Over the years there have been a few threads about the current forum software (esoTalk) and possible alternatives. Whilst I love the people on the forums, I’m not a big fan of the esoTalk platform. For instance, it’s slow to post, doesn’t support Markdown or even syntax highlighting and its search functionality is poor. Toby (the creator of esoTalk) has been working on a new product for several years now (Flarum) but that is not yet out of beta and is certainly not ready for production.
I have no doubt that there is a lot of glue code holding together esoTalk and Xojo’s backend in terms of account management but I wonder if it’s time to have an open discussion about a more robust forum software? Personally I think Discouse is the clear winner in terms of features, security, ease of use and maturity but I’m curious to know what current forum users thing about the state of the forums.
We looked at Discourse at the time and decided on esoTalk. Geoff and I had some fantastic ideas for something custom, but investing the time wasnt really in the cards. I think esoTalk is good enough that its not worth migrating from yet. The right time to switch is when there is something significantly better available. I dont think anything in the landscape right now fits that description.
Writing something custom seems fun from a dev point of view but forum software is probably one of those re-inventing the wheel things. If migrating away from esoTalk is unlikely then perhaps at least we could look at polishing it a bit. For instance - adding proper syntax highlighting for Xojo code. I cant imagine thats too big a problem to solve. Heck, Ive even written language definitions for Xojo for a bunch of open source JS-based syntax highlighters.
IMHO esoTalk is as good or bad as any forum software.
However I still think it would be a huge marketing asset both for Xojo and the community if the forum was not written in PHP but in Xojo. It would prove what Xojo is capable of… I thought this like 12 years ago, when the old RB-Forum was running on PHP-BB and I still think this now.
Long threads get slower and slower. When ignoring people you still see that they posted. When trying to post there are errors or the post get lost. And so on.
esoTalk is the product of a hobby developer. The newer forum software like Discourse all look like clones and waste too much white space.
It looks like people like the the forum software then. Thats good. Im happy to investigate writing some code to properly highlight syntax if Xojo would be open to using it.
No actually. It would be required these days, but at the time were were just thinking of features, not necessarily the tech wed use to make it happen.
To be fair, plugins still work… mostly. Its just that over the years weve run into things that esotalk couldnt do and that required digging into the base code.