›

makega.me

TuismTuism
edited in General
Saw this from Rami's one tweet - it's a new game making forum community thing. It really isn't something new in concept, but DAMN, THE IMPLEMENTATION. It's super slick and works great, the way the posts are labeled, the navigation, editing and stuff. It all works super slick.

Was wondering if this was open source software that they're using or pretty much custom-made? I'm guessing custom-made?

http://makega.me/

Comments

  • FengolFengol
    That's done in Discourse which I would love to move to it.

    However:
    • There's an initial $200 once-off fee and then $10 a month because we're a non-profit
    • It's hosted in the cloud and our access is limited
    • What do we do with all our current data?
    But please, everyone should play around with Discourse and comeback with feedback. If there's strong enough positive feedback I'm happy to consider it.

    In the meantime I'm busy testing a Wordpress with embedded Vanilla forums site for MGSA so that we can have a proper CMS instead of the hack I put together.
  • creative630creative630
    It seems interesting. Is there a reason why they are forcing you into the $10 monthly digital ocean instance rather than the $5 or $20 dollar one? I'm just curious as to why they don't mention the other pricing brackets digital ocean provides...

    If we are worried about cost then the $5 instance isn't too bad if we could use that instead. I've been running one for quite a while and it works well for me. If we need more cpu/ram you can scale up the instance easily to the more expensive brackets.
  • CorruptedHeartCorruptedHeart
    Would it not be possible to self host? https://github.com/discourse/discourse
  • FengolFengol
    The cost isn't really a problem, we can sponsor that. I think the major issue is the change of forums and moving our existing data.
  • CorruptedHeartCorruptedHeart
    edited
    If it is possible to convert to the import format for Discourse mentioned here, rather the plans for one. It might be possible to not lose that much.

    Also, https://meta.discourse.org/t/discoursehosting-migration-service-for-your-existing-forum/12201
    Thanked by 1Fengol
  • jellymannjellymann
    It's built in rails, and it's open source. There really shouldn't be any reason to lose any data.
  • FengolFengol
    @jellyman, I mean, moving our data from Vanilla to Discourse. Vanilla is PHP with a MySQL database.
  • TheFuntasticTheFuntastic
    Discourse is pretty slick. I've had my eye on it for a while. As I understand it self hosted should be possible. Though without an easy import option it would require a lot of time. If anyone is keen to donate their time then I would say we should go for it.

    But besides some slick features it doesn't really offer anything over the current format. Something I would dearly like to see though is a portfolio page of members game. Something like what you get on the Jam sites - a scannable gallery of pictures and videos. Would make it much easier to keep up with all the games everyone is making.
    Thanked by 1francoisvn
  • KarujiKaruji
    Why change?

    'Slick' isn't a reason. If there was some way it addressed a need, or there was some kind of flaw in our current system then change would be appropriate. But changing because it is 'slick' just seems like a ridiculous waste of effort. Especially if we cannot insure the current integrity of our data.
    Thanked by 1Nitrogen
  • SUGBOERIESUGBOERIE
    'Slick' isn't a reason.
    LOL. I'd have to agree with @Karuji on this one.

    Although I like @TheFuntastic's idea of a portfolio page but I don't know if it is better to just build upon the current system or moving to this "slick" Discourse.
  • TuismTuism
    Actually I know I brought this topic up but I agree with @karuji, if we were changing anything it should be for a reason better than "slick" :)

    The things I see missing from our current setup:
    1. Landing page. Or, good landing page, that can be edited easily, and is mobile-friendly (try going to makegamesSA.com on your iPhone)
    2. Stability (the speed is sometimes terrible, I had thought it was some kind of having too much data scenario but that makes no sense. I only thought about this in terms of forum code cos I seem to remember being told that we had a lot of data and that was slowing everything down? Or was that only the wiki?)

    And I don't think discourse would solve either of these :)

    I was just wondering about the package they used and if it were easy to implement. Clearly not :)
    Thanked by 1hanli
  • KarujiKaruji
    Tuism said:

    The things I see missing from our current setup:
    1. Landing page. Or, good landing page, that can be edited easily, and is mobile-friendly (try going to makegamesSA.com on your iPhone)
    Ye know not all of us have iPhones ;) But the landing page has nothing to do with the forums it's independently written. Probably just need someone to sit down and write it with BootStrap so it functions across desktop and mobile.
    2. Stability (the speed is sometimes terrible, I had thought it was some kind of having too much data scenario but that makes no sense. I only thought about this in terms of forum code cos I seem to remember being told that we had a lot of data and that was slowing everything down? Or was that only the wiki?)
    The slow you are talking about was due to the wiki spam (there was something like 50GB of spam on the wiki as opposed to something like 200mb of data on the forums)

    As far as slow goes: AFAIK the forums are on DreamHost's shared hosting. Which means that there is a limit to the amount of concurrent users that it will support at an optimal rate of data delivery. It's one of those instances where we have outgrown our systems, but that's a web host not a forum issue.

    Ye sure there are a bunch of things we can do to improve the forums! So lets rather talk about that (like putting in a cool portfolio page, and I'm curious what @TheFuntastic wants there) instead of putting effort into something that we already have working well.
  • jellymannjellymann
    Discourse can be hosted pretty much any cloud platform. Check out Shelly Cloud, Heroku, Engine Yard, Open shift, to name a few. As for Discourse, it comes with a stack of useful features out of the box, pretty much everything you would want in a forum. It's completely customisable with CSS, and even if theres still something missing its possible to add/implement your own plugins. As a rails app it can coexist nicely with pretty much anything, for example you could slap something like Comfortable Mexican Sofa (or any rails-based CMS of yoir choice) alongside it for a portfolio/landing page. So yeah it's a great forum framework.

    On the downside, it is pretty new, still being in the late beta stage, although nearing a v1.0 release very soon (probably this year some time). It's also quite a complex beast if you crack open the source code :P particularly the Ember.js side of things. Other than that I can't really see anything wrong with it.

    I'd say if there's a definite need for a new forum go for Discourse but I dont see what's wrong with the current system... works fine on my phone... busy posting from it now :P
Sign In or Register to comment.