Forums Page

[JamesTheClarke]

https://cnto-arma.com/forums/

A new page with updated visuals needs to be created: https://www.carpenoctem.co/forums

Potentially cut down on forums bloat by merging some current sub-forums into one.

• General Discussions (removal of Multimedia and Community Introductions due to lack of usage)
• Arma Lounge
• Other Games (centralised into General Discussions to reduce forum bloat)
• Community Events
• Community Announcements
• Staff Room
• Guides (centralised into the Wiki)
• Brainstorming
• Tech Support (expanded functionality into two separate ticket systems for admin issues and tech support)
• Freelance (moved from Branches into Help Desk)
• Interviewing
• Mission Making
• Research & Development
• Training
• Leave of Absence
• Discharges
• Archives (removed to lower manual workload - threads will be tagged as "resolved" and locked in their original sub-forums)

When the structure of the forums is complete and issue #9 has been resolved:

• go through the entire forums and assign & double-check all user permissions

[enrico-ghidoni]

Hiho. I'd evaluate a dedicated software for the forums, such as https://github.com/discourse/discourse that we can self host and provide a feature rich experience for the users as well as APIs to interface with. The issue would be linking the users between the forum software and WP, but it can be investigated. What WP plugin are you currently using?

[JamesTheClarke]

After a lot of trial and error in October and November I settled for now on wpForo because it satisfies three requirements I had:

1. visually appealing
2. fully compatible with BuddyPress
3. exportable if we switch in the future

[enrico-ghidoni]

Yeah it looks good, Discourse is probably overkill for what we need and needs some special care for syncing users between the forum and the actual website. Does the WP plugin already handle it?

[JamesTheClarke]

Yeah wpForo syncs with BuddyPress: https://cnto-arma.com/members-2/clarke/forums/

But there's still some minor kinks to work out as I haven't fully completed the BB setup yet.

[JamesTheClarke]

I recreated the forum structure with some changes to hopefully reduce a.) manual labour b.) forum bloat.

Also I've added to the sub-forums unique icons to visually identify them a bit better from each other. Source: https://fontawesome.com/icons?d=gallery

This issue will now be on hold until #9 is fully completed.

[enrico-ghidoni]

Yes the forum looks way better than our current one.

Discourse can be integrated with WordPress authentication (both ways, so one can authenticate from the forums and be authenticated in the website and viceversa), but I couldn't find any integration with BuddyPress. So I believe the two would overlap in functionalities as both provide a user profile and manual (or manually written automation) would be required to keep them in sync.

Should we move the discussion to #9 or keep it here since they're very related?