Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

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Pony99CA
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by Pony99CA »

DionDesigns wrote:I don't believe a product exists today which, on its own, has the ability to supplant phpBB. However, I do believe phpBB will be an afterthought within 3 years after the release of 3.1. phpBB will receive some serious wounds in the first few months after the release of 3.1, and its survival will depend on how it deals with those wounds. I guess I'm predicting that it will not deal with them very well.
What are those "serious wounds" you speak of? You shouldn't make a statement like that without elaboration.

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meatsadam
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by meatsadam »

Hey, phpBB will surely trump competition if we make it as easily pluggable(like Disqus) to any existing properly coded php 5.3+ based site. Next, let's make it easily accessible in most platforms by having a responsive theme.

stevenmw
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by stevenmw »

Two things that were said stick out.
t_backoff wrote: Bloat bloat bloat bloat bloat bloat bloat bloat (I think I covered all 8 points of yours). Personally, I think the "reputation" should be vote up or vote down. Nothing else! If people want to expand on that, then create a plugin for it. I wan to be clear - I'm not against such a system going it, but it needs to be basic (again, just vote up and vote down). Adding all these unnecessary crap just makes the stuff more complex and steers phpBB away from it's core purpose - to create discussions.
It should be basic / simple, and the concept of up or down being the only options is a great way to do this. Personally I feel that a reputation system should be applied to users, but only accessible in posts. Something like allowing each post to have a link or button where you can vote a user up or down based on their post. Not only would this reward helpful users, it would help stop spam, non sense, and other negative items. You could maybe even implement a feature where if a user has so many down-voted posts they can't do things like use avatars, have signature, post to certain things, etc. But honestly, this is just a more complex version of the report post feature so in all honesty it may be pointless. That is just my take.

The second thing that stood out was
DavidIQ wrote:It amazes me how many people are ready to jump ship because phpBB doesn't have feature X or Y when most of what is being asked for is already available as MODs/add-ons. Sure it would be nice to include some of these features in core but including everything everyone would want in the core would make phpBB a bit bloated and we need to maintain a good balance between good core features and bloat and including everything everyone has mentioned is just not reasonable.
This is a huge selling point for phpBB. The fact that it is simple, and doesn't include a huge amount of core features. The fact that phpBB is so easy to build onto, and develop into exactly what you need is a key factor. In all honesty phpBB right now comes with exactly what it needs to. There are two things I wanted to see come with the BB by default. These were a global quick reply system that can be turned on and off in different areas, and a hyperlink with the last post title on the forum index instead of an icon. The first item has all ready been implemented, and the second is so easy to implement ourselves it's silly to request it.

This software is so underestimated. It is meant to be a bulletin board, and it does a fantastic job of this. But everyone overlooks that the phpBB core comes with all of these amazing features, and the real problem is simply tying them into your website.

DavidIQ says it as clearly as it can be said. Adding a large number of things to the core just adds bloat. We should stick to just basic features that can be used in a number of different ways. What I mean is that single features that can be used to accomplish a multitude of tasks are the important features to implement with the core. I have always felt that what makes phpBB unique is how easily it is to turn it into what you need. The lack of certain core features allows a much wider range of possibilities.

The only thing I really want to see with added to the phpBB core right now is the ability to be taken back to your previous viewed page after logging in. No matter if you are in the forum path or outside of it, and long as each page is defined in phpBB and you are using phpBB's session. With this small implementation you can use phpBB features hand in hand with your website without any effort.

opc0de
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by opc0de »

Registered an account to make this post.

I've been using phpbb in its various incarnations since 2001, and I can tell you that from the administration side of things, phpbb is very much a case of "the devil you know." People stick with it because it's what they know; not because it's great. Case in point: A few years ago I got fed up with phpbb and moved on in search of a better offering.

There are a lot of really, truly horrible design choices and features. Writing themes and templates is too complicated. Last time I checked, the API documentation was practically non-existent (probably by design, so that for-profit mod authors can thrive). Doing just about any task as a user or an admin involves too many clicks and pageloads.

phpbb4 needs to focus on the user and the administrator experiences or it will find itself taking a back seat to other offerings.
  1. Developer documentation needs to be better. Lots of people want to use single-sign-on systems and don't want users to have to register an account for each of their wiki, e-commerce, forum, CMS, etc. I tried to integrate phpbb3 with Drupal once. BIG MISTAKE.
  2. Simplify and document the process for writing plugins, mods (why do you all capitalize "mod" as "MOD"?? It's not an acronym), and themes
  3. Less clutter. Focus more on the content of posts and not on silly things like user badges, upvotes and +1s, post counts and ranks. All these things can be added via plugins if the API is sane.
  4. Streamlined interface by default. Tags as well as sub-sub-forums for every single thing? Eight different boxes at the bottom explaining that bbcode is ON and that I may in fact edit posts? Random statistics at the bottom that nobody cares about like "most users ever online"? 400 different subcategories for various profile fields that a fraction of users ever use or look at. The only reason you click on someone's profile is to track their posts or send them a PM.Folks, all these things should be OFF by default. Let the users enable these things if they choose to. The focus needs to be on communicating, not packing in as many features as possible. It's a forum, not myspace. It should be about posting and reading messages, not showing off your user trophies or whatever.
  5. In the same vein, develop some officially-supported plugins like an upvote system or user trophies or 3 different kinds of profile pics or a level-up forum RPG system or whatever. These are features that a lot of retards users want and will flood your request forums looking for, so plugins would be a good way to satisfy user demands without contributing to bloat.
It's been my experience that a lot of the "old guard" of the phpbb dev community are very set in their ways and hostile to change. I hope for the project's sake this is no longer the case. The pre-2008 days of the web forum crammed with every conceivable feature and garrish neon-green-on-black themes are behind us.

I don't mean to be rude; it's just that I'm sure there are plenty of fanboys who are happy to consistently post stuff like
random idiot wrote:gj devs!!!1 Best release evar!!!shift+1
Sycophants are a dime a dozen. People who tell it like it is are (IMHO) in shorter supply.

Anyways, best of luck with phpbb4.

wGEric
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by wGEric »

opc0de wrote:why do you all capitalize "mod" as "MOD"?? It's not an acronym)
To differentiate it from moderator which is often shortened to "mod". I can't remember exactly why modifications was used instead of hack. Probably because of the negative connotations that come with the term hack.
Eric

opc0de
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by opc0de »

Ah, makes sense. I've been wondering that for years.

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Mess
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by Mess »

opc0de wrote:Registered an account to make this post.
Welcome.

Just to sum up you post to make sure I understand you correct.
  1. Focus on making bridges a core part of phpBB because you once needed it.
  2. Remove everything else you don't need. Because those who think they need it are retards.
  3. Focus on making an extension system (like the one coming in 3.1), and maybe add everything removed as officially supported extensions.
  4. Those who use phpBB, use it because they can't figure out how anything else work.
Did I get it about right?

KnocksX
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by KnocksX »

Actually, +1/like should be a core feature. It's not just "retards" who want it, "liking" posts is huge for encouraging interaction in the forums and making people actually want to post, which is the dream of every admin.

Just because you're stuck in 2003 doesn't mean every new feature makes a forum similar to MySpace.

stevenmw
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by stevenmw »

KnocksX wrote:Actually, +1/like should be a core feature. It's not just "retards" who want it, "liking" posts is huge for encouraging interaction in the forums and making people actually want to post, which is the dream of every admin.

Just because you're stuck in 2003 doesn't mean every new feature makes a forum similar to MySpace.
This is not the purpose of a message board. Being a part of a discussion and getting feedback are their are own encouragement for interaction. Just like these forums, the support forums, and other support forums found else where. There is no reason to 'like' a post on a message board. It serves no purpose.

KnocksX
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Re: Biggest competition threats to PHPBB forums

Post by KnocksX »

stevenmw wrote: This is not the purpose of a message board. Being a part of a discussion and getting feedback are their are own encouragement for interaction. Just like these forums, the support forums, and other support forums found else where. There is no reason to 'like' a post on a message board. It serves no purpose.
That's your opinion. Hundres of millions of XenForo and IPB users beg to differ.

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