hippo has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

There is a site I manage which is a good candidate for a forum. Here's what I'm after:

Hopefully that's not too much to ask for. If you know of (or even better, use) such an application please reply with the details.

And yes, I do realise I'm asking this on precisely the type of platform I'm looking for but the gods and pmdevs constantly moan about how unmaintainable it is so perhaps it isn't a great option from a backend point of view. It is lovely to use as a normie, though. :-)

🦛

  • Comment on What is your favourite Perl-based forum software?

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Re: What is your favourite Perl-based forum software?
by Corion (Patriarch) on Apr 03, 2024 at 14:23 UTC

    I think tinita wrote battie, which at least at the time was a fairly fast forum software.

    I can't really recommend the Everything engine, since it keeps most of its code and templates in a database. This makes integrating it with git somewhat unwieldly.

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[d/l]
Re: What is your favourite Perl-based forum software?
by gnosti (Chaplain) on Apr 05, 2024 at 00:38 UTC
    I've used the YaBB forum and found it reasonable to manage. Stores messages as files. It's quite mature, there are numerous extra features (mods) but the main developer recently died.
[reply]

      Thanks for the reminder about YaBB. I did look at it maybe 15 years ago along with eBlah but decided to go with the latter for reasons which now escape me. That turned out not to be a good choice as eBlah development ceased shortly afterwards. Alas it seems that the same is now happening with YaBB with most (all?) of the dev team gone and the last commit being nearly 2 years ago. A real shame.

      🦛

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Re: What is your favourite Perl-based forum software?
by LanX (Saint) on Apr 03, 2024 at 21:20 UTC
    > pmdevs constantly moan about how unmaintainable

    I'm one of the pmdevs and it's certainly easier if you are a god, because you can try and error and revert. We pmdevs have no test ground to play around.

    And I suppose you would be god.

    Anyway, I think the everything engine shouldn't be considered the same with the perlmonk's engine because it was considerably extended. I suppose everything evolved too.

    And I don't think perlmonk's engine is even available for installation.

    Cheers Rolf
    (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
    see Wikisyntax for the Monastery

[reply]
      We have no test ground to play around

      Yes - that is a major disadvantage...

      But even taking that aside, the Everything Engine uses some very platform-specific syntax and some dated practices. I certainly wouldn't contemplate building anything new on Everything even if it were still available..

      As an aside, I was quite shocked when hippo recently shared with us that most of his customers don't have a test/dev environment!

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        Everybody has a test/dev environment. Some of us are lucky to have a separate production environment :)

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[d/l]

        https://github.com/everything2/everything2
        My understanding is that a lot of what people might complain about - particularly, code being in the database - has been changed in the E2 engine. Worth checking out.

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