Hi,
Is there a way tu subscribe to forum threads, users and/or categories?
What do you think this is? Phpbb? Discourse? This forum barely functions...
I'm being facetious, but in all seriousness, no you can't.
I'm sure someone though will tell you contributions are welcome and that the forum is a great example of software written in Nim.
Contributions are welcome!
By the way, the forum is a great example of software written in Nim.
I guess implementing RSS could me relatively easy. We don't have it yet, the demand hasn't been too high for this feature.
However, if you subscribe to the official Telegram or Discord, you'll get notified about new threads.
My workaround has been to use the forum's RSS feed and https://blogtrottr.com/ to email posts.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Blogtrottr and its free tier is ad-supported. Also, you will get some spam because the RSS feed includes out all new posts, including yet-to-be-moderated posts.
I think a basic prerequisite for great forum software would be the ability to retrieve posts, yet the forum consistently fails at doing this.
This is not the way.
If that's all you're doing when browsing the forum, then no, I guess not.
The forum has a documented issue with retrieving old posts though. I've been struck by this in the past when trying to dig up old threads.
https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum/issues/287
My main gripe with NimForum is that it lacks many features that basic web forums offer. I guess I'm also in the minority in that I don't care about Nim for its web development offerings. I'd rather use other languages for web application development.
When I think about the NimForum, I also inevitably end up thinking about how much time went into developing and maintaining the solution and to what end. I've always advocated the community should ditch them and migrate to discourse / phpbb / whatever.
Because the folks who built the forum have always claimed they are good enough and that the forums are a shining example of Nim's capabilities. Therefore, we should keep them around not migrate to alternatives. Plus, it's probably work.
It's a good question regardless.
The last 2 points would both be a lot of work and I don't really have time to get involved, so it's just wishful thinking on my part...
Regarding alternative forum software:
Let's have a hackathon and fix some issues with the forum? I think the lack of subscriptions in not an issue, it's a blessing. But switching to Norm, refactoring the code, and adding the docs would be great. Maybe fix that Like issue (I don't think switching from SPA to traditional site is possible within a single hackathon)? Fix search?
Another interesting topic would be to finilize that Nimble directory redesign. I think we need to advertize Nimble directory more on the website and make it sexier.
I'm ready to invest several night hours between Friday and Saturday and between Saturday and Sunday. I'm a family man so no 24 hour hackathons for me, but at night I'm all yours :-)
So TL;DR : the current forum lack many basic functionality and its user experience is very poor.
So the solutions to this problem are either :
The search feature is broken. That means that all the question that have been answered in the past are lost to time unless you remember exactly what was said and by who.
Let's try and fix it? Would you join a hackathon if there was one?
You have no way of saving a post or a comment
That sounds nice to have but not must have. It's a good feature, don't get me wrong. I'm just trying to understand what the minimal list of crutical improvements to the forum would look like.
and you can't view your own history past the latest 10 comment / threads. Great contributions are lost to time.
That's a shame. Sounds like something that should be easy to solve.
There is no related question and no topics. There is no accepted answer making useful content lost to potential unrelated discussion
Relations are hard but solved should be easy.
The forum itself claims to be a discourse alternative when it doesn't have 20% of its functionality.
This is just poor marketing :-) We should remove this nonsense from the repo. Of course Nimforum isn't the bloated beast Discourse is.
>> The search feature is broken. That means that all the question that have been answered in the past are lost to time unless you remember exactly what was said and by who.
Let's try and fix it? Would you join a hackathon if there was one?
IMO, it's one of the least pressing features to be fixed, as external searches usually work well enough. For years many sites had a frame with a textbox for a 3d-party search and it worked just fine. BTW, do you know Hacker News doesn't have a built-in search function?
Fixing post rendering and UI bugs, providing user history, lifting editing-time limits and maybe allowing to see new posts in threads you participate in are far more urgent.
I wholeheartedly agree with @exelotl, especially on the SPA point. A forum should always render the contents with JS completely disabled.
For those interested, there is an "official" mailing list archive of this forum. I've been maintaining it for some years. Apparently there's no real link to it anywhere in the documentation, so I'll do it here:
https://www.mail-archive.com/nim-general@lists.nim-lang.org/
see the info page if you want to subscribe via email:
https://www.mail-archive.com/nim-general@lists.nim-lang.org/info.html
the list is actually mirrored by gmane, for those die hard afecionados that know how to use NNTP (group "gmane.comp.lang.nim.general") - my favorite way of reading this forum.
It is currently read-only.