Web Served, part 6: Form the forum
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"Free as in beer and speech" What does this even mean? What distinction is it trying to make? What about it ISN'T free?
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marcusj0015":xrvslymb said:
I think it is to say that not only is it free of cost, the code is free to modify and redistribute without copyright violation.
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Free as in beer means you don't have to pay money for it.marcusj0015":32ck9ghn said:
Free as in speech means you are allowed to modify and redistribute it to other people without facing criminal charges and statutory damages in the hundreds of thousands of dollar range.
Some "free" software is "free as in beer" but not "free as in speech", and some "free" software is "free as in speech" but not "free as in beer". It's a very common term in the industry and he's just pointing out that both apply.
It's worth pointing out the "free as in speech" part usually comes with limitations, there are some things you're not allowed to do with it. It's a good idea to skim read the actual license for the code before you go and modify it or redistribute it.
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As ceb and abhi_beckert note, there's a distinction between free software that's gratis and software that's libre. The former is "free as in beer"—it doesn't cost anything to acquire. However, you might be forbidden from modifying it or using it as a basis for producing something else.marcusj0015":34bu2h3u said:
It's a complex issue, but calling software "free" when in fact it might be anything but free is a good way to invite an avalanche of angry comments. Here's a place to start if you want to get a more in-depth explanation.
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Vanilla is a great choice for forum software. The dev team and community are very helpful and the user experience is extremely pleasant for both admins and users. Vanilla does a lot of things differently than most forum software, but for the most part, these particularities are for the best. Whereas phpBB feels like it's stuck in 1998, and Vanilla feels like a part of the modern web.
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I don't like the term "free as in beer". Beer is good and all, but when is beer free? Beer is cheap at the grocery store and expensive at the bar. It's not something I associate with free. If it said "Free as in smiles and speech," that would make more sense, since it's common to say that smiles are free. Just a thought.
In all seriousness though, good guide. I've managed a forum, and my information is a few years out of date. I wouldn't mind having another one, but you kind of need a wide audience to really benefit. I'm surprised Invision wasn't mentioned. They have the most advanced forum platform out there, but it's not free (neither is Jelsoft's vBulletin, which was mentioned). Invision is actually way too ambitious for all but the largest forums, with all its extra features. It can have a Wiki, a Facebook-like wall for each user, a chat room, a gallery, stuff like that. You can even get an arcade page for it, with the highest-scoring user for each game getting a trophy under their mini profile (name, avatar, join date, etc.).
In this day and age, though, you need to cater to mobile users. Ars Technica itself doesn't do this yet, but all the relevant tech forums do. There are two avenues here, and I'm not sure, on the admin side, which is easier. The first is smartphone app integration, i.e. Tapatalk. You install a plugin/modification via the user control panel, and users of the Android/Windows Phone/BlackBerry/iOS app Tapatalk can use the forum in a native app. It just works and it works real good. The second is a mobile-friendly style sheet. I know WordPress does this automatically for blogs. Some of the forum platforms probably have it built in. Access the forum in a desktop/laptop web browser, it's normal. Access it in a mobile browser, it's formatted for mobile. Not as robust as the smartphone app, but no horizontal scrolling, it all just fits nicely and looks like it belongs. Even if you don't think your forum members will want to interact with your forum on the go, consider that tablets of both sizes are coming into the living room. Sitting at a desktop is starting to be replaced by laying on the couch with a smartphone or tablet. You have to ask yourself if you want to require your members to be sitting at a desk to use your forum.
In all seriousness though, good guide. I've managed a forum, and my information is a few years out of date. I wouldn't mind having another one, but you kind of need a wide audience to really benefit. I'm surprised Invision wasn't mentioned. They have the most advanced forum platform out there, but it's not free (neither is Jelsoft's vBulletin, which was mentioned). Invision is actually way too ambitious for all but the largest forums, with all its extra features. It can have a Wiki, a Facebook-like wall for each user, a chat room, a gallery, stuff like that. You can even get an arcade page for it, with the highest-scoring user for each game getting a trophy under their mini profile (name, avatar, join date, etc.).
In this day and age, though, you need to cater to mobile users. Ars Technica itself doesn't do this yet, but all the relevant tech forums do. There are two avenues here, and I'm not sure, on the admin side, which is easier. The first is smartphone app integration, i.e. Tapatalk. You install a plugin/modification via the user control panel, and users of the Android/Windows Phone/BlackBerry/iOS app Tapatalk can use the forum in a native app. It just works and it works real good. The second is a mobile-friendly style sheet. I know WordPress does this automatically for blogs. Some of the forum platforms probably have it built in. Access the forum in a desktop/laptop web browser, it's normal. Access it in a mobile browser, it's formatted for mobile. Not as robust as the smartphone app, but no horizontal scrolling, it all just fits nicely and looks like it belongs. Even if you don't think your forum members will want to interact with your forum on the go, consider that tablets of both sizes are coming into the living room. Sitting at a desktop is starting to be replaced by laying on the couch with a smartphone or tablet. You have to ask yourself if you want to require your members to be sitting at a desk to use your forum.
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I believe there is a copy pasta error on the second page where you tell the reader add a line to include the Nginx conf file for vanilla in the site-configs folder. You list wordpress.conf in the code block, I think you wanted to edit that to be vanilla.conf.
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Hey, RMS coined the phrases. Talk to him and his beard.DarkReality":1w8lmdyv said:
It's definitely a good idea. Vanilla gives you the ability to serve a secondary style to mobile users, but I don't care for their default mobile theme.
I'm not at all a fan of tapatalk, but I recognize that a lot of folks are. However, I think the best option is to use a responsive design that degrades gracefully to mobile. Vanilla supports this, and there's at least one full Twitter Bootstrap-based theme you can download at their site (it's 3rd party, but it's quite well put together). The advantage there is you don't have to honk around with multiple themes or use web server redirects to detect a mobile user. The downside is that it requires a bit more testing and an understanding of how responsive design works.
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Who is RMS? I Googled it, and nothing jumped out at me. I'm guessing someone in the open source scene? Only name I really know from there is Linus Torvalds.
Taptalk is better as an idea... if it supported Android's recent Holo design and had a couple more tricks up its sleeve, it could be really special. The idea of a bunch of forums being accessible not through your web browser but a central app (kind of like newsgroups) has always appealed to me. The only issue you run into is, website owners can't as easily monetize services like this (Tapatalk can push ads from the forum, but the user can always opt out). I would be happy with a mobile theme. It's the access I'm looking for, not the actual means to get there. As long as you can read topics without having to scroll left and right, and post without having to scroll, you're most of the way there. Notifications are key, too, but you need an app for that. Ubuntu might have something to say, though, with notifications for web apps, but in Windows and Android at least, only the app offers total mobile integration, even if its design hasn't been updated in a few years.
And again, it just boils down to what you want to get out of the forum. A technical forum doesn't really need the whole mobile thing. You want to get people on their desks on a real keyboard so they're typing out their thoughts, rather than SMS shorthand. But mobile view is still important. Social forums kind of do need the mobile access, if you want to stay on top of a conversation.
Taptalk is better as an idea... if it supported Android's recent Holo design and had a couple more tricks up its sleeve, it could be really special. The idea of a bunch of forums being accessible not through your web browser but a central app (kind of like newsgroups) has always appealed to me. The only issue you run into is, website owners can't as easily monetize services like this (Tapatalk can push ads from the forum, but the user can always opt out). I would be happy with a mobile theme. It's the access I'm looking for, not the actual means to get there. As long as you can read topics without having to scroll left and right, and post without having to scroll, you're most of the way there. Notifications are key, too, but you need an app for that. Ubuntu might have something to say, though, with notifications for web apps, but in Windows and Android at least, only the app offers total mobile integration, even if its design hasn't been updated in a few years.
And again, it just boils down to what you want to get out of the forum. A technical forum doesn't really need the whole mobile thing. You want to get people on their desks on a real keyboard so they're typing out their thoughts, rather than SMS shorthand. But mobile view is still important. Social forums kind of do need the mobile access, if you want to stay on top of a conversation.
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DarkReality":cc1azrea said:
Richard Mathew Stallman, founder of the GNU project.
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Andrew Norton
Ars Tribunus Militum
As you're introducing Git, I thought I'd drop this link here. It's a panel discussion given by Randal Schwartz (the Perl guy) called "Git motivated! an Introduction to Git" from September. No video (I don't have space for 39 hours of video) but there is audio there. http://eff.dragoncon.org/2013/01/11/git-motivated/
Hope it helps.
(BTW, The audio level is not the greatest on this one, because while I usually run the mics, I was actually doing a panel on Discworld, 2 hotels over at the same time as this)
Hope it helps.
(BTW, The audio level is not the greatest on this one, because while I usually run the mics, I was actually doing a panel on Discworld, 2 hotels over at the same time as this)
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I've said this in the article about ngnix installation, but I'll say it again.
Do NOT install beta/development versions in a server facing the public internet, no matter how little important it is. Especially if you're inexperienced.
Systems facing the public internet need to be kept up to date. Otherwise, you end up being yet another guy who got pawned and we get thing like this: http://meincmagazine.com/security/2012/10 ... o-stuxnet/
As much as possible, use stable versions which only get important bug fixes. These can be upgraded to fix problems with confidence, that, 99.9% of the time, the upgrade won't break anything.
Keeping beta/development versions up to date is lot more work, simply because developers can and will occasionally make changes that will break your configuration when you upgrade.
Do NOT install beta/development versions in a server facing the public internet, no matter how little important it is. Especially if you're inexperienced.
Systems facing the public internet need to be kept up to date. Otherwise, you end up being yet another guy who got pawned and we get thing like this: http://meincmagazine.com/security/2012/10 ... o-stuxnet/
As much as possible, use stable versions which only get important bug fixes. These can be upgraded to fix problems with confidence, that, 99.9% of the time, the upgrade won't break anything.
Keeping beta/development versions up to date is lot more work, simply because developers can and will occasionally make changes that will break your configuration when you upgrade.
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Small typo in Security and hardening
touch /etc/ngins/site-configs/vanilla.conf
should probably be
touch /etc/nginx/site-configs/vanilla.conf
Cheers
Dieb
[moonsharksays]Fixed![/moonsharksays]
touch /etc/ngins/site-configs/vanilla.conf
should probably be
touch /etc/nginx/site-configs/vanilla.conf
Cheers
Dieb
[moonsharksays]Fixed![/moonsharksays]
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Or, perhaps, a new article that summarizes all of them and has links to them all.
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Hello Lee,
First of all I would like to say a big thank you for the time and effort in compiling this series. The instructions in each tutorial have been clear, concise, and the learning curve has been made significantly easier as a result.
I am rather anal with keeping things nice and tidy, and this goes for the "pretty URL's" that have been mentioned throughout the wordpress and forum installation parts of this series.
One thing I haven't been able to work out, either through blind stupidity, lack of PHP knowledge, or a combination of both, is how to get the pretty URL's to function after the '/vanilla/' section of the URL, where the rewrite has the URL configured with 'index.php?p=' with the sub sections following.
Maybe I missed something in this tutorial, but I could see that from the screenshots provided, that during the initial setup of the vanilla forum, the URL's had contained the 'index.php?p=' rewrite rule, but once at the "Getting Started" stage, those "pretty URL's" are evident without the active rewrite contained within.
Maybe I have something mislabelled as instead of using '/vanilla/' as my location I instead opted for '/forum/' and have since checked all the configuration files to assure that all locations and .conf's contain the correct location, and I have reloaded nginx and cleared cache and started a new session, but still the same issue.
One last thing I would like to mention, and more of a request, is that earlier in this series there was the mention of including a wiki. I know that in your own Blog there is a post concerning the installation of this, using a subdomain, I was wondering whether you would be including this setup during this series using a new location instead, as I'm sure there would be plenty of folk interested in this also?
If there is any way you can put me right, even if it is just to say "that's how it is supposed to be" I would greatly appreciate it.
First of all I would like to say a big thank you for the time and effort in compiling this series. The instructions in each tutorial have been clear, concise, and the learning curve has been made significantly easier as a result.
I am rather anal with keeping things nice and tidy, and this goes for the "pretty URL's" that have been mentioned throughout the wordpress and forum installation parts of this series.
One thing I haven't been able to work out, either through blind stupidity, lack of PHP knowledge, or a combination of both, is how to get the pretty URL's to function after the '/vanilla/' section of the URL, where the rewrite has the URL configured with 'index.php?p=' with the sub sections following.
Maybe I missed something in this tutorial, but I could see that from the screenshots provided, that during the initial setup of the vanilla forum, the URL's had contained the 'index.php?p=' rewrite rule, but once at the "Getting Started" stage, those "pretty URL's" are evident without the active rewrite contained within.
Maybe I have something mislabelled as instead of using '/vanilla/' as my location I instead opted for '/forum/' and have since checked all the configuration files to assure that all locations and .conf's contain the correct location, and I have reloaded nginx and cleared cache and started a new session, but still the same issue.
One last thing I would like to mention, and more of a request, is that earlier in this series there was the mention of including a wiki. I know that in your own Blog there is a post concerning the installation of this, using a subdomain, I was wondering whether you would be including this setup during this series using a new location instead, as I'm sure there would be plenty of folk interested in this also?
If there is any way you can put me right, even if it is just to say "that's how it is supposed to be" I would greatly appreciate it.
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DtR--Never fear, "Web Served" has gotten a reprieve and two bonus installments. I'm penning part 7 right now, which is on setting up MediaWiki in the same fashion as the previous apps, though it might not go live on the site for a couple of weeks.
For URL rewrites with Vanilla: it won't work until you've added the "$Configuration['Garden']['RewriteUrls'] = TRUE;" line to your config.php file. After that, it should be automatic--the "@forum" location transforms the URLs, and Vanilla expects to receive transformed URLs after RewriteUrls is toggled.
Are you still seeing bad behavior with that on?
For URL rewrites with Vanilla: it won't work until you've added the "$Configuration['Garden']['RewriteUrls'] = TRUE;" line to your config.php file. After that, it should be automatic--the "@forum" location transforms the URLs, and Vanilla expects to receive transformed URLs after RewriteUrls is toggled.
Are you still seeing bad behavior with that on?
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Hi Lee,
Thank you so much for responding so quickly to my questions.
Genuinely excited about the reprieve and the upcoming Part 7. I will be tuning in as soon as that is up.
Honestly, it's one of those strange occurrences, where I had edited the config.php file to toggle TRUE > FALSE and back again, to then reload nginx, and the issue persisted.
I then go back and do it at the behest of your response, and low and behold, jackpot!
Seriously happy now as that was the last thing nagging me.
It's 21:00 on a Friday night here in sunny Scotland (sober so far this year) and it has been time well spent. I am a complete convert to nginx having previously stuck with apache simply due to compatibility and modules, but mostly due to lack of understanding of the nginx web server.
Vanilla forums is a treat and not something I had come across previously, I have had experience with vBulletin in the past (Yuck!) and Simple Machine Forum applications, the latter being pretty decent. I am seriously impressed with my initial jump in to Vanilla Forums and look forward to configuring it to my requirements.
Thanks again.
Thank you so much for responding so quickly to my questions.
Genuinely excited about the reprieve and the upcoming Part 7. I will be tuning in as soon as that is up.
Honestly, it's one of those strange occurrences, where I had edited the config.php file to toggle TRUE > FALSE and back again, to then reload nginx, and the issue persisted.
I then go back and do it at the behest of your response, and low and behold, jackpot!
Seriously happy now as that was the last thing nagging me.
It's 21:00 on a Friday night here in sunny Scotland (sober so far this year) and it has been time well spent. I am a complete convert to nginx having previously stuck with apache simply due to compatibility and modules, but mostly due to lack of understanding of the nginx web server.
Vanilla forums is a treat and not something I had come across previously, I have had experience with vBulletin in the past (Yuck!) and Simple Machine Forum applications, the latter being pretty decent. I am seriously impressed with my initial jump in to Vanilla Forums and look forward to configuring it to my requirements.
Thanks again.
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Lee, this is the first I'd heard of Vanilla Forums. Since it seems fairly new, I suppose there's not much of a security track record yet, but what is the general feel about the development team behind it?
Related, I'd setup a shadow machines forum install as Sandy hit, in hopes that local people could keep in touch, offer each other help, etc. That didn't really work out (my only route to find "locals" was Patch.com and they did not like me posting the forum info to their comments thread), and I largely forgot about the install. Fast-forward to a week or so ago and I login to find 300+ members and 18,000+ posts. WTF? Not a single legit account, just a bunch of spambots spamming other spambots. Really bizarre. I had a thriving community of bots, it was kind of surreal. I had email confirmations enabled, and the built-in captcha, while not the most difficult in the world, was something I thought would at least keep automated forum spam bots out. Not so... A real eye-opener.
So, any tips on stopping the same with Vanilla?
Related, I'd setup a shadow machines forum install as Sandy hit, in hopes that local people could keep in touch, offer each other help, etc. That didn't really work out (my only route to find "locals" was Patch.com and they did not like me posting the forum info to their comments thread), and I largely forgot about the install. Fast-forward to a week or so ago and I login to find 300+ members and 18,000+ posts. WTF? Not a single legit account, just a bunch of spambots spamming other spambots. Really bizarre. I had a thriving community of bots, it was kind of surreal. I had email confirmations enabled, and the built-in captcha, while not the most difficult in the world, was something I thought would at least keep automated forum spam bots out. Not so... A real eye-opener.
So, any tips on stopping the same with Vanilla?
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That's great to hearDeath To Radio":2sz943r0 said:
I was right where you were with Nginx a couple of years ago, and I wanted to write this series for folks just like you. Glad it's proving enjoyable!Vanilla's been around for a couple of years, but it's never gained a tremendous amount of traction. Its biggest adopter by far is Penny Arcade, which switched over to it early last year or perhaps in late 2011 (not sure exactly when). The dev team is quite active on the official forums and they respond to feedback, but by far the best way to get their attention about bugs and security issues is to file reports on github. You don't have to write a pull with fixed code or anything, but bug reports with repro steps get addressed pretty quickly.sporkme":2sz943r0 said:
As far as the spam accounts, Vanilla has a plugin which integrates with Akismet and Stopforumspam.com. I've found this to be pretty effective, but far more effective is a team of active moderators. I get a couple of spam accounts a week slipping through the automated nets on the Chronicles of George forum, and they seem to be person-powered rather than bots. A capcha + akismet & sfs.com + e-mail verification is just about all you can do--after that, the best thing to have is a savvy moderator team.
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Lee, you had mentioned two bonus instalments, and I am aware of the MediaWiki part which I'm excited about as I am wanting to use it as an index for community managed tutorials and general how-to's.
Is there any chance of divulging what the other part of the jigsaw may be?
Is there any chance of divulging what the other part of the jigsaw may be?
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I'm thinking Etherpad Lite (backed by Redis + Node.js).Death To Radio":2wtv9bg4 said:Lee, you had mentioned two bonus instalments, and I am aware of the MediaWiki part which I'm excited about as I am wanting to use it as an index for community managed tutorials and general how-to's.
Is there any chance of divulging what the other part of the jigsaw may be?
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Pokrface":dupcy508 said:I'm thinking Etherpad Lite (backed by Redis + Node.js).Death To Radio":dupcy508 said:Lee, you had mentioned two bonus instalments, and I am aware of the MediaWiki part which I'm excited about as I am wanting to use it as an index for community managed tutorials and general how-to's.
Is there any chance of divulging what the other part of the jigsaw may be?
Agh, excellent! I really like the idea of this simply because I'm only at the initial learning stage and being able to see where specific edits are needed in blocks of code, and be shown the errors of my ways in real-time would be massively beneficial.
I have one last thing to nag you about (sorry in advance). I'm not sure whether it is beyond the scope of this series, but I was hoping for something that then completed the circuit and provided the option to seamlessly (as possible) integrate Wordpress, Vanilla Forums, and MediaWiki. I am aware that there are bridges available to connect Vanilla Forums to both Wordpress and MediaWiki, but having all three integrated would be pretty neat. I imagine though that this is a rather cumbersome and meaty process, but if either yourself or someone would be able to provide pointers on how to do this then I would greatly appreciate it. I have looked about but unfortunately not found anything concrete. I do come across your Bigdinosaur blog with every search though,
Thanks again for the quick response, and sorry for being a pain in the ass. Overly eager I guess!
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Been following this series for a while, had life interfere and I had to deal with the real world for a few months but I've now come to take another swing at it. I've gotten as far as Part 5 working beautifully (I even got my old Blogger site exported over to Wordpress), but now I'm trying to install Vanilla and I'm having a problem with CSS. I suspect it's related to Part 7 actually because Vanilla was working properly at first, but when I installed ImageMagick it somehow broke CSS so I have an extremely plain-looking screen. Is it possible for ImageMagick to break CSS? I can't get the wiki to work due to a Error 500 but I'm right now more interested in fixing what was working before it got broken - I can chase the Error 500 later as I never got the wiki working.
UPDATE:
I got mediawiki working, but not Vanilla CSS in either HTTP or HTTPS. WordPress looks fine both ways so I don't *THINK* I broke nginx too badly. Why oh why didn't I take a snapshot before starting Part 6?????
UPDATE:
I got mediawiki working, but not Vanilla CSS in either HTTP or HTTPS. WordPress looks fine both ways so I don't *THINK* I broke nginx too badly. Why oh why didn't I take a snapshot before starting Part 6?????
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Got it working - turns out the Git repository does *NOT* have the latest version of Vanilla, I had to download and unzip it. Odd that Git didn't have the latest version (2.1b1 which was released April 4).
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Hey Lee and pals,
I've been following this served series for just the last week and have slowly been working things out. For a person who is coming from a basic Windows IT and general Mac user place, this has been a great experience to figuring out things in Linux. I'm liking all the help out there but every once in a while I have a problem I just can't solve without sleeping, going away for a couple of hours, or various other things to get my mind off of things.
You've taken my entire 3 day weekend away from me and I have to say thank you.
Zach1812
I've been following this served series for just the last week and have slowly been working things out. For a person who is coming from a basic Windows IT and general Mac user place, this has been a great experience to figuring out things in Linux. I'm liking all the help out there but every once in a while I have a problem I just can't solve without sleeping, going away for a couple of hours, or various other things to get my mind off of things.
You've taken my entire 3 day weekend away from me and I have to say thank you.
Zach1812
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