Brian Sandberg said:

It wasn't explicitly pointed out, but what is the scope of this? Are you going to replace the forums with Discourse (which seems like a fine idea) and keep everything else intact, or since you say “the GamDev.net platform”, are you considering replacing the entire site with a Discourse instance, getting rid of features like articles/project/tutorials as well as devlogs?

The goal is to keep all features. From initial review, it looks possible to bring everything into the Discourse platform with some creative customizations, but that needs to be explored, particularly for blogs and projects.

A forum-only replacement is fine too, if everyone is fine with a) a completely different UX/look/feel experience when in the forums and b) a disconnect in related content for categories/tags across blogs/tutorials/forums, and c) disconnect in user profile features provided by Discourse versus the rest of the platform. This approach likely will increase costs somewhat as Discourse would have to run in its own VM/container separate from the rest of the site - but maybe can decrease resource usage of the main site, so maybe breakeven.

I'm going to experiment with the “bring everything into Discourse” path to see if that can work and what frontend customizations are necessary to retain the non-forum features as they are today before settling on a path. Having said that, I've noticed other sites using Discourse also put their articles/tutorials in Discourse as well, and I can see that being a valuable approach for GameDev.net as well to retain comments and that cross-content navigation with forums mentioned above. Then it's a matter of figuring out how best to approach projects, blogs, etc.

Terrible idea, it's supposed to be open source but the source is nowhere to be found, it's shady.

It also depends A LOT on plugins for customization.

If you want something better do not go back to a Wordpress-like experience (with discourse that it) my recomendation instead is use the newest version of PHPBB https://www.phpbb.com/​ which you can actually see his code and give you far more control to mount than a docker than they told you is OSS but in reality the code is not open.

phpbb still receive bug fixing and is very, very robust and mature https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb

xrbtrx said:

Obs-D said:

Terrible idea, it's supposed to be open source but the source is nowhere to be found, it's shady.

The link is down there, to its GitHub. Its main page is its way to sell their hosting, but the forum engine is completely free I believe https://github.com/discourse/discourse​

I guess i have been proved wrong with respect to that specific point, i remember search some years ago and being unable to find the source code and see similar conversations in them forums.

Still, for my experience using discourse, as i stated before, it depends A LOT in plugins and doesn't really have sub-forums mechanics and have some issues -or used to have some issues- with the login, at least it has been the experience we have with it.

If we see the point of really sub-forums mechanics, yeah, gamedev.net doesn't have really sub-forums mechanics, only double-tag systems, discourse do the same in that regards than gamedev.net but PHPBB do have sub-forums mechanics along with tag system.

Personally i think having a sub-forum mechanics give more the experience of a forum and is much better organized than only-tag or double-tag based, but that's me.

I suggest to evaluate that because nowadays PHPBB is responsive and have all that jazz than modern aplication demands, but the lack of order you have with forums with only-tag or double-tag based like discourse is not really that great imo of course.

Sub-forums mechanics allow to really only see the content you want to see, when you want to see it, and allow you to avoid see an infinite spam of otherwise unintresting post from other users.

I can understand the approach of the only-tag or double-tag systems for reeplace subforums, but the thing is, when you are showing everything, how many of that “everything” you need to show in order to make mostly spam for the viewer and sacrifice his intrest in continue reading with it?

And that is a skechy question…

I guess my point is put some other proposal in the table and invite you all to consider this points, see other forum structures can be usefull, in any case i think it is a good idea to have this kind of things present at the time before taking any desition.

Edit: With the community i relate, we do consider at some point abandon discourse and that's why i do propose PHPBB, it was a strong choise back in the day considering his characteristics and rich history as a forum framework, the funny thing is we keep discourse but then in time we get issues with it again than make us lose data because of a bad migration, i wasn't related to that migration but i think it would be a good say to mention this, historically discourse has been more issues than solutions, for us at least.

Aressera said:

Obs-D said:
gamedev.net doesn't have really sub-forums mechanics

It actually used to, before the 2017ish redesign. I preferred that to the current disorganized mess. +1 for PHPBB.

GameDev.net has never used phpBB. Our software was often confused with it, but for 10+ years it was custom forum software (because when we started there was no such thing as forum software), then Invision Community (~2010), and now a mix (~2019).

The 'current mess' is effectively the same navigation as we had with Invision Community where the latest activity was shown by default. As for forum organization, subforums still exist and can be navigated to - either by clicking the forum category tag or Forums → Browse, or by using the Browse the Forums navigation in the right column.

What might be referred to as the latest feed has always existed. The intent of the tags is to allow quick navigation to the forum. For example, this topic from the latest feed:

Clicking the GDNet CSI tag takes me straight to the CSI forum:

As for Discourse, this navigation is what I find attractive as it's similar to the goal here. Categories are effectively subforums, tags are niche topics, and the approach is very similar to what we have here for quick navigation to topics of interest. Subforum navigation can still be implemented as a view, albeit a little more work.

I think what we've tried to do here and what Discourse tries to do is break away from the traditional forum organization in a world that doesn't value traditional forums, but I also understand the appeal for that.

fleabay said:
Good lord, the pricing on that. How do they stay in business?

I think you're looking at the hosted pricing. GDNet was self-hosted, which is a 499/onetime + 199/yr recurring fee. Although we don't license from them anymore either, so that's no longer a cost.

IC wasn't bad.. just difficult to do some things with and regularly had performance issues that were difficult to resolve without beefing up the VMs. Changing to this platform reduced expenses 30% on baseline performance, which is an important factor. GDNet sees ~100 requests/minute on average so while not a massive amount, it has costs to maintain.