Re: why on Earth does DEBIAN use this pre-alphaware?

Posted by mark on Aug 31, 2019; 9:18pm
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Nabble-is-now-open-source-tp7603082p7604146.html

I'm not sure wherein Debian uses Nabble (their main forum doesn't seem to be a Nabble forum), but I'm pretty impressed with Nabble, personally. Are you talking about a mailing list archive? If Debian actually is using Nabble somewhere, they could do a lot worse, IMO. Debian is a cool Linux distribution (I used to use it), but I use Xubuntu, these days.

What exactly don't you like about it? What exactly do you like about the competition?

Nabble has some of the fastest (if not the fastest) forum software out there, by all appearances. This makes it take a whole lot less time to use. Very clean. The forums can be made quite easy to navigate/view/read in a useful fashion, especially with the Topics View being available. Posting is very quick. Reading is quick. Themes are nice. You can use it as an emailing list (I don't know anyone else who offers that). When you post, you can include others via email (I don't know anyone else who offers that, either). They allow native image and attachment uploads. They don't truncate URLs. They don't redirect to your URLs from some strange URL. It's free. Users can lock their own threads (if you let them); this is a pretty rare feature, but one I definitely enjoy. Polls.

There are a few things I would suggest to make it better (if they wouldn't slow Nabble down notably or anything):
* Make adding mini-profile fields easier.
* Make it so you can upload multiple images at once.
* Make it so you so there's an option to fit images to the width of the screen (keeping them proportionate).
* Make it so the Last Post column tells the subject and sub-forum, and shows the poster's avatar.
* Make it so you can can totally customize your profile page (just make it like a regular post instead of having fields, maybe).
* Make it so you can embed videos from more sites (such as Amazon, for those who take videos on a Kindle Fire and upload them to Amazon).
* The ability to like posts.
* Custom ranks for users that change based on their post-counts. Badges that they earn by doing certain things could be cool, too (kind of like StackExchange does).
* Make it so the threaded view can be made the default for everyone on a forum. That would make the threaded view a lot more useful for those who use it.
* Make a progress indicator for attachment uploads (so you know how much longer it'll take).

EDIT: Other than maybe the last item, you could probably do all that with NAML, I've realized.

Other than that, Nabble seems pretty much perfect to me, and I can live without those other features if I have to. I definitely prefer Nabble to other sites that host free forums. I haven't tried using Nabble software on my own server.