite about it than, say, WTDWTF was, but then that applies to most things - as bitter as some of the discussions here can get, OSDev is an island of tranquility compared to most of webfora. Mind you, the fact that there were complaints on the board right after the switch to NodeBB, even as others were rejoicing at the overthrow of the much-hated Jeff Atwood and Discourse on the site, says a lot more about WTDWTF's community than about either Discourse or NodeBB.

I'm not saying we shouldn't upgrade to a new version of PHPbb, if only to swap the old bugs for exciting newer ones, etc., but it is by no means a priority.

[Kazinsal]

The only reason I would want the forum software to be upgraded would be to improve the strength of password hashes (eg. bcrypt or high-rounds PBKDF2) and force a password reset to ensure everyone's using the new hashing algorithm.

IIRC the version we're running is old enough to be on salted MD5, and that was frankly terrible in 2007, let alone 2017.

[matt11235]

This version of phpBB has mostly the same features as the newer versions, so the main issue is security. If you go through Google there doesn't seem to be any public vulnerabilities that affect the site. It's a shame that the same can't be said about most other PHP code

The only suggestion I have is switching to PHP 7 and enabling the opcode cache, I just did that for the CompilerDev forums and the speedups were quite significant.

[onlyonemac]

I agree, we should *probably* upgrade to a newer version of phpBB. (Not *certainly* because I don't know how easy it is to migrate existing posts and themes - I've seen other sites have difficulties migrating themes when they upgrade phpBB.)

We should not, however, change to different forum software. I've yet to see a website which has changed forum software without either messing up the formatting or layout of old posts or losing either their old posts and/or half their userbase. And there's no need to change forum software - phpBB may not be the most feature-packed but it has all the features that we need and it's nowhere near obsolete. My experience with most other forum software is that it's slow, overpowered, and difficult to use.

[SpyderTL]

This is my favorite forum on the Internet. I vote that we leave it as-is...

[osdever]

This is my favorite forum on the Internet. I vote that we leave it as-is...

Same. I am against any kind of updates.

[Love4Boobies]

Presumably, you like it not because of the infrastructure but because some of its members. Also, software engineering has evolved since the 60s; I don't think you need to worry about the bug count remaining constant throughout versions. Security fixes are always welcome, especially if you like this place. Otherwise, you may one day wake up with it gone. There are also a few broken things which some of you may have noticed (esp. on the wiki).

The biggest problem is that chase would have a lot of administrative work to do, as anyone who has done this sort of stuff well knows, and he's not payed for this time.

[Schol-R-LEA]

software engineering has evolved since the 60s; I don't think you need to worry about the bug count remaining constant throughout versions.

Yes, it has, but... Jevon's Paradox (and the related Parkinson's Law and Grosch's Law) applies, for the same reason it applies to CPU speed, memory size, size and speed of secondary storage, etc. - the need for more, and more complex, software exceeds the need for the software to run correctly, so improving software engineering is as likely to lead to more bugs (because it facilitates both less skilled programmers, on the one hand, and more ambitious projects, on the other) as it is to lead to fewer.

Hmmn, maybe we can ameliorate that somewhat if we could find a way to apply a modified version of Amdahl's Law to decisions regarding software improvements - if there were a simple heuristic to decide if a feature is worth the expense of developing and maintaining it, based on (for example) feature request frequency, the frequency in which users apply equivalent combinations of features to get the same result, etc., it might give software engineers some hints on how to prioritize which new features should be developed first. It would be a lot less objective than the Amdahl projections for hardware components, and getting people to use it (and not letting MGT override such decisions) would be an uphill battle, but it might be worth looking into (though I expect it has been tried before at least once).

[dozniak]

Presumably, you like it not because of the infrastructure but because

..but because of Ponies theme!

[Schol-R-LEA]

Presumably, you like it not because of the infrastructure but because

..but because of Ponies theme!

True dat.

[matt11235]

Presumably, you like it not because of the infrastructure but because

..but because of Ponies theme!

The real reason CompilerDev is ranked low on Google is because I haven't added the ponies theme

[dozniak]

Presumably, you like it not because of the infrastructure but because

..but because of Ponies theme!

The real reason CompilerDev is ranked low on Google is because I haven't added the ponies theme

DO IT!