Agreed. It has a bit of a learning curve but it’s grown on me. I do wish for a little darker text on the white background though…
What was the reason for switching from the old forum software to EsoTalk? To abandon that knowledge base for a software where the developer has given up development on his own product? I don’t get it:
http://esotalk.org/blog/index.php/2012/01/18/the-future-of-esotalk/
http://esotalk.org/forum/51-esotalk-1-0-0g2-released
I can get by the difference in interface but there seems to be other more developed forum platforms out there that are fully supported. The gravatar is a mess, who wants to go through having two other registration accounts just to add a picture. What am I missing?
esoTalk is not abandoned. Toby Zerner, the developer, is a member of this forum and we sponsor his development.
Gravatar, I’ve already explained.
As for abandoning the old software, we really did not like phpBB. And, quite frankly, nearly all forum packages look and act the same. They’re pretty awful. esoTalk has given us much more freedom to integrate our community. Even if we had stayed with the same forum software, in order to integrate our login system, we’d have had to reset them completely. So we figured if we’re going to reset our forums, we might as well upgrade our software at the same.
[quote=10812:@Thom McGrath]esoTalk is not abandoned. Toby Zerner, the developer, is a member of this forum and we sponsor his development.
Gravatar, I’ve already explained.
As for abandoning the old software, we really did not like phpBB. And, quite frankly, nearly all forum packages look and act the same. They’re pretty awful. esoTalk has given us much more freedom to integrate our community. Even if we had stayed with the same forum software, in order to integrate our login system, we’d have had to reset them completely. So we figured if we’re going to reset our forums, we might as well upgrade our software at the same.[/quote]
Thom, thanks for the info. A few followups, if you will:
- Can you say more about the EsoTalk/Xojo relationship? It almost sounds like Xojo is sponsoring EsoTalk as an open-source developer. That would be cool if so.
- Can my company get in on the action? (My current company uses Vanilla forums, and while initially great, Vanilla seems to have really dropped the ball on open sourcing their dev efforts). If my company could help EsoTalk flourish and use it for our forums, that would be of significant interest.
- Everyone knows that PHPBB is the spawn of satan (sorry, it needed to be said)
Basically. We ask him for features / fixes as necessary, he bills us for his time, and we pay it. He does some work on his own of course, but he’s in school which eats up most of his time. And everything he does goes right into the public esoTalk github. The only work he’s done for us that does NOT go into the source is a custom plugin he wrote for us to handle the login integration. Beyond a couple custom plugins we use, we’re using a 100% stock esoTalk install.
Of course: esoTalk github. Like I said, we’re running the same code that is posted there.[quote=10820:@Michael Diehr]Everyone knows that PHPBB is the spawn of satan (sorry, it needed to be said)[/quote]
Agreed, but even the competing packages are pretty much the same. It’s rare to find innovation in the forum software category. I’m glad we found esoTalk, it’s different in a nice way.
Thom, thanks for the honest & detailed response. Very useful & interesting. I know Xojo’s primary business is not forum software, but I also think this is (oddly) an underserved area, and if you guys were to, at some point, put out some sort of “Esotalk/Xojo Webapp for Small App developers” that might be a hit. Would love to have a xojo webapp that I could program to handle sales, downloads, bug reports, etc. Food for thought.
[quote=10828:@Thom McGrath]Basically. We ask him for features / fixes as necessary, he bills us for his time, and we pay it. He does some work on his own of course, but he’s in school which eats up most of his time. And everything he does goes right into the public esoTalk github. The only work he’s done for us that does NOT go into the source is a custom plugin he wrote for us to handle the login integration. Beyond a couple custom plugins we use, we’re using a 100% stock esoTalk install.
Of course: esoTalk github. Like I said, we’re running the same code that is posted there.
Agreed, but even the competing packages are pretty much the same. It’s rare to find innovation in the forum software category. I’m glad we found esoTalk, it’s different in a nice way.[/quote]
Thom, Is it beyond the scope of Xojo web to write a forum software from scratch? I know you guys have been busy getting this update out, I’m just curious of the capabilities of Xojo web? ( I am only using desktop windows edition and have not done any web development with Xojo - yet… )
Oh we’ve had some very interesting ideas. But at the moment, they’re just ideas. We work with the resources we have, and for the foreseeable future, we don’t have the resources to spare on developing our own forum software.
IMHO: On the one hand: Xojo needs to be 100% laser-focused on two things: Cocoa, 64 bit, and IOS compiling. Oh, and Android. Ok, that’s 4 things.
Anything else is a distraction.
Ignore all others!
But…
On the other hand…
The “small software dev market” really needs a quality “all in one” solution:
Imagine some mix of Xojo / Xojo Web Apps, and Eso Talk that would allow an Indie developer to:
- develop and deploy a Mac/Win/iOS/Android app
- online store for sales (in addition to MAS/Win8/Google Play)
- have app crashes and feedback/bug reports integrated with some Feedback.app-like system
- ???
- profit!
IMHO: Xojo should focus on Xojo.
But there’s an opportunity for Xojo Devs with perhaps a Xojo buy in to develop these products as a group/consortium.
I love this new simple forum, and the search works great and fast.
Thank you for letting the old one die. The search system on the old one was a terrible clutter and cumbersome to use. Ended up using google.com search using “site:forums.realsoftware.com” option instead of the forums own search all the time to find anything.
This new one is much easier to read too. Thumbs up! x 2!
And this new one works perfect on android and iPhone too! HUUUUGE improvement!
Michael, cut a bit of the coffee, you seem kinda overexcited. 
If Xojo gets those done, they will have my money each year until the day I die. If they add even more tasty candy, fine; but I’ll dance the happy dance to my grave with just that single line you wrote there.
As far as I know, Xojo have plans for everything Michael cited (Cocoa, 64 bit, IOS. Android) and he cited because he knows it. It’s just a question of time.
We have stated our plans for Cocoa, 64 bit and iOS several times.
Android we’ve not actually committed ourselves to anything at this time.
We have very full plates with those other three already.
In the old forum, I basically only ever did “view active topics”, which provided a list very much like this forum defaults to. Different look and feel, but not totally foreign.
I would like a little darker font, perhaps.
I agree with the op and others on: Darker font, please. The eye strain is too high. Dare I suggest black?
Agree with the darker font. Light grey on a white background works really bad in a non-office environment on a laptop…
Also, I find “quotes” difficult to sort out from the new posts and it makes me read the same lines again and again…
But I think the solution is, let the team of Xojo visit the beach or the sunny park with a laptop to do some forum posts and the viability issue will take care of itself!
I just bet they’d love that too 
I doubt they’ve seen the sun for many days.
Should be great an option in the settings. Every user could choose how white he likes the BG and how dark the FG.