Forum Issues + Fixes

I will try to keep a list of known issues and fixes/updates here. I’m doing this because I came up with 2 work arounds that we can use until there is time to fix up the issues.

1. When editing a topic or post - all line spaces have been stripped. SOLVED
   

• work around :: after typing in post/topic, copy it and paste it into a notepad document, if you need to edit your post, use the notepad version and paste it into the form
  
  
  

2. Embedding a youtube video not working. SOLVED ?
   

• work around :: rather than using the “emebed youtube…” button, just put the url of the video directly in the post but change com/watch?v= to com/v/
  
  
  

3. Problems sending links in private messages.
   

• solution :: The removal of links is due to spam protection, just post urls instead, they will be converted to links.
  
  
  

4. Wiki Image issue - Not sure what this issue is sorry, will fill this in as i find out
   

• No fix at this stage but being worked on (?)
  
  
  

5. hub.jmonkeyengine.org server unreachable
   

• There server goes down from time to time, it happens, try again in half an hour.
  
• it was recently down for several hours but this was an isolated incident.

i had also problem with private messages when i tried send URL(in java tags if i good remember), then it add <a href “in text edition”

The youtube embed bugs are known and exist for long, the removal of links is due to spam protection, just post urls instead, they will be converted to links.

the forum has alot of issues,

links that dont get recognised as links,

post code that will try to load smiles

backslashes won’t show



there others and they can be quite annoying

Is there a fix or work around for embedding videos ? I’ve done it before with no problems.

I only happens for certain urls and also when other stuff (mostly the code highlighting) are on the same page.

mcbeth said:
the forum has alot of issues,
links that dont get recognised as links,
post code that will try to load smiles
backslashes won't show

there others and they can be quite annoying

Let's not forget the removal of empty lines when you edit. That goes for posts and the wiki. And as @pspeed said, it's so damn annoying that mostly nobody wants to mess with the wiki anymore. :(

Yeah, its totally annoying, me, @sbook, two volunteers already and nobody managed to fix that…

I changed the topic around and added some work arounds I found that may or may not work for people.

I’m curious why the platforms chosen for Wiki and BBS are not more familiar, and widely deployed ones (MediaWiki and vBulletin or similar, respectively).

On the BBS:

1. I find the “My topics” versus “All Topics” tab a needless modality. Most other BBSes have a very lightweight means of showing threads you’ve posted in, or a “watch this thread” checkbox that ties to email notification or simply color/icon marking of the threads within an otherwise unaltered view of the forums
   
2. Watching recent threads (across forums) is not a helpful perspective, and it seems to be the one the design caters to, primarily.
   
   The things I do like about this forum’s design (or configuration) are:
   
3. the absence of support for images in signatures (a favorite path of damnation with little upside elsewhere)
   
4. minimal smileys… I’d actually prefer stripping this out entirely, but the monkey guy does make me happy.
   
   On the site in general:
   
   being forced to pick a mutually exclusive search target (Wiki vs Forums) is a bad thing. Moreover, the choice is not sticky.
   
   JME2 and JME3 should be segregated better in all sense. Having a separate site altogether for JME2 would be ideal.
   
   
   
   EDIT:
   
   
   
   I’d particularly like to see it made easier to edit the Javadoc (or at least annotate it for consideration for amendment) without the weight and responsibility of submitting source code changes to SVN.
   
   
   
   There are so many places where ambiguity can be readily identified and addressed (e.g., where is the origin of a capsule collider? the extent of a bounding box is actually HALF the extent by most definitions, etc), and no one is less able to see this than the people who maintain the source code (as they clearly know too much about it to see the issues that confront newcomers).

DulcetTone said:
I'm curious why the platforms chosen for Wiki and BBS are not more familiar, and widely deployed ones (MediaWiki and vBulletin or similar, respectively).

This is a matter of integration with Word Press from what I remember.
What is used as a "forum" is called BuddyPress. I tried it for my own site. Didn't like it.
If it were for me the forum would be switched to something else. vBulletin is a great forum software but it's not free. The best alternative would be phpBB3/2 which I use in my other domain.
But that's not my call to make and I do understand the rational behind the current choice.

We will not install any bbs that is not 100% integrated into the rest of the site, the coming bbpress plugin for wordpress and the consequent splitting of buddypress and its forum features will certainly bring more features to bring more structure into the general overview / categorization of forums.

DulcetTone said:
I'm curious why the platforms chosen for Wiki and BBS are not more familiar, and widely deployed ones (MediaWiki and vBulletin or similar, respectively).

If you remember back before the redesign, the site was split into a number of different totally separate modules. There was DokuWiki for documentation, WordPress for news, and SMF for the forum posts. The plan had been to wait for SMF2, use Joomla! for its users, pages, and blog (news, for us) functionality, and JFusion to integrate Joomla!, DokuWiki, and SMF.

Considering the amount of time it was taking for SMF2 to be released as well as their sort-of-but-not-really-open-source license, we began to look elsewhere. (Note that SMF has gotten an accepted open source license in the last few months.. New BSD, which is what jME is licensed under)

At the time that we were looking to other ideas, many people were already using WordPress as a CMS. For a community site it was already attractive as BuddyPress and bbPress had large communities and were actively being developed. With the WordPress 3 integration of WP and WP-MU (multi-user), it really began to take shape of something that the entire community could use. Of course, the entire system being under GPL is a nice bonus.

There was even a built-in wiki in development that we spent a hefty amount of time testing and attempting to work with (an open-source utility came out of it). Ultimately, that wiki system's development slowed and the current state of the art wasn't acceptable for use. After looking at a number of other wiki systems, it was agreed that staying with DokuWiki made the most sense as there would be no content conversion required and there was already documentation on dependable integration between WP and DokuWiki.

This is only touching the surface of months of research, testing, utility/script/plugin development, and back and forth with various communities and developers. I hope it provides some insight on the thought process that went into the decision.

So what can we do now? (Why did we do it?)

• If you make an account on the forum, you immediately have an account on the wiki. Believe it or not, having to make another account resulted in lost wiki edits (there are indeed forum posts like "meh, maybe I'll make a wiki account at some point and update that")


• Any user can be given rights to post a news item on the front page. You may have seen an example of this with the development of TerraMonkey


• @ tags mean something. Being able to say something like "Hey, @normen might know the answer" can draw attention to a conversation in case @normen hasn't seen the thread. This is probably a bad example though as @normen seems to be telepathically linked to the forum index page.


• Standard WordPress plugins are compatible! No need to reinvent the SEO wheel, or site analytics tracking.. (jMonkeyEngine has been trending upwards overall in rankings)


• Easier maintenance. A single database runs the entire site. In the event of a catastrophic disaster, getting the site set back up is far easier than it once was. The creation of parallel test websites for new features, plugins, updates, etc is also much easier now. This means that we can invest more time in testing updates and applying them to the live site, reducing the risk of downtime or broken features.

DulcetTone said:
I'd particularly like to see it made easier to edit the Javadoc (or at least annotate it for consideration for amendment) without the weight and responsibility of submitting source code changes to SVN.

This is a great idea.. Do you know of any other projects doing this? It would be interesting to see how others have implemented it.

DulcetTone said:
I'd particularly like to see it made easier to edit the Javadoc (or at least annotate it for consideration for amendment) without the weight and responsibility of submitting source code changes to SVN.

We have an offer for a *very* integrated javadoc/wiki/documentation solution by a capable web developer. Maybe we see this kind of integration soon and its another example where the unparalleled flexibility of WordPress can be used to integrate that into the current site economy easily. Remember that no matter how many problems the site and especially the forum part have they integrate a *lot* of information, data and functions in a way that allows even @erlend_sh to manage the site and add new features and announcements / badges etc easily ;)
One of the main reasons why we struggle to unfold the whole power of the site is due to the lack of a good web developer that can do that full-time, most site tweaks etc. were performed by me and I guess you believe me when I say I got a lot of other "monkey business" going on ^^

The newline and wiki editing issues have been solved, still looking for the wiki images issue tho…

normen said:
The newline and wiki editing issues have been solved, still looking for the wiki images issue tho..

Way to steal my thunder Normen :P

Anyhow, BuddyPress 1.5 is finally stable, which means we will be rolling out a great number of improvements some day very soon now. We just need to make sure nothing essential is broken in the new version. There are going to be some minor set-backs to begin with, mostly because of outdated plugins. This will mean extra features like badges and post code buttons will go missing for a while. Hopefully most of the plugin authors we rely on for updates (that includes Normen :D ) will bring their plugins up to speed with BP 1.5 asap.

What? All my plugins work with 1.5 of course

It seems the images in the wiki are slowly coming back, one after another oO

oh nice the pictures are back, and they look sexy xD

and the newlines are fixed, woho :o sweet, can edit the wiki in peace now <3

Yeah, and javascript works again, the editor is actually usable, also the media browser/uploader