Elias (@goebelmasse)

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Viewing 25 replies - 1 through 25 (of 27 total)

  • Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    The things I see here are exactly the same indifference towards the user’s needs I had to see in the WP development for the last years. As I said some months ago, it is the WordPress style of “communication” growing here.

    Yesterday, I announced on my little site that I will abandon any further work on my german localization of bbPress and suggested the usage of another bulletin board system. It was the silent decision to end the bbPress 0.9 support, which made me sure that bbPress is in a dead end and that no one of the “relevant” people (which do their decisions in an anti-communicative and anonymous way) wants to change this direction.

    I am fed up with people dreaming of “world domination” with writing almighty PHP applications and ignoring the needs of the users. It is grim, meaningless, void. bbPress is dead.


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    Ouch, “minor errors” and “Forums not installed” isn’t exactly user-friendly…

    I suspect the installer script wasn’t able to create the file bb-config.php caused by too restrictive permissions in the directory bbPress is installed in. To create this file, the directory have to be writeable for the user running the webserver. If this is the cause of this failure (look for a file bb-config.php in the bbPress directory, if it is missing, it is the problem), just give the directory 0777 permissions before starting the installation. After the installation completed, the permissions can be (and should be) set more restrictive.

    In reply to: Welcome Back _ck_

    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    Wow. This is a reason to log in again here (after being totally fed up by being censored and having to read on the fine bbPress as a plugin for the bloaty WP) and to say: Hello _ck_! ;-)

    In reply to: 1.1 feature poll

    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    To chrishajer: Yes, it was me. My “lots of” links are three (is that “lots”?), but okay, the post is loooong. And of course there is not a conspirancy, but it smells like censorship, when I have to see that plans for bbPress to become a WordCrapPressy Bloaty Piece Of Unuseable And Totally Overloaded Shit and have to see my post saying that the WP way is the wrong way for bbPress is made disappear silently and not noticeable for the me. And sorry, but I have to say I expected such kind of censorship. It is the WP kind of “culture” growing here, just forgetting the community of users and building an own universe without the problems in the real world and dreaming of world domination with PHP scripts. That “feature poll” thing makes clear that no strategic discussion with users (and eventually with people who may become developers a little — I simply can only give a little, I am an homeless german artist living by begging and don’t have always a development environment or even permanent internet access) is totally unwanted.

    It sucks. bbPress is dead with this kind of “culture”. And bbPress is dead for me. I expect this lesser neat words to be deleted too, but I know that they are read by the people who are doing so.

    In reply to: 1.1 feature poll

    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    The one thing I love on bbPress

    The one thing I love on bbPress is: It is simple and fast. “Simple” means, its functionality is easy to understand and to use for a less experienced internet user and there are no features distracting from the one core thing in a forum, from that funny discussion thing. And “Fast” means, that the bbPress core is even faster than the rather minimalist PunBB on the virtual server I use bbPress on. These are the two “features” of bbPress I really want to see in the future.

    The things I hate on WordPress

    Following the current discussion reminds me on my own experience with the great WordPress blog software. I am a WordPress user since WP 1.5.x, and WP 1.5.x was the software making me a blogger. It was easy to use, had a clean and simple user interface for the blogger, could be extended easily and replaces my simple home-written system after one week of testing and comparing to s9y.

    Now, I do hate my long ago decision for WP sometimes. The current WP version 2.8.x is bloated, slow and without a good caching plugin not well-suited for a blog with readers.

    As an example, there is a tiny german blog filled by me and less frequent some other people. It is called “Blah”, and most of its postings are simply links to other internet resources, mostly political, conspirational and funny ones. Did I mention that the blog is called “Blah”? ;-) It is not really a “successful” one, in the last six months there were approximately 2,000 visits per day, that’s not much. The “average visitor” requests five postings, and only one percent of them ever leaves a comment. The blog’s database contains 4,300 posts at the moment, that’s not much too. If I deactivate the WP Super Cache plugin, the server fails to handle that little load, the response time of the tiny blog grow to 30 to 50 seconds, the apache processes accumulates and finally the server runs out of virtual memory, giving visitors that funny “Out of memory” PHP error messages or a plain white page.

    This is a situation totally unwanted for a bulletin board, which is a highly dynamic kind of website that can not be cached as easy as the less frequent views of a blog.

    From bbPress 0.9.x to 1.0.x, the number of database queries to view the same page has nearly doubled, and the execution time has grown by approximately 60 percent on the same server. From the user point’s of view, it was exactly the same page, and bbPress is at the moment still performant enough to be better than any other bulletin board software. But from my point of view it remembers me to the things I experienced again and again with many new WordPress versions in the past, reaching the current point of a blog, which isn’t made to have more than a handful of readers. But for a WP blog, I can work around with WP Super Cache, for forums this approach is nearly impossible.

    Some words about readers

    I’m looking at the statistics generated from the apache logfiles of the Blah-blog for the last six months. It is a blog in german language, and of course most readers are living in Germany, less in Austria or Suisse, some in the Netherlands, Danmark, Belgium, Poland, Russia or Hungary too. These are not readers from the so called “third world”. (There is only one world, and we all have to share it!) In the last six months, 19 percent of the Blah-blog readers used an old dial-up modem connection to access it. (Identified by the rather speaking hostnames given in germany for that kind of connection I can identify, there may be some more readers with a low-bandwidth connection.) For this fifth part of my readers (which may be a representative value for other websites in germany too, but most people seems not interested in this kind of information), every use of large JavaScript magic which has to be loaded via a low-bandwidth connection gives an impression of slowness, and this is something I do not want to give them. That’s a reason for the rather minimalistic design of this blog.

    Let me compare that 19 percent to another statistical number for the Blah-blog. 12 percent of all readers uses that fu… fine Internet Explorer 6.0 for surfing. (Identified by the user-agent string, which may be faked in rare cases.) The IE 6 is an old and ugly browser with many problems and a CSS box model interpretation giving a good headache to designers, and there are much better browsers out for free. But in many cases it is unwanted to exclude that 12 percent of website users or to give them a totally trashed design experience. It is also amazing, how many people are still using Windows 98 or ME or even Windows NT 4.0. I assume these people use rather old computers, still working for their personal requirements, so they don’t want to throw them to waste. Yes, there are people out there, which are poor and simply cannot spend a few hundred euros for new hardware every few years — me too. These are people I don’t want to exclude from any website I maintain, and especially I don’t want to exclude these from pages about political or cultural subjects. Every kind of bloat is wrong in my point of view.

    (I use bbPress for a small forum on an uncommercial artists’ webpage, and it is great for that. This usage is my reason why I’m maintaining an inofficial german translation of bbPress, there is simply no language file for German at the moment, and not to share this work is stupid.)

    Some words about the dashboard

    The current bbPress dashboard is fine, it is aesthetical appealing, easy to use (compared to other bulletin boards’ backends) and fast even via a low-bandwidth connection and on a not up-to-date computer. It can be used with all browsers, and it makes all administrative tasks easy. The current WordPress dashboard sucks. It is unuseable slow with the Opera browser, and even with other browsers needs an enourmeous transfer of data and an long initialization time before one can do that simple thing which is blogging: writing a new post. If someone uses an older computer (older than five years), it is unuseable with any browser, and it is unbelievable frustrating to use via a dialup connection. And no, that “Google Gears” stuff does not help.) The huge amount of features are overwhelming for an unexperienced user, and for the little artists’ site (with eight authors) I still have to help some people for every post they want to blog. Since I had to upgrade that site to WP 2.8.x (it used 2.0.x and 2.3.x for a long time), the other authors hate me. Some of them are poor people. I recommend the usage of BlogDesk for them, but sometimes there are tasks which cannot be done with BlogDesk, as deleting an unwanted idiot’s comment or declaring a post as sticky (to announce an action, happening, exhibition, sound vernissage, reading, party, etc.). Since WP 2.8.x, the posting frequency of some co-authors is reduced to zero, and if I had the possibility for it, I would create my own WordPress fork (a DietPress for people who wants blogging without bloat).

    And this is the way bbPress should avoid, in my opinion.

    The bbPress of the future I want

    bbPress is great! The bbPress core is good, and the features in an out-of-the-box installation are enough in many cases. But of course, there are things that could be improved, and there are many features often missed by people who wants a bulletin board. The probaly most wanted features are (list may be incomplete)

    • eMail notification for new posts
    • A kind of bbCode, which meets better the standard people expect in a BB software
    • An improved editor, helping the user to do the wanted markup (may be bloaty magic WYSIWYG, but even eight buttons with a little JavaScript are better than nothing for the inexperienced user)
    • An internal system of personal messaging (I hate it, but others love it)
    • Attachment of files to a post
    • Perhaps an avatar system independent from Gravatar
    • An easy to extend user profile with additional informations
    • A “who is online now” display
    • Counters how often a post has been read
    • A “terms of usage” statement which is required to be accepted by newly registered users
    • An extended search with criteria as forum, tag, date range, username. (The existing search is better than the WordPress search, but I can still be improved. In a support forum with ten thousands of topics, it would be good to have the accumulated information more “findable”.)
    • An interactive (and plugin-extensible and i18nable) help system for all core bbPress features, explaining the bbPress usage to inexperienced users and the concepts they cannot understand directly, especially tags. This is something I haven’t seen in any other BB software, but it is something really needed. It may even contain some words about netiquette…
    • Perhaps a “widget system” similar to WP as a simple way to modify the order of appearance of the displayed entities without editing in themes

    And of course, bbPress must remain performant, non-bloated and easy to integrate with WordPress. That’s a lot…

    Many of these frequently requested features are not a good “standard” functionablity.

    • The eMail notification is fine for spammers too. I am registered in some boards with this “feature”, and from time to time someone registers, writes spammy posts to various topics and the BB software dutifully and reliable sends that spam to a lot of users, before a moderator can do something. That’s why I am deactivating it always — one day, I received more than 100 mails “from my favorite forum”… aaargh!
    • An over-improved editor slows down the forum for people with old hardware and makes the forum unusable for blind people with their strange solutions for surfing. (Yes, some of my “readers” are blind.)
    • Personal massaging is a poor reinvention of good old internet eMail that sucks. For someone active on various boards, he has to check it messages in many places, which is ugly.
    • An extended user profile is exactly the thing spammers want. The links in approximately 5 percent of my eMail spam are going to user profiles in bulletin boards, which are misused in many ways.
    • Every upload possibility to the server can be a security problem, can be used by spammers to put spammy graphics in the internet or can consume execessive hard disc space on the server if heavily used.

    But of course these features are wanted in many cases.

    We should have a bbPress slogan for all future development. My suggestion is: Let’s make simple things easy, and let’s make complex things possible.

    Learning from that part of WordPress which sucks means: Doing it better in bbPress. The core system should kept as a small one, perhaps a little smaller than the actual core. (The current user profile is sometimes unwanted.) And all additional features should be implemented in plugins, that a forum administrator can activate and configure as needed.

    Core Plugins

    But plugins are a huge problem too. Using a plugin indenpendent from the core system means: Making the update of bbPress to a new version sometimes to a migraine upgrade, whenever the needed plugins do not work with the newer version. Sometimes, I have this problem with one of my sites based on WordPress. And if the plugin’s functionality does require editing in the themes, it excludes less-experienced forum-administrators with a lack of PHP knowledge from using the plugins, which is not exactly the way to make complex things possible.

    So there should be a set of plugins which are part of the bbPress release, which are developed together with the core system, let’s call them “core plugins”. It is not required to activate them to have a simple and basic bulletin board, but if someone do so, he will never have problems with upgrades. The “core plugins” are guaranteed to be delivered and to work with every release version and every security fix ever released. We have this kind of “core plugins” already, bozo users and Akismet. But it is a concept to be extended. A better post editor, a “terms of usage” page, a PM system, an internal avatar system, attachments to posts and all the administrative stuff around these features are good candidates for “core plugins”. If someone does not need them, he does not activated them. But if someone activates them and only them, this will never make the next bbPress release to a upgrade hell.

    There may be bbPress-tags which are implemented empty if a core plugin isn’t activated, to make it easy to program the default theme and any other theme independent from the activated set of “core plugins” and without that sucking lines of if (function_exists ('bb_great_feature')) bb_great_feature ();. This kind of interface can be defined long before the “core plugins” are stable, and it can be documented for theme developers to allow them making their themes future-proof. (Oh yes, we need some good themes, the default one is fine, but some people want a richer selection.)

    The bbPress features eighty percent of people want can be implemented in “core plugins”. Simple things will be easy. And if someone wants a small bbPress, that’s easier, he simply does not need to activate any “core plugin”. And there is still a plugin interface which makes complex things possible — sometimes a little editing in themes is required, but most people never needs to do so.

    That’s the way bbPress should go, in my opinion.

    (It may be a way for the future of WordPress too. But that’s not the topic here, and the WP developers do their work for a huge community of users and simply cannot change earlier decisions easily.)

    And excuse my english. My poetic german is much better… and shorter.


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    Since bbPress 1.0.x you have to use my-languages, the path bb-includes/languages is correct for older bbPress versions.

    In reply to: new topics not showing

    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    Sometimes, this weird error occurs if you have pretty permalinks, but your .htaccess dows not reflect the permalink settings.

    In any case, you have to do a recount, the negative counts are surely wrong.


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    For dutch, better save it as nl and set BB_LANG to nl… ;-)

    (de is german)


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    Use the .pot-file for the bbPress version you are translating – you can import it in your poedit project.

    http://svn.automattic.com/bbpress-i18n/pot/tags/


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    I wrote a long German text on my german bbPress-Website to draw some attention to the current, sad situation from German bbPress-Users — many of them can’t read English easily…


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    Oh yes, thank you Marius-, this idea to show the current problem to the WP team was to simple to be mine…


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    I wrote a detailed description of the problem in german language — ich habe das Problem ausführlich in deutscher Sprache beschrieben:

    http://bbpress.tamagothi.de/2009/11/19/seltsamer-fehler-login-geht-nicht/


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    Oh, that’s weird, time for a deeper examination…

    I get the output from bb-config.php as a local file with wget and cat it to my console on my UTF-8 linux system. It looks like an empty file, but it has a size of three bytes. And than I remembered about Unicode and typed od -x bb-config.php, which results in

    bbef 00bf

    And then I began to understand.

    The first three bytes ef bb bf (for normal reasons least byte first on intel platforms in inverse order to make it not too easy to understand) are the byte order mark for a UTF-8 encoded textfile. But for PHP, they are simply characters.

    Some informations about the BOM in german language

    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark

    Your text editor saves the file as UTF-8 and writes a byte order mark at the beginning of the file, and these three bytes do cause the strange error. Look in the documentation of your editor to find the setting for the file storage format, and if in doubt, simply save the bb-config.php as a plain ASCII file instead of Unicode or UTF-8.

    Ich hoffe, jetzt hilft es wirklich ein bisschen weiter. So ein Problem ist richtig arg, da kommt man nie drauf, wenn man kein Glück hat…

    (Okay, it is an english forum here: I hope this times it helps a little more. This type of problem is a hard one, something you never think about and find it only by chance…)


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    There is a problem in your bb-config.php, most probably in the first line.

    Normally, HTTP-requesting bb-config.php should not create any output. But try

    http://uni-bonn-medienwissenschaft.de/forum/bb-config.php

    and see the strange “”. I cannot get, what the problem exactly is, but it is the bbPress configuration file for sure. After login, bbPress tries to set a cookie. This is done by sending an HTTP header. But if there is any output before the PHP header () invocation, PHP sends a generic header, which lets the cookie fail. Result: you can not login.

    Ich hoffe, es hilft ein bisschen — und sorry für mein mieses Englisch ;-)

    Oh, ich vergaß — Oh, I forgot

    If you want a german language file for bbPress 1.0.2 (with the formal “Sie”), take my translation — Wenn du eine deutsche Sprachdatei für bbPress 1.0.2 haben möchtest, nimm meine Übersetzung.

    http://bbpress.tamagothi.de/

    In reply to: Future of bbPress

    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    […] I don’t think it is really using much (if any) MySQL specific code.

    bbPress uses a lot of SQL statements not working with Oracle and is highly optimized for MySQL. To make it independent from the RDBMS will not be easy, and coding a RDBMS independent layer and not using “JOIN”, “LEFT JOIN”, “MATCH” and “FULLTEXT INDEX”, “LIMIT” would degrade the performance of bbPress, which isn’t exactly the thing wanted for it.

    In reply to: left aligned

    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    There are simply no stylesheets for div.discussions and other kakumei CSS classes, so they are displayed unstyled.


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    For normal site-users it can be nice, that they’re logged in at WordPress if the’re registered and logged in at bbPress. The WP comment form is simpler for the logged-in-users, they don’t have to type their name, mail adress and homepage. If you configure your WordPress in a way which requires registration of commenters, there is an additional benefit for administration. There are always some hand-registered SEO-spammers, and it makes you less work if you have only one user database. The mapping of WP user roles to user roles in bbPress may save some work too.

    For most installations, the integration isn’t needed. Always remember that the bbPress installation with integration is significantly more complicated than a normal bbPress installation and may lead you to incompatibility issues with future WP releases. Think about it before doing. I love it, but it is a little hard sometimes…

    In reply to: admin panel warning

    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    I think that this problem occurs in forums w/o posts, when the various numbers are divided by the number of posts, which is zero. But it is a bug, the code must test for zero as denominator…


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    By editing the style.css file.

    body {

    [...]

    background-image: url(path/to/the/image/relative/to/the/css);

    background-repeat: no-repeat; /* or whatever you like */

    [...]

    }

    Of course I cannot give a full CSS introduction here, but there are lots of good and helpful introduction available online.


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    I scanned my bbPress source directory with poedit and merged the changes into my local .po, which I used to localize the older versions of bbPress. Okay, there was a little work with errorneous substitutions of translated strings, but poedit is a great tool.

    http://www.poedit.net/


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    @Arturo: It’s just a matter of tools…


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    http://bbpress.de is not an official site, and they seem not to be interested in a good localization. The “bbPress Deutschland” makers created a language file a few months ago, but this translation is not complete, it contains a lot of typing mistakes, some terms which are easy to misunderstand for a german reader and some wrong texts too. It hasn’t never been updated.

    I love bbPress (and sometimes, I hate it), so I decided to create my own and better translation. I had worked only a few hours on it, and the result is a translation much better than the bbpress.de one.

    The existance of a language file is a reason to use bbPress. People should know which translations are existing, and I think, they should know it from an official site. At the moment, there is no “official” german site, but only the bbpress.de. This is a project of “inpsyde”, the makers of wordpress-deutschland.de. A few weeks ago, they tried to deliver a “german WordPress version” with an advertising plugin silently, which was called by some people – me included – as a kind of “plugin spam”. (It wasn’t announced and not marked as an advertisement for the german company LinkLift.) This attempt to create an “official looking german WordPress release with advertising” failed, there was a great resistance from the german WordPress users. This is a strong reason for me not to trust those people anymore. I want the translation to be as free as possible from the early days on.


    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    I experienced the same problem, and deactivating the “Use Display Name” plugin fixes it for me too. Something in the “Use Display Name” plugin may be broken. (But with previous version of bbPress, it works fine.)

    There is another strange thing. The “display names” from WP are still displayed after deactivating the plugin, but only in the topic listings, not in the threads. This isn’t exactly what I’d expected…

    In reply to: Wrong user count

    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    Oh, thank you SamBauers – this is the information missing on this site…

    But as I read at the trac site, the problem is already known. It is fixed by changeset 867 – at least in my test environment. I’ll upload it to the real server, it seems to be okay and of course it will be better than my quick and dirty “solution”…

    In reply to: Wrong user count

    Elias
    Member

    @goebelmasse

    Arrgh! Horrors!

    The problem is caused by the bb_append_meta invocation in line 2075 of functions.php. The query destroys the last SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS and so the count is wrong. A quick and dirty workaround is to change 'append_meta' => false to 'append_meta' => false in the $defaults array in line 2021 of functions.php. But this only works if the append_meta argument is not given in the bb_user_search call.

    Now the problem is more complicated as I suspected earlier. It is a problem for the hackers that make bbPress. No further searching for bugs from me, the problem should be clear. (It is clear enough to me after reading lots of code from other people.) I expect it to be fixed in the next release.

Viewing 25 replies - 1 through 25 (of 27 total)