Forum OpenACS Q&A: Why do you part with functionality in bboard?

1: Why do you part with functionality in bboard?

Posted by Vadim Makarov on 11/03/02 03:49 AM

I see that bboard package is being rewritten, and a lot of old functionality seems to be gone. Can somebody give a rationale why it was bad to

categorize threads (well I haven't checked if it's still an option in the package but at least you dropped it in this forum)
have a list of recently answered questions / answered since last visit (when was this feature dropped, long ago?)
being able to search the forum (now it finds only separate postings and not threads; not very usable)

How is the forum supposed to be a useful resource if you are dropping features making it an archive rather than an ephemeral chat?

2: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Vadim Makarov on 11/03/02 04:04 AM

I have to add three more points:

Caching drives me crazy. It has taken at least two minutes before this thread appeared on the list. I've been thinking it didn't get posted.
Footnote links in emails is an innovative feature indeed that nobody else uses. The user is puzzled the first time he/she sees it.
Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? you see above this post in the thread is redundant. The old forum was smart enough not to show it.

3: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 11/03/02 04:26 AM

I'll look into the display of the subject in replies. It is only supposed to display if it is different.

We are moving forward, and while we are gaining easier integration of packages, some features have been left out.

Thanks for pointing out features that you would like to see added to the system. Please be sure to read the forums to see if the issue you are asking about has alrady been discussed.

I really would like to see people submitting these requests to the bugtracker for the web site. You can check to see if an item has already been requested. This makes it much easier for volunteers who want to help out to pick one item and fix it.

This is an open source community, and as such anyone who has something to contribute can submit bug reports, feature requests and patches to the bugtrack at https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs.org/ for features or bugs that relate directly to this web site or https://openacs.org/bugtracker/opeancs/ for the OpenACS toolkit.

All the code that runs this web site is available for download from the CVS repository and browsable at https://openacs.org/cvs/

We know that this web site needs work, but we felt it was very important to have OpenACS.org running on the latest version of the code. I think it is great that we now have the code that runs the site available for developers to learn from. So while we have issues to deal with in migrating the site, everyone in the community will benefit. Very soon we will post the scripts and procedures we used to migrate from OpenACS 3.2 to OpenACS 4.6. This will be very useful also.

So thanks again for commenting on the site, but please be patient with us while we work through this together.

4: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Vadim Makarov on 11/03/02 04:46 AM

I thought I'd post it on the forum because it was more about underlying philosophy of what the bboard is, and about undesirability of losing useful and essential features in the development.

In other words, if one of the best ACS-based sites - photo.net - runs ACS 3 and has had all'em since several years ago, why are they not in the brand new OpenACS 4.6 which is supposed to be darn better?

5: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Matthew Geddert on 11/03/02 05:08 AM

if you want bboards features (categorization, list of recently answered questions, etec.) use the bboard package on 4.6 - it hasn't gone anywhere and works great. If you want forums features (integration with notifications, better graphical customization, threaded views) use forums on 4.6. If you want the features of bboard to be present in forums please feel free to contribute the code needed to do this... your first and second points shouldn't be hard to implement (especially the second one that would be trivially easy), the third one may be a bit trickier.

6: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 11/03/02 06:45 AM

I fixed the no link back to parent from individual message problem.

7: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Luigi Martini on 11/03/02 10:48 AM

I learn right now that there is a package called "bboard" and a package called "forums". I am curious to learn what they are, and so go to the documentation section. I find two columns; on the right of the page there is a list of packages: installed packages and uninstalled packages.
Some of the packages are in blue, and others are in black.
What is the difference? Also, I cannot find a link to the documentation of "forums"; is the documentation not available or, as always, am I too new to this world not to be able and find it?

8: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Ben Adida on 11/03/02 05:07 PM

Vadim,

In a previous thread a few months back, we discussed the design of forums.

The reason for forums being separate from bboard is that bboard had serious implementation issues, specifically with respect to overuse of objects and permissions. The goal of forums is to progressively recreate the functionality of the 3.x bboard package.

The reason we left out categorization of threads at first is because there was talk of a generic categorization package - that would be the *right* way to go about this. I agree that we should use categorization, but I think it's better to hold off on categorization until we've implemented it correctly.

The recently answered questions and search by thread features can definitely be implemented easily - although just for completeness's sake, I should mention that search by thread was not implemented in the 3.x bboards.

All of this is good feedback - part of rewriting a package is figuring out what is truly useful to rewrite. Clearly there are missing pieces: forums is a work in progress.

9: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by MaineBob OConnor on 11/03/02 07:15 PM

The column that gives the date and time for "Last Post" doesn't work as advertized... It shows the date and time of the FIRST post in the thread, not the last post. The Last Post time is more useful.

Should this be reported elsewhere?

-Bob

10: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 11/03/02 07:39 PM

The last post problem has to do with the function acs_object__update_last_modified, which has a problem in postgresql.

See this thread: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=45676

11: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 11/03/02 07:42 PM

I think we have address all the original concerns on the first message in this thread except the "new since last visit" feature.

Like categorization, this would be better as a sitewide service, rathar than being forums specific. This new site will be containing much more dynamic content than the 3.x based site, so this will become more important.

12: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 11/03/02 11:55 PM

given how much slower 4.x seems to be, I'd hope they move in the direction of MORE caching, not less.

However, "smart" caching isn't much more effort than "for N minutes" caching. For instance, the forums index page is slow. It could easily cache its per-forum info in an nsv that was invalidated by insert-msg.

13: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Luigi Martini on 11/04/02 01:32 PM

I understand that many of you are very skilled and busy. Thus I refrain a little from disturbing. Nevertheless I need to understand some basic things, in order to eventually make some further little steps. In case somebody read these lines, and is willing to help me with the unanswered questions I posted earlier on this thread, I would be happy.

15: Re: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 13)

Posted by Jeff Davis on 11/04/02 01:58 PM

Luigi, packages in black mean that the package exists but there is no documentation available in the PACKAGE/www/doc directory (well, more accurately, no index page there, but if there are docs but no index page we should create one).

With respect to forums, no documentation, apart from comments in the code, has been written. I know Ben Adida has been filling in some gaps in the API documentation but I don't know if he is planning on writing any higher level documentation or not (or if someone else will take that on).

You aren't doing anything wrong, it's just that there are some conspicous gaps in the existing documentation.

14: Re: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 13)

Posted by Jamie Rasmussen on 11/04/02 02:08 PM

In addition to what Jeff said, if you have already seached these forums without finding answers to your questions, please do post them. Everyone is busy, but I'm sure someone will try to help you. You can use the API documentation web interface (at https://openacs.org/api-doc/ or your installation) if you are comfortable reading source code comments and the package you are interested in is installed and enabled.

16: Re: Why do you part with functionality in bboard? (response to 1)

Posted by Vadim Makarov on 11/05/02 06:11 AM

Thanks for explaining many things. I would really like the time when I can just sit down and contribute the necessary code, but it takes a lot to learn how to do it.