Should we move the forum to stackexchange.com?

You might know that we have been having issues with the Contao forum ever since we moved to PhpBB. None of the anti-spam plugins seems to work, so we finally decided to send new users to the moderation queue first.

However, we only have a handful of moderators, and since two of the most active ones have quit, new posts keep remaining unread in the queue for weeks. Very annoying for new users :(

We (the Contao team) have been thinking about possible solutions and have come up with two: either use yet another forum software or try to move to stackexchange.com. Stackexchange is one of the biggest Q&A platforms on the net, which hosts popular sites like stackoverflow.com or askubuntu.com.

http://stackexchange.com/sites#technology

Also, it seems that big projects like Magento, Wordpress or Drupal are there as well.

Now the question is: Shall we apply for a Contao Q&A site at stackexchange.com? Or try to run the forum with vBulletin?

Is it then still possible to publish the announcements and official news from contao.org automatically on the Contao Q&A site at stackexchange.com?

Probably not :/

Better a forum.
Sites like Stack Overflow I do not like very much, are not functional.

In my opinion you should run a forum on the Invision Power Board or vBulletin. There is no need to have the stackexchange account. Personally, I don't like the phpBB interface and it looks horrible to me, so I do not spend almost any time here. However, since we switched the Polish forums to IPB and applied a better design, we finally got the forums active.

I Agree with Kamil.

On the moderator side a good solution for approving posts more quickly may be to send a notification by email (post is awaiting approval)

Why not merge the Forum into the German vBulletin one? I always found it weird, that the community is arbitrarily split this way...

Would be much more convenient for me at least, to keep track of all Contao threads ;).

The international forums should stay separated. If the English is merged with German, then all other (French, Italian, Polish) would need to be merged also.

There are several reasons that speak against merging (legal reasons as well as technical reasons and usability problems because of the different languages).

@qzminski: Is IPB good with anti-spam actions? I used IPB years ago but don't know how good it is at the moment. Should propably take a look at it :)

I already tested transfering the board to vBulletin but stopped this, because there are - maybe - some problems with the future of vBulletin (quite some troubles with changing the ownership of the vBulletin company, firing a lot of their employees and so on) and I don't want to choose the wrong board software.

Apart from vBulletin, I think xenforo is very good (plus it's new and modern, instead of old and almost out of date like vBulletin ;)).

xenforo is the project of the fired vBulletin-developers as far as I know.

@Nina, at Polish forums I have the default anti-spam feature enabled plus one as an addon. Unfortunately, sometimes spammers are able to junk the forum a little bit. I think they are registering manually because there is the recaptcha and a custom question. It's easy to remove them and their posts anyway.

IPB and vBulletin are my favs, though I think IPB looks way better ;)

As mentioned in another post I think the English forum should be merged with the German one. Then we would get a lot more people discussing Contao in English which will help people all over the world. With a lot of native German speakers being able to communicate very well in English it will help the English Forum grow.

I don't use this forum much anymore as the user base has slowly dropped off since the English and German forums splits some years ago. I have just seen this thread now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ben_360fusion

As mentioned in another post I think the English forum should be merged with the German one. Then we would get a lot more people discussing Contao in English which will help people all over the world. With a lot of native German speakers being able to communicate very well in English it will help the English Forum grow.

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Yes, what you write is true.
In other projects, the forum is unique and divided by language.

i don't like it, because of bad functional