On 23/09/2026 19:16, Maetes wrote:
> Hey Chris, Is there anything we can help you with?
> 
> I have little experience with forums and don't know how helpful I can be, but
> I'm a Backend PHP programmer.

Thanks for the offer - I do appreciate it. At this point, there is not a lot that can
be done in software. If someone decides to hit the forum with 1,000 requests / second
(for example) there really is no programmatic solution unless they are using a single
IP (what we tend to see these days are residential botnets). Mostly I rely on
Cloudflare now that we are proxied by them.

Generally speaking I try to avoid turning on managed or interactive challenge to stop
them (the latter is quite effective) but am coming to the point where I might have to
add a cron job to auto-activate it (via API call) if the forums get hammered.

I am already planning an exit from the current forum software and have been coding an
"archive" version that is fully static and contains the magic markup that allows
google to index it correctly (we already have valid JSON-LD but google ignores it).
Most likely will go to structured markup. This is also part of work to bring better
search (I'm using Algolia). I'm having good results with the latter but need to work
on the crawler side more.

FWIW the "archive" view will be aggressively cached on Cloudflare. The downside of
this is that no logins work in archive mode (cached version is always the logged-out
view - but there will be a link to the live version), they are single page (this is
also an upside since modern browsers are quite capable of handling even our longest
threads), and no sorting.

The archive view is what will get indexed by search engines and where possible I will
redirect scrapers there (not always possible but we'll see).

> I had also thought about whether I should take a closer look at an open-source
> forum software and try my hand at importing individual forum threads. To maybe
> bring our message board into this millennium, with a few more functions. But
> nothing has come of it so far.

You are looking in the right direction: our forums (as most of the world sees them)
were originally written in an era where the majority of users were connecting via NNTP
and the web view was kind of a fallback. Now most posts and views are from the web.
New forum software is definitely on the tables - potentially with an import from the
existing one, or if not the existing one will serve as a read-only reference
side-by-side with the new one.

We still have some NNTP users (including myself) and I do not want to cut them off.
Nothing out there really caters for threaded views though - yes there are a few
exceptions, but not many. I will do my best to make it happen since I still much
prefer threading for forums (and the entire opposite for emails).

Currently my two top choices are Discourse (open-source and not to be confused with
Discord, which is a proprietary walled garden that does not share information) and
self-hosted XenForo with the Media Gallery and Resource Manager add-ons (commercial
but not expensive).

Also, a footnote regarding import (regardless of what we use): all new forum software
requires login to post, with each article thus attributed to a poster or other
identity on the server. While many posts on this site are able to be connected to a
login, particularly recent ones, this is not the case for all activity (even recent)
and much less so 10-20 years ago. I would not want to treat the two groups
differently, nor would I want to import all posts under a "default" user identity. If
we import at all, at most only very old posts will have a default or missing forum
userid. I will need to engage with currently active NNTP users to get them to create
an account on povray.org (if they don't have one) and find a way of definitively
linking their NNTP posts with the account.

-- Chris

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