General

Re: Down with Mises forum

Groucho — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:37:22 GMT

Lead on, McDuck ;-)

Re: Down with Mises forum

Fephisto — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:14:46 GMT

What jmorris said.

I'd encourage people to go to Autolykos' forum, since he seems to actually want to deal with moderator crap :U.

I more or less just wanted to get the ball rolling.

Re: Down with Mises forum

jmorris84 — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:52:18 GMT

Looks like the forum in the original post to this thread was closed and opened as the Voluntaryism forum instead, which I was able to register for and successfuly post in. Hope to see you all there!

Re: Down with Mises forum

Groucho — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 04:54:06 GMT

jmorris84:

I guess I spoke to soon; it won't let me sign in over there. :P

I was about to ask how you did it....

So far I know Autolykos has a forum at voluntaryism.freeforums.org and Wheylous is working on starting one at LibertyHQ.

I think it'd be good if we could find a way to get a libertarian forum going that will attract lots of others. I love mises.org, but to be fair its focus is primarily Austrian Economics, and while libertarianism is a natural part of that, it may be that we need a larger "umbrella" under which to discuss all the relevant topics. We need a one-stop-shop that covers it all, but I don't know to what degree that fits in with the aims of the LvMI.

I've toyed around searching for domain names that are available (btw, a really cheap service for registering domains is Namecheap.com - check it out!). Damn Cato institute has already appropriated libertarianism.org, where I don't think you can even find the phrase "non-aggression principle". I found something like "FreeMarketNAP.com" isn't registered yet and would cost $11 per year to register it with Namecheap (they also do shared hosting for around $5 per month - but for a dedicated server it's $100/month or more).

Then there's the forum software itself - vBulletin, UBB, MyBB, which also require you to have (and understand) MySQL, PHP, yadda yadda yadda. You have to have quite a bit of technical know-how to create a pretty forum like we've all probably seen elsewhere (I'm sure even the commies have a badass forum somewhere lol). Probably have to hire programmers and designers (or take a chance with freelancers).

It's a big project for sure, but so worthwhile to figure out a way to do as there is nothing yet out there that fills that niche.

Re: Down with Mises forum

jmorris84 — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 04:08:33 GMT

I guess I spoke to soon; it won't let me sign in over there. :P

Re: Down with Mises forum

jmorris84 — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 20:18:52 GMT

Just registered over at the hyperboards site. I'll still lurk here in hopes that people migrate over there but posting here, especially with quotes, is a pain.

Re: Down with Mises forum

Marko — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 10:41:06 GMT

Preview just flat out doesn't work (at least I've never seen it work).

It used to, along with the quote function and the spellchecker. That's all in the past now since they had this guy try to improve and further develop the forum, and he broke the code.

Re: Down with Mises forum

Jack Roberts — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 01:24:44 GMT

I can offer some time to implement a new forum with the mises.org header and footer included. The only aspect I have not done before and might have struggle with is integrating the user list of the rest of the website with the other forum software. I could give it a try though, some forum software support third party user list integration out of the box, other forum software might require programming changes (which i am not too strong at). The other alternative would be to have a separate user list for the forum than the rest of the website but the forum otherwise would look and feel as a part of the site due to sharing the same footer and header.

Migrating the existing forum userlist and content including categories and similar should be ok to do but might take a few tweaks on the db level or a bit of troubleshooting. But that depends on a few factors. But I think it could be done relatively seamlessly.

Re: Down with Mises forum

Tex2002ans — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 00:49:50 GMT

It is not homebrew... it is an old version of Telligent forum software.

Long story short:

No money or manpower to upgrade the forum. The institute runs on a shoestring budget and has to spend their money on more important things.

Re: Down with Mises forum

Malachi — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 00:17:17 GMT

I remember hearing it was homebrew and thats why all the problems.

Re: Down with Mises forum

Michelangelo — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 21:25:44 GMT

Wait, a company sells this forum software? I always assumed this was freeware of some sort or just something clobbered together over a weekend.

Maybe we should start a fundraiser to give the Institute the money to update this place.

Re: Down with Mises forum

Groucho — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 20:11:11 GMT

I mean, this software... I hope the company's not owned by Murray Rothbard'sbrother-in-law or something. But I'm actually suprised the company is still in business if this is what they sell. Preview just flat out doesn't work (at least I've never seen it work). It's got a jumble of mostly unfamiliar icons three times the height of the text, none of which I'd trust to not wipe out my post if I clicked them. Quoting is disabled by default and iwhen you want to quote it's almost impossible to keep the text formatting from going wonky.

To put it mildly, it takes some getting used to!

I looked at the vBulletin site - they even have a forum there for customers to post in (and a "before you buy" forum too). I browsed through a bit - very easy to see all the different areas right from the main page. But reading through the posts it appears running a vBulletin forum requires a good bit of programming experience and knowledge about servers. Looks pretty complicated. But from a forum member stand point it would be fantastic. A nicer interface would be probably result in a larger crowd of inquisitive future austrians sticking around, and maybe attract a higher class of trolls than the than the current crop of dingleberries orbiting the socialist threads.

Grumble grumble grumble.

Re: Down with Mises forum

Malachi — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 19:14:39 GMT

It would appear its the same as always, just grumbling. Grumble grumble grumble.

Re: Down with Mises forum

Michelangelo — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 18:54:56 GMT

So what's this about finally fixing the forum?

Re: Down with Mises forum

Groucho — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 08:08:21 GMT

How generous! Assuming this would be at the mises.org site, I'd be happy to help as a mod (bye bye Nike Pro Air 90's!). But an admin needs a lot more technical knowledge than I possess. But first I think we need to find out what the current forum admins' needs are, as far as replacement software goes.