There’ve been threads about this before, and from what I can remember, the idea was that integration was important and people should have only one login for the ‘community’ (blog, forum, other things?).
I don’t think I can go along with that story anymore. The forum is broke and lacking in so many ways. Austro-libertarianism is about the communication of ideas, and that’s being crippled right now.
I say, disregard the goal of integration and think more about ‘division of labor’. There is great forum software out there for very cheap, which would allow many more possibilities than exist now. The amount of people who blog on Mises is not very high, especially the number of regular bloggers (see https://forum.freecapitalists.org/blogs/Bloggers.aspx ). I don’t see why creating an extra account for them is a big deal. It literally takes seconds. I’m also a bit puzzled what the need is for being able to blog on Mises. Why not have people create a blog on any of the free sites (wordpress, tumblr, blogger), or through cheap hosting with a domain name and free wordpress installed, and have a collection page on the Mises Wiki where you can link your blog on.
The fact that the Mises Wiki is seperate software that is not integrated (and very powerful and specialized) seems to speak for this idea too.
You can see that vBulletin is succesful among the highest trafficking forums. It also looks the best of the top 3 in my opinion.
Other advantages compared to now:
Is not a ‘rich text’ editor and outputs text in a consistent way. There are a lot of problems with this now.
A quoted text has a link on it that leads you back to the post it was made in. Very handy.
Has an excellent search function. You can build up a lot of knowledge in a forum, but it has to be findable.
Click on a user and you can see which threads they’ve started.
Ability to ignore users (their posts are collapsed in your view with a button to open).
Links are automatically activated.
All of this (and much more) is highly configurable.
I would say create a limited number of subforums, and add a few stickies there. If you make too many subforums people will simply use the ‘latest posts’ button and disregard any categorization (which is what I do now, for reading and posting; also because the current subforum choices make little sense).
I was told to check in here for updates. I’m not sure how the change-over is supposed to work (or if that is the “integration” you were talking about) but I went ahead and created an account there.
But obviously that isn’t exactly bustling with updates. And it’s a wordpress site…so the blog section is obviously up to par (Daniel James Sanchez even moved his blog back after having to jump ship from the Mises site due to limitations.)
However, the “forum” section there is even worse than this one. I agree, vBulletin is a good platform. It’s popular for a reason. I don’t know why everyone here pisses on it so much. (Then again pissing on popular things is done a lot around here).
vBulletin took a huge step back about a year and a half ago when they were bought by a publicy traded firm (Internet Brands), and the latest version of the software is not even close to their legendary quality. They have a lot of customer satisfaction issues from what I have observed.
I don’t know why LvMI doesn’t push resources towards this side of the site or finish the new community but I stopped worrying about it a long time ago.
That’s vb4. It takes a lot of development to get a site looking like that.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. One certainly is that developing a user community isn’t a casual thing and it’s best not left to volunteers, even though LvMI is blessed to have volunteers like it has had in this community.
I have two XF licenses, haven’t deployed them yet, one is spoken for however. I think the issue with this community, and many communities in general is that they aren’t run for profit, that is there is no clear connection between development hustle and desired results.
I’d be announcing every new book and Mises Academy class in here. This is a very targeted audience of people who spend money on LvMI related stuff. That sort of demo targeting would be very expensive elsewhere.
Whether something is worth paying for depends on your needs. I imagine that having professional support can make it worth it. Another thing may be that, because a commercial forum is usually bought by commercial entities, the testing of new updates is more stringent because it is more important.
MyBB is a really good alternative to all well known forum softwares, and the community around it is really dynamic. It combines an easy to use administration interface with a simple and shiny appearance. Without attempting to support the entire range of features we could classically find in proprietary software, MyBB is a perfect forum for medium and large community. A sufficient security model is well implemented and ensure your forum not being invaded by hordes of spammers.
With more than 400 plugins and modifications, you will have a great choice to customize your MyBB installation and fit your users’ needs. It is also well known for ensuring a high quality migration of existing forum, as the MyBB developers team provides the MyBB Merge System, that helps you replacing your old PhpBB 2 or vBulletin 3.8 installation with a new and modern bulletin board system. It could also be perfectly used in case of merging two existing boards, that is quite rare today.
And to conclude with another good news, it is open source and is proud to be! Congratulations to the MyBB team, that has made a really good job.
This appears to be taken care of quite well on the MIses Blog. Not that it would hurt to have more advertising, but it’s not like they’re slacking off on publicizing anything that could possibly be promoted. And to be quite honest, I think it would possibly alienate frequent users of the forum to be constantly barraged with notices and adverts. I personally would be, and I think it would crowd the forum. Perhaps if it were a format where threads were kept in their specific forums, and there were a dedicated announcements forum or something like that. But in a setup like this, where every message, regardless of what forum it is in, gets bumped to the top of a master list, it would get quite annoying.
I’ve never set up a forum, so I don’t know what it takes, so I don’t why the new forum isn’t post-beta. After all, there has been work put into it. But it would have been great to have something set up, until the new forum went post-beta, that didn’t require more than one click to quote or having to write or copy and paste code to embed a youtube video.
My main issue with the forum software is there is no browser spell check support, which is odd. If you install a dictionary in to firefox when you type in every window apart from these comment boxes it underlines spelling mistakes. So i end up copying and pasting my post in to word to do a spell check and then pasting it back. If you could intergrate mybb in to the site then i would vote for that. I have used mybb with postgre and it was easy to setup and configure, took like an hour. Other than that i have no problems with the forum software and do not realy mind, plus i just joined so i don’t realy have a say…
edit: if you do use mybb i recommend disabling the reputation and calendar/events features and a few others as well, makes it less bloated and the reputation feature just gets abused. Unless there is a specific use for the calendar feature, disable it.
It has to do with the nature of the rich text editor. If you click the “source” button at the top left of your post box and view your work in the html source, the spell check works. I just click over to that and have a glance through. It’s like putting on spell check glasses.