Hey @gameecode! Thanks for the feedback! As an admin on the forums and the owner, I will address the points as best I can.
for whoever does the forum tech, this site was a huge pain to even ask a question
other sites not like this
Well, that would be me. I’m responsible for the tech and tech support for the forums (I also foot the bill).
it was very hard to make an account with lotta problmes like there's this capacta thing that just didnt work
but other sites dont have a capacta, this has one for no reason, all it does is cause the users pain
Well, that is a bit of an assumption that its “for no reason”. The captcha use is part of Vanilla, the forum software we use. I cannot disable it, and its just built-in. Its on the lowest setting possible, but because its built-in to the Vanilla forum system, we are stuck using it. On the plus side, it does help reduce bots and spammers.
and it gave no errror when account wasnt made when it was suppose to, like email was never sent before to another email, etc
Likely the email server was bogged down, the email bounced (sometimes happens, not sure why) or something else. The forums email server is kinda flakey at times, and because so many people have made accounts with emails that are incorrect and/or do not exist, the email server sometimes struggles.
It’s something I need to look into at some point, but haven’t had the time. For the most part though, the emails do go through if the email associated with the account exists and is entered correctly, it works, but it just may take several hours.
can they just use discourse already
everyone else does, and there's far less issues with that
Personally, I prefer Vanilla forum software, as I find Discourse kinda hard to view and use. Discourse kinda reminds me of Reddit to be honest, which has some issues with thread visibility (among other things).
However, I have looked into Discourse several times but the forums are not really suitable for a few reasons.
One reason is that all the forum posts couldn’t be imported, at least not that I can tell. Years worth of discussion and answers would be lost, users would need to migrate and make new accounts, etc. We only recently-ish moved to a new server a couple years ago, and not too long ago had a database error. Both events have caused a loss in users and made it hard to find the forums, and moving to Discourse would not only loss discussions, but it would also make the forums essentially have to restart again.
Another, big reason is that we actually get too much internet traffic for Discourse! The forums gets over 1 million hits a month. Discourse has limits on internet traffic on their free tier, even for open source projects, and we would eat through those limits in a week or less.
So, we would need to pay for a paid tier. I am already footing the bill for the forums, and the cost of the lowest tier of Discourse would be over the cost I am paying for the forums currently and we’d still break through the internet traffic limits! We’d need to get enterprise support for the level of internet traffic we have, which is certainly over my ability to pay and something the official Godot team would have to negotiate and run, as these forums are entirely community supported.
I suspect this is why many forums over a certain size do not use Discourse, as it becomes much too costly too quickly. This is probably why Unity, Unreal, and even the Godot QA, do not use Discourse.
So yeah, Discourse cannot really happen for a multitude of reasons. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Vanilla is the best, that it doesn’t have its flaws, or that the experience is as smooth as other game engine forums, but its what we’ve got right now.
Currently we do not have the resources to migrate to another platform. Again, these forums are entirely community supported. We do not get support from the official Godot team and everyone on the forums willing donates their time and energy to the forums. If the forums continues to grow as it has, then in the future we may need to look at getting a more robust system, but for now we’re using Vanilla because it makes the most sense with our current situation.
Hopefully that answers your questions! :smile:
