What made you choose SMF?

[Nabix]

I've SMF a couple years ago on a project that didn't pan out. I'm just curious, why did you choose SMF as the software to run your community with?

 

[Matthew S]

Open source, large community of SMF admins, large range of add-ons and styles, Tiny Portal, I'm broke and couldn't afford another XF + pro add-ons setup, and XF has an importer if I ever decide to change.

 

[Pete]

When I first picked SMF, it was 2006. phpBB hadn't gotten over its then-terrible security record, and initially I set up with PunBB but realised I didn't like that polls were an addon, so I went looking for free software that had polls and a good security track record. Which led me to SMF.

Times changed and I wouldn't recommend SMF 2.1 though. Not even sure I'd recommend SMF 2.0 any more. Too much stuff gets pushed around without testing.

 

[Pete]

Antes did you know that the member search in 2.1's admin has been broken for 6 years and no one noticed? The filtering by groups doesn't work. Oh, and IP searching has been broken for two years since the big changes to all the IPv6 stuff, none of which have been properly tested.

 

[LeadCrow]

Antes did you know that the member search in 2.1's admin has been broken for 6 years and no one noticed? The filtering by groups doesn't work. Oh, and IP searching has been broken for two years since the big changes to all the IPv6 stuff, none of which have been properly tested.

If noone even complained about it until now, maybe those werent very popular features SMF webmasters used or whose quirks they adapted their workflow around.
That said, 2.1 is still beta. I doubt it would be left broken in the final release.

 

[zappaDPJ]

It chose me. I inherited a number of forums that ran on it which are now large (1 million+), highly customised and would be a nightmare to migrate.

I probably wouldn't recommend it. The pace of development and bug fixes is reaching the point where it needs to be measured in decades not years. I believe work started on 2.1 (still in beta) in 2011 or before. The environment on the official forum is also quite toxic.

In its favour it's free to use, reasonably secure and fast.

 

[XinYenFon]

Antes did you know that the member search in 2.1's admin has been broken for 6 years and no one noticed? The filtering by groups doesn't work. Oh, and IP searching has been broken for two years since the big changes to all the IPv6 stuff, none of which have been properly tested.

You should tell those to Suki, I'm 100% sure she'll help you gladly.

 

[Pete]

If noone even complained about it until now, maybe those werent very popular features SMF webmasters used or whose quirks they adapted their workflow around.
That said, 2.1 is still beta. I doubt it would be left broken in the final release.

It wasn't broken in 2.0. It got broken for some reason early in 2.1 and just never touched since. No need to use admin search if you don't ever run it anywhere real.

I'm 100% sure she'll help you gladly.

Hahahahahaha no. If I said it was dark outside, she'd find a way to disagree with me just because it's me saying it. Last time I spoke to her, she criticised me for reporting bugs. So I stopped reporting bugs and just carried on findin' and fixin' in my fork. She actually managed to put me off in a way you didn't!

 

[XinYenFon]

Hahahahahaha no. If I said it was dark outside, she'd find a way to disagree with me just because it's me saying it. Last time I spoke to her, she criticised me for reporting bugs. So I stopped reporting bugs and just carried on findin' and fixin' in my fork. She actually managed to put me off in a way you didn't!

Now I'm jealous, you have to give me another chance

Kinda curious when you typed "Hahahahahaha no" did you suddenly become all serious and typed no ? that would be hilarious

 

[Pete]

Think more like...

 

[KimmiKat]

I used SMF for a 2nd mboard when I fired vB, but since retired it.

 

[Elf_Ears]

I'll admit to being a bit of a fanboy but I'll try to stay objective.
Yes the admins are toxic, some stuff is overengineered while other stuff is laughably basic (I'm looking at you warning and ban systems) and yes it's a wee bit outdated and development is long...
But I like the BSD license and it has tons of really cool features...
(Conversational pms in free forum software from 2011? That's insane!)
They're just hidden due to poorly documented code and menus.
(Plus the themes are plain php and html. I can't be arsed to learn a wierd intermidiary language to basically just do the same thing)

 

[Elf_Ears]

Not to s**t on the admins too much though...
I find it hard to resist the urge to shout at noobs sometimes but I do think they go too far sometimes, especially for legit questions or bug reports.

 

[Pete]

I'll admit to being a bit of a fanboy but I'll try to stay objective.
Yes the admins are toxic, some stuff is overengineered while other stuff is laughably basic (I'm looking at you warning and ban systems) and yes it's a wee bit outdated and development is long...
But I like the BSD license and it has tons of really cool features...
(Conversational pms in free forum software from 2011? That's insane!)
They're just hidden due to poorly documented code and menus.
(Plus the themes are plain php and html. I can't be arsed to learn a wierd intermidiary language to basically just do the same thing)

I assume that I'm in the category of 'toxic'.

Warnings - I've had lots of thoughts over the years whether it's too basic or not, but I've never been sure what to really do with it. I did experiment in one of the SMF forks about upgrading it substantially but other than 'that's very nice', I don't think anyone ever took it seriously.

Bans... what would you do differently? I actually find the ban system overengineered, not basic, the notion of having multiple triggers that I can add to is occasionally useful but frequently overcomplicates it. Then again I wrote the 'annoy user' mod (that provides vaguely similar functionality), but I don't use it myself.

As for the conversational PMs, that was actually there in 2008, but it's not really conversational at all. It just remembers that PMs were replied to each other and that they have a common history and presents them as such. It can get quite confused if you try to bring people into the conversation by adding them as recipients later on (it's not really XF-style conversations at all). It's a shame that it took until 2014 for it to actually become the default mode, and then only after much wailing and gnashing of teeth because 'they can just change it, isn't that enough'? (Answer: no, there is no way to just change it for all users.)

The BSD licence only came about because of one set of former admins literally blackmailing the then-current set of admins.

As for the themes, them being PHP is actually one of the worst things about it. As a developer jumping in and out of the multiple quoting paradigms at work, it's horrible.

The delay in no small part comes from the fact that every decision gets questioned and challenged and debated, and there's no core 'vision' of what it should be.

 

[Elf_Ears]

Pete what I meant when I said bans were under engineered was that you could only set them in days (even though scheduled tasks have a nice multi unit system that could have been copied and pasted) plus bans are update every page reload (or every few? It's confusing so I'll have to break out ol' Mr. Find in Files in Notepad++) instead of in a scheduled task meaning a very regular BIG database check (I've also heard that the ban updating system is inefficient due to it checking every ban at once but I'm not sure how other software fixed that so I'll shut my mouth). I'm also not sure if decimals work (probably not, I think the "Days" value is stored as an int) so you can't ban someone for "36 hours" via "1.5 Days". I really like the multiple triggers thing though, it satisfies my bureaucratic efficiency urges.

I'm also aware that the conversation PM system is a little weird but I was surprised that they added it in at all so I'm not too fussed. It still probably works better than the s***ty kludge I'd add in if I REALLY wanted that feature though .

As for the dev blackmailing... Yeah... Complete ****show I agree. A bunch of important people being kicked off for criticising and trying to remedy the glacial pace of development and criticising the s***ty company structure (and then getting their names removed from the credits just to add insult to injury (although [unknown]'s easter egg was kept)) was terrible. Now it was a few years back and most info is on rickety archives and some people went back to SMF from wedge so I don't feel I have 100% understanding of events but this is what I mean when I said the dev team was toxic. I don't like to use that word because painting a whole group of people with a black and white Nice or A**hole stamp doesn't really reflect reality and from what I've seem most of the time they seem reasonable but I will say that the reputation exists for a reason.

As for 2.1, I was unimpressed a few years back but looking at it recently I've actually warmed up to it. I like how they re-organised things (except for language being a non theme setting... So long silly text changes,..) and the improvement to attatchments and other cool core changes as well as the new responsive theme make me kinda exited (for it's 2030 release )

 

[Pete]

or every few? It's confusing so I'll have to break out ol' Mr. Find in Files in Notepad++

It runs every few page loads. Coincidentally, about as frequently as the scheduled tasks system actually checks for tasks. As for why it doesn't use scheduled tasks, partly because it was there before tasks - and partly because if you ban someone you want it to come into effect pretty much immediately, not when the next scheduled task gets run for the bans. As for bans being let off, bans being in the unit of days is not a huge inconvenience - if you're banning someone, it's actually very frequently in the unit of *weeks* rather than parts of days, based on what everyone seemed to be doing. The complete rewrite that it would need to make it run off the scheduled tasks system doesn't actually merit the benefit as far as I can tell.

Now it was a few years back and most info is on rickety archives and some people went back to SMF from wedge so I don't feel I have 100% understanding of events

What was made publicly known is a fraction of the level of crapstorm that happened behind the scenes.

I like how they re-organised things (except for language being a non theme setting... So long silly text changes,..

Um, what?

 

[Elf_Ears]

Pete I get what you're saying about bans (I would personally make it a scheduled task but ALSO update bans immediately whenever triggers are changed) although I personally disagree on the time units front though because I'm neurotic about these things .

As for the whole re-organizing business, They changed and consolidated stuff the Sources dir files in a way I like (I'm more talking about the new features and stuff like the new profile fields system though). (I also liked languages being a theme setting so I could make silly text changes for that theme and that theme only)

Either way looking at the "users who are viewing thread" box it looks like some more of the SMF people might get in on the action so hi guys!
This discussion is interesting!

 

[Pete]

the new profile fields system though

It's mostly the same as what was in 2.0, albeit with a few improvements. You can now reorder them, make them easily available in a few new places, that kind of thing. The base feature was still there in 2.0, just harder to find.

I also liked languages being a theme setting so I could make silly text changes for that theme and that theme only

They still are. There is nothing that seismic in 2.1, and I can't imagine what you could do in 2.0 that couldn't be done in 2.1 in the same way. Languages are still stored in the theme folder, still loaded with the same underlying function as it was in 2.0. Even the ThemeStrings file setup still exists if that works for you. I'm still confused as to what functionality you think isn't there...

 

[Elf_Ears]

Pete Hmm... Guess I misread an update post about languages then...

Wierd. I can't even seem to find the text in the update I misread. This one's all on me

 

[radu81]

I started in 2005 with phpBB and wanted to use again for a new forum, but I needed to add and integrate the new forum with a joomla site. At that time there was no bridge for phpBB, so I used smf. After a couple of years using smf I completely forgot about phpbb and also abandoned joomla, migrating all the joomla articles to simple portal articles. It was a nice experience