Atheist Forums Must Change

[KevinM1]

I'm actually surprised it doesn't have more members. It's the first thing I found when I looked for an atheist forum. Not to mention it's the best one quality wise. I'm really curious how much work you put into it. It must've been a lot.

(I'm learning HTML and CSS and some other stuff right now.)

The guts of the forum is prepackaged - MyBB forum software. I'm not sure how much custom modding Tib and/or others have done to it. I'm guessing things like kudos and reputation are existing secondary modules that have been tweaked. Mod tools are generally stock with forums like this (mostly because they're a PITA to modify in a lot of cases, and tend to do the job just fine anyway*), although I can't help but wonder if the special colored staff text blocks we see from time to time in posts when things are going off the rails are at least partly custom.

*At PHPFreaks we made the mistake of changing from either MyBB or PHPBB to IP Board for our forum software. Worst back end administration tools ever. Something as simple as banning spammers took 4-5 steps.

[Tiberius]

Banning spammers used to be annoying in MyBB too. In recent versions the have a "purge spammer" option which permanently bans them and deletes all their posts.

[KevinM1]

Banning spammers used to be annoying in MyBB too. In recent versions the have a "purge spammer" option which permanently bans them and deletes all their posts.

Yeah, IP Board has that option, too. It just takes an effort to get to it. Can't just click on a name and ban through their profile, instead you need to go through at least two other screens.

[Excited Penguin]

I'm actually surprised it doesn't have more members. It's the first thing I found when I looked for an atheist forum. Not to mention it's the best one quality wise. I'm really curious how much work you put into it. It must've been a lot.

(I'm learning HTML and CSS and some other stuff right now.)

The guts of the forum is prepackaged - MyBB forum software.  

What a dummie I am. I guess I noticed that earlier on but forgot about it. I guess I'm just in that mindset right now - creating websites.

So usually all forums are like this, right?

[Joods]

Just in case no one noticed, this is an example of a ninja rep whore thread. And I fucking love it.

Napo better step up his game.

Guess I should step up my game too. There are theists that have more rep love than me and I've been here longer!

[KevinM1]

The guts of the forum is prepackaged - MyBB forum software.  

What a dummie I am. I guess I noticed that earlier on but forgot about it. So usually all forums are like this, right?

Usually, because writing your own is a PITA even with modern frameworks like Symfony, Laravel, etc., and the intellectual problem a forum represents has been solved by existing solutions. New forum software, like, say, Vanilla, tends to simply be an iterative step made as a response to the perceived flaws in the older sofware.

Basically, unless you're learning or making an attempt to make (for all intents and purposes) a better wheel, sticking with what's proven to work is your best bet.

Unless you're talking WordPress. That shit needs to die in a fire.

[Excited Penguin]

What a dummie I am. I guess I noticed that earlier on but forgot about it. So usually all forums are like this, right?

Unless you're talking WordPress.  That shit needs to die in a fire.

Why?

[Excited Penguin]

But even still, I browsed some other "atheist forums" and none look as good as this one does. I guess they use a different forum software(a worse one)?

[ignoramus]

What a dummie I am. I guess I noticed that earlier on but forgot about it. So usually all forums are like this, right?

Usually, because writing your own is a PITA even with modern frameworks like Symfony, Laravel, etc., and the intellectual problem a forum represents has been solved by existing solutions.  New forum software, like, say, Vanilla, tends to simply be an iterative step made as a response to the perceived flaws in the older sofware.  

Basically, unless you're learning or making an attempt to make (for all intents and purposes) a better wheel, sticking with what's proven to work is your best bet.

Unless you're talking WordPress.  That shit needs to die in a fire.

You'll be picking on my Joomla next Kev. Hehe

Hey, nothing wrong with fast food sw is there?, if it does the job for the masses...

[KevinM1]

Unless you're talking WordPress.  That shit needs to die in a fire.

Why?

Mostly because it's an archaic mess under the hood, rife with terrible code. Or, it was the last time I was forced to deal with it a few years ago.

It was first released in 2003 before PHP had real object oriented programming support. It was merely supposed to be a blogging engine, and because of that the entire thing is based on The Loop, which is quite literally a global level loop (think for-loop or while-loop) that runs the whole thing. And for a blog, that kinda sorta makes sense.

Because of how easy it was to install and use, it quickly gained ubiquity, and with it a desire to expand it into other kinds of websites, like CMSes and e-commerce. Problem is, rather than change the guts to something more logical, they kept The Loop (likely because the user base that could actually troubleshoot code and the various add-on and theme creators were familiar with it). So, it became a bit of an inflexible, contorted mess.

The code itself was terrible, written before PHP coders really knew what they were doing. Lots of mixing application logic with presentation logic and global variables (which are very bad things because they blow apart encapsulation and create tightly coupled code that relies on what are essentially magic values) everywhere.

Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but I refuse to touch it again. I'm much happier creating truly custom sites with Symfony because I can do anything a client wants, especially with all of the packages available through Composer. And I can do it faster than I would mucking around with WordPress. Even on the front end, as Twig is more flexible than the weird three file thing WordPress has for layouts.