To the admins: Regarding DU forum software:

DU forum software is far superior to other forum software!

DU has spoiled me -- it is difficult to visit other forums with their unwieldy forum formats. A very popular format for most forums is the type where the thread is broken up over several pages & each response is put at the end of the thread. I hate that! It's hard to find posts you want to respond to. I much prefer the DU design, where the entire thread loads on one page in a hierarchical format where you can easily tell which post the responses are in reference to.

Does anyone know why the other design is so much more in use? Is it an off-the-shelf package? Is DU a completely customized product? Just curious why so many sites choose an inferior format over a superior one.

Anyway, the superior format is only one reason why I continue to support this wonderful site!

Outstanding job, admins!

:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

:applause:

I hate going to the to other forums because I can't find what I'm looking for, and if somebody is kind enough to post a link, it's a pain trying to read the post and comments.

DU is without a doubt the most user friendly forum.

I join you in your accolades!

:applause:

:P

At the bottom of every page you'll find the following copyright notice:


The admins here at DU have worked very hard to make modifications to DCForum that make for a very positive user experience.

Use PhpBB, which is free or VBulletin, which is anything but free. Unlike DU, which elad has HIGHLY customized to the point it is unrecognizable from what was here in the early days.

As a webmaster, I would rather have lots and lots of root canals, every day, sans anesthesia, than run a forum. If someone told me that I had to do it as a requirement of my job, I would retire to Montana, to grow dental floss and herd cats.

Your comment makes me appreciate my monthy contribution even more!

:rofl:

You've never been asked to create a scrolling table with fixed headers and sortable columns, and by the way we have to support Internet Explorer 5? If not, consider yourself very lucky.

Running is another, you know? ;-)

both technically and in terms of people management.

:applause:

Most PHP forums were written by script kiddies. My understanding is that DU is highly customized, but I'm sure Elad could elaborate, and I wish he would.

-Hoot

It's who's hosting them. Most site owners don't do their own writing anymore.

:applause:

I have always felt that the better the design, the fewer instructions are required...

Cheers to Elad.

They seem so complicated and hard to deal with.

DU is the first Forum I was ever a part of, so I am very spoiled.

The one thing I've always wanted is for reply messages to be indented one level from the post they are replying to. I realize that this gets hairy as threads get very deep, but it doesn't have to be much. 15 pixels would do. I just wish there was a more visual way to immediately tell that a given post is in reply to another post.

All I could say was :wow:

Here's what's coming up (granted, this was last November, but still...)

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Skinner/217

"Powered by DCForum+ Version 1.1 Copyright 1997-2002 DCScripts.com
Software has been extensively modified by the DU administrators"


So it's likely open-source (freely-available) software that the DU admins have extensively modified for the DU site. :applause:

And I agree: It ROCKS! They have done a superb job on this site. Makes me happy to donate when I can.

http://www.congressunderfire.com/dc/dcboard.php

The software is distributed under GPL:



"DCForum+, PhP/MySQL Version of DCForum

"A web-based discussion forum is an absolute must for building a web community...."

DCForum+ is a powerful, freely distributed under GPL, web-based discussion forum software. Created using PhP, DCForum+ uses fast and reliable MySQL database backend to deliver highly scalable solution to meet the demands of your growing online community."

http://www.dcscripts.com/

I wish I had the talents that the admins/programmers here have...

...obviously it is on DU. The speed, security, and uptime of this site is impressive, besides the fact that it's much more interesting than the default DCForum/DCScripts site. They've done a lot with it here!

Perl coders represent!

(crickets...)

just because a lot of php programmers dont know what they are doing you shouldn't discount how good php/mySQL actually is.

As a PHP developer, I've seen just how well PHP/MySQL can perform under pressure when you code properly.

(It's even more fun though when you tie it to Oracle. Sweep Cupin' Cakes, the load that can take!)

But they're not why I discount it. It's more the inability to enforce variable declaration and the lack of namespaces. I also don't like embedding code right into HTML, a genuine templating system would encourage cleaner code.

But none of that is to say that PHP doesn't have its place. It's great for quick and dirty scripts, and it scores points for sheer ubiquitousness. But I strongly disagree that it's "just as good as" perl (or java, ruby, or even C#).

But this is all way off topic, and DU is no place for a holy war. Well, OK, it totally is, but not a holy war on this topic.

I'm not at the point yet where I'm an expert in object oriented programing so I can't really comment much on it, I just know this was a feature a lot of php programmers were waiting for and now got.

I'm not sure what you mean by inability to enforce variable declaration. If you have E_ALL on not declaring a variable before calling it will produce a warning but the code will still execute, there are ways around that. Not sure if this is what you mean.

Perl is certainly great, the fact it's last major revision (perl 5) happened well over a decade ago should be a clue that it is a stable programming language. But having worked with it years ago in my personal opinion it makes some things more complicated than they have to be, php is much more convenient to work with. Plus you can't beat the community that has now grown around PHP. Thousands if not millions of modules are available, a great open source community, and wonderful support.

And this isn't the first time a thread has tread off topic and it won't be the last. I don't know if I would call this a holy war, I love php since I was raised around it, but I don't think I'm ready to go on crusades over it just yet. :) But at the same time I can't resist geeking out when the opporunity comes.

But to each his own. I'm sure you already know programmers are a stubborn breed, so I'm sure you wont change my mind just like I wont change yours. :)

:toast:

And it works like a snap on my 26.4 dialup. (Less when it rains.)

easy to navigate and search.

but to each his own. :toast:

Since I'm a dialup user I feel the opposite as you about pagination. I much prefer long threads to be spread over several pages because of loading time. Some long threads I don't bother trying to get into at all because I know I'm going to have loading issues... same for threads with a lot of photos.

I used to have dialup & turned all graphic features off. Even then, the really long threads sometimes wouldn't load.

When I first got DSL a friend told me, "Just wait. In a couple of months you'll complain how slow it is." I didn't beleive her, but it happened! :crazy:


Love your screen name! ;)

The list and the...is it Perl that is the threaded style, so you can see the whole discussion at once?

I agree. I have not found another forum layout that comes close to DU.

Because they hate America!

it might provide another income stream . . . something to think about? . . .

it just keeps getting better

I absolutely hate it. :thumbsdown: Every other forum I spend time on uses vBull, and I'm used to that. I prefer the way vBull looks, and the way it is used by forum members.

For all the work they have done to make DU look good and work well, it is still possible to use DU from the most limited of environments and it still looks good and works well. I would expect DU to work well for those dependent on screen readers and similar technologies.

Because of security concerns/fears and various other constraints, I often access the net with "quaint" browsers like lynx or w3m. These render HTML only and display the results in a terminal window with uniform-width characters (and sometimes on an actual terminal like a VT-420). No scripts, no Java, no XML, no video, no SWF -- nothing but bare bones HTML is understood by these browsers. No images either, only their alternate text, although in some environments I can explicitly request an image be downloaded and then displayed with some other application.

These limited browsers are very fast, even on a slow dialup line, and they have almost no security vulnerabilities.