My thoughts on SMF - lengthy background info first

[Thurnok]

I just had to register on your site here so I could post my thoughts.

First, my background (yea, I know it will show my age but what the heck)

Started my computer career back in 1977

• assembly programming for 4000 based CPU's
• 1980 - assembly 99000 based CPUs
• 1981 - assembly 8000 based CPU's (MASM still the best)

Since then development in numerous programming languages

• C/C++(Zortech/Symantec/MS/Borland)
• Fourth
• Prolog
• PL1
• CMS2(military)
• Fortran
• all flavors of Basic
• Java
• and my current favorite Delphi/Kylix

as well as numerous scripting languages

• Perl, PHP, ASP
• Javascript, vbscript, VBA, pascalscript
• WinBatch

• Worked at Symantec for 4 years on the PC Anywhere team having the pleasure of working for Peter Norton
  (he and I actually had competing products back in the early MSDOS days - Disk Editors written in Assembly)
  I guess you can say I've done a bit of programming.


• Served 12 years as a United States Marine in Electronics Engineering
• owned my own computer business since 1983 building clone PCs, Ethernet Networks, and Service contracts for various mid to large corporations.  So I guess you can say I know a little bit about hardware.


• Started my own BBS (the original ones via dial-up modem at a whopping 110 baud in the beginning anyway) back in 1979 where most of us were hacking and cracking in machine code for various systems and software.
• Ran the gamit of different BBS software (RBBS, Fido, MEX, Colossus, and others)
• then my favorite came along - TAG BBS written by some good friends of mine (Rob Numeric, Randy Goebel) - which I ran a 16 line multiuser version.  So I guess you can say I know a bit about communications.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Well, I wanted you to see that I've had quite a bit of excitement and experience in all things Kom-pu'-tor so you would have an idea of the magnitude of what else I have to say.

I run 6 phpBB boards (over many years now) for various online gaming guilds that I'm in. I have never seen a better BBS program than phpBB all the time checking out others over the years.  I also use PostNuke for those gaming guilds websites all of which I host on my own server.

Recently I took a look at Mambo for my family website I'm working on right now because of the ease of administration I had read about.  It seems to be a pretty nice CMS and I'm satisfied with it to this point (even playing with it only a few days now).  I had anticipating putting up another phpBB and attempting to integrate it within Mambo when I came across some info on Mambo Forge regarding SMF.

I decided to set up an SMF board to evaluate it for purposes of integrating it on my family site within Mambo.  I started doing that about 4 hours ago when I got to the point where I "just had to post a note".

I'm pissed!  Yes, I'm very pissed... at myself for not finding your product much sooner!  You have done a GREAT job on this product!  The more and more I am delving into its capabilities, the more and more I am loving it.  I keep expecting the "GOTCHA" to hit where I'll want to just throw it away and put up another phpBB but " IT JUST AIN'T HAPPENIN' "!  So I just had to tell you, because its been years since I've gotten this excited about a product of this nature.  Thanks to the whole SMF Team!

And sorry for the lengthy post!

[Grudge]

Thurnok,

Great to hear you are enjoying it! Obviously some of the "hooks" into CMS systems such as Mambo are still in relatively early stages but I'm hopeful that when SMF goes final (Not far off) they'll progress even further (Although by all accounts they are going rather well). As for SMF itself - we like to think that we're building a solid system at the core - which should hold is in good stead for the future development too.

Always nice to see some nice words from people in the know

Grudge

[Oldiesmann]

Oh, so Norton is a real person? I never knew that...

Glad you like it.

[Abedie]

Hmm, you thought about age? I got my first degree in RPG programming on a IBM 360/20 card machine (filling a room, programming with cards ) in 1971.
I found you're list impressive and you're way of writing great, so welcome at the SMF club and hope to read more from you.

Greetings,
Abedie.

[andrea]

Welcome Thurnok and Abedie.

Glad you to like it.

And good to see that I am not the only person here who is out of school age.   

[Vanish]

Heh. For once I'm not the old fogie. I cut my teeth on an original Apple in 1977. Ther rest, as they say, is history.

[[Unknown]]

Hmmm, I think MASM is a nice assembler, and MASM Linker 6 even has some nice extensions (.if, etc.) but I've always liked TASM.  I did learn it first, after all... but I've used both, so long as it's intel syntax.

Which is why, when I recently found out about this, I was quite overjoyed (I had thought it was AT&T only, previously.)

Thanks for the kind words.

-[Unknown]

[Anguz]

It's great to know you're loving it and thank you for taking the time to post this!

Oh, so Norton is a real person? I never knew that...

* Anguz points to attached picture

[Oldiesmann]

Ah. I know I've seen him someplace before.

[packman]

I keep expecting the "GOTCHA" to hit where I'll want to just throw it away and put up another phpBB but " IT JUST AIN'T HAPPENIN' "!

Your list of languages brought a few memories back. I used a lot of those, plus Algol-W, Pascal, Pilot, BCPL, COBOL, Mimer/PG, Natural and I'm sure others that I've forgotten about! Z80 assembler was great fun...and the only sensible way to program on a machine with 20k of RAM and a 1MHz CPU!

Anyway, your next step is to convert all your phpBB2 forums to SMF. The phpbb2_to_smf converter brings virtually everything in standard phpBB2 (plus attachments) across into SMF. My phpBB2 users found SMF very easy to use because all the same posts, topics, board structure, avatars, smileys, PMs, etc that they had in the old forum were right there in the new forum straight away. The forum was only off air for about an hour to do the migration and final testing. Go on...have a go at migrating a phpBB2 forum into a private SMF test SMF forum (it doesn't change your phpBB2 forum in any way) and see how easy it is!

[Thurnok]

Hey!  Good to see others with some similar backgrounds!   It's been a long time since I've been able to actually discuss much of "those days" what with all the "youngsters" I end up having to work with nowadays.  hehe

- TASM (yes, I've played with it as well) but because I pretty much delved into MASM when I started on 8000 based CPUs, I got attached (so to speak).  TASM has some very nice attributes to it tho, I'm not afraid to admit.

- Abedie, you've got me beat in the starting of computer careers... I was actually more into becoming a musician in late 60's / early 70's.  My Mainframe / Mini's era didn't really start until I went into the Marines and had to work on those Sperry Univac 8080's and UYK-20's.  Programming via dip switches and LED pushbuttons in octal machine language was real fun... NOT!

- [Unknown], that was an interesting find on AT&T sytnax vs. Intel.  I seem to remember seeing something similar back ...  hmm.. some time back, and I was under the same impression as you apparently.

- packman, yes, I like you left out a few that with age, I've come to forget them.. heh... A friend of mine once told me, when you turn 40 you automatically get a pair of glasses in the mail.  I've been waiting on my still for years...  hehe.  20k of RAM?  wow... that would have been a godsend on a trash 80 4004.  But those days were actually fun trying to squeeze what you could into 4k.  I did the KPro for a bit around the time slightly before IBM PC era began doing the CP/M thing and that was actually pretty fun and quite a bit more RAM than I was used to up until that time.  I really thought TI was gonna  do some great things with the TI 99/4a and bought 2 of them with expansion boxes and some extra cards (RAM, Modem, etc).  but they just didn't market it.  It was truely ahead of its time, so much so that it was too costly for the peripherals which probably aided in its death.  Oh, and M.U.L.E. just kicked butt on Atari, I bought one just because of that game.. LOL

- converting my phpBB2 boards to SMF - I'm actually considering this.  I've had enough time now to really enjoy the features of SMF.  As you know phpBB has numerous MODS for their various versions (I'm running 2.0.8 and 2.0.10 on the 6 I currently run) and some of these are quite nice, but SMF OTB is quite sweet.  And the MOD installation implimentation looks like a clear winner in my opinion.

I do have one question, though it probably fits under the feature request section, but perhaps its already available.  I searched the forums for whatever info I could find but I only found a reference stating it currently doesn't work in SMF.  This has to do with URL Framing/Redirection.  I have 200gig available space on my server, and have 9 domains currently pointing to that server (various directories of course) using URL framing from my Name service provider.  I can use the actually domain URL with directories for the server and everything will work fine, as you would expect of course.  But if I try to tell SMF the website URL is the "Framed" one, it causes various issues (can't find the avatars / smiley graphics among other things of course including login / session logging.

I believe this has to do with the fact that the session logging and "cookie" use uses the domain URL you provide in the config which of course is not the true domain the server is on for all the framed domains I'm using.  Now with phpBB I can do this because they allow a cookie domain config setting seperate from the true domain info you supply as the board's domain.  Hence, I can use the actual domain the server runs on for the cookie setting, and tell phpBB that the rest of the URLs info should point to the "Framed" URL so that links within the board all point to the "Framed" URL locations.

This allows a valid cookie to be set to my actual server domain (with path info to where the "framed" url resides) but as far as the board is concerned, all the links to the various php modules/links point to the "framed" domain.  Is there a way to do this in SMF currently?  If not, have you considered adding it as an option?

I admit I haven't had much time to research it more on your board, been fighting a back injury for the past 4 weeks and my family keeps bugging me to get the genealogy stuff going on the family website.  Family can be so demanding at times... LOL

Anyway, thanks for a truely GREAT product.  If there's anything I can do to help you guys out, let me know.

[[Unknown]]

Actually, I bet I can help you out with the "framed" issue, but it would be best to start a new topic about that in General English Support or Administration and Functionality.

Hope your back gets better .

-[Unknown]

[Thurnok]

Thanks for the kind words [Unknown] - seems like its almost impossible to do just about anything with a back injury.  Can't even tie my shoe laces without it being a major effort right now.. LOL

I'm posting the query in question in the Administration and Functionality section right now (seems like the right place).
Thanks!

[AlphaWolf]

I don't normally add a "yeah what he said", but Thurnok, you hit it on the head here.  SMF seems to totally blow the doors off any other forum software I have tried - both for speed and integrated features.

Like you, I'm an old timer - been in 'puters since the early 80s, ran a 64 line TBBS BBS until '96, was an ISP for awhile, have done the "Big 10" conuslting scene and finally have gone back to running my consulting business full time.  Because my clients depend on the stability of the programs we integrate into a website design, those that wanted forums got PhpBB or IPB.  CMS folk got PhpNuke or PostNuke.    Recently Mambo and Moodle have 'hit the scene' and we have started working with those as well, but I still hadn't seen anything new and exciting in the forum development world that was worth taking a chance on...until SMF.

I happened upon SMF while trying to find a forum that had some better built in 'push-pull' features, and actually ONLY decided to even try SMF because of the high quality, proven, team of developers it has.  (I've tried too darn many 'new' open source apps that were even buggier than Windoze!)

I'm sold!  All I can hope is that SMF catches on so that more mods etc. are developed for it.  Better docs would be nice (as is always the case with freeware apps), but that is more for my clients' benefit than my own.

After only 4-5 hours with SMF I am now going to run the converter and convert my team's forum area and our user support area from IPB to SMF....then I am going to see about the possibility of integrating it into an existing PhpNuke site.  And yeah, I am going to pay up to support the team here - they certainly deserve it!

peace

Wolf

[Anguz]

Welcome AlphaWolf.

[AlphaWolf]

Welcome AlphaWolf.

Thanks Anguz!  Shaking head - I've just done 2 IPB and a PhpBB conversions in less than 30 minutes!  The only thing that glitched was the "last post" record for each forum in the IPB conversions, and that was easily fixed by doing a modify on a post for each forum.



I'm a happy camper!

Wolf

[David]

Recounting your totals from your admin center should also update the last post.

[[Unknown]]

Better docs would be nice (as is always the case with freeware apps), but that is more for my clients' benefit than my own.

We're working on it, but we're sort of lacking people with time and writing ability...

Recounting your totals from your admin center should also update the last post.

I keep looking for this, I'm obviously missing what the Invision converter is doing wrong...

* [Unknown] goes to look once again.

-[Unknown]

[AlphaWolf]

Thanks Dave - reading your reply saved me a bit of time on another IPB forum convert.

Unknown, believe me I understand people lacking time - docs are a pain and don't do anything cool...chuckle... There are always more important feautures and fixes.

Peace

Wolf