The worst forum software I ever encountered was what Baen Books uses on their Baen Bar.
I don't know what they use *now* but the two systems I did use were flat out horrible. They attempted to integrate e-mail lists with a forum. Of course there were massive problems. Users could subscribe to a subforum by e-mail and all posts there would also be sent to your e-mail inbox. One problem was a lot of replies would never make it back to the forum, but would to others subscribed to the subforum or thread. Also, many times a post made on the forum site would disappear, but if replies were made before it vanished, those would be visible. Sort of like on Usenet where a server might copy a partial thread without its original post - but this was just *one server*. Since the provider of that disaster (which Baen *paid money for*) wasn't getting any of the bugs fixed, Baen bought another product that also attempted to integrate forum and mailing list. It didn't have as many issues, but to compensate it had some 'specialties' of its own. One that was most annoying was the e-mail notifications of replies to your posts were %100 totally useless. You'd get a link in your notification but instead of taking you to the new post in your thread you *always* were dropped into the root level of the forum. The forum search was hit and mostly miss. I remember I could be looking directly at a specific post and I'd copy some text string from that post into the search and it could not find it. Following up on responses to a thread start was just about impossible. Why was Baen paying good money for crap software? To satisfy the long time users who had subscribed to their e-mail lists back before they decided to do the forum and no free forum software had that kind of integration. Judging from the hard fail of two commercial products attempting that, I can see why none of the free/open source forum systems tried to mush the two together. They also didn't want an open source product. IIRC some crazy notions about 'security'. A software product that barely functions can be quite secure, but what good is a secure product that is incapable of serving your need? Open source software designed for multi-user access with logins and passwords nearly always has legions of people attempting to poke holes in it, and they either fix them or report them to people who can fix them. Find a hole in a closed source product and odds are you'll be ignored and the hole won't get closed. For one serious example, look up a recent electronic hotel room lock hack. The hack was done through the power jack on the outside of the lock. That jack was used for power to retain the lock programming during battery changes, and it was also a "secret" programming interface. The hacker who found the security hole was able to build a device into a hollowed out ink marker. Pop the battery cover off, shove the gizmo into the power jack and instant unlock. All one needed was the hotel's site code for the lock system, IIRC he put ALL the site codes into his device. He sent all the details to the lock manager and got back silence. So he presented the hack at the DefCon that year. Lock company insisted its stuff was secure. They weren't notifying their customers of the vulnerability. I printed the info out and gave it to a few hotel managers. They were rather curious and concerned about their locks after that. Aside from the sheer awfulness of the Bar's user experience, there was a bunch of know it all's in the 1632 section who were quite annoying and condescending and who simply would not read 100% of what people with ideas different than theirs had to say. Ignore a couple of words and you get the completely wrong meaning. For example if you nip off the first two words of "One of the most important..." Nope, they'd skim for certain words and upon seeing things like mention of machine guns and they'd all but call you names and virtually pee on you for daring to bring up such a "dead horse" subject. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
