My thought was that phpBB has been going strong for a very long time, and will probably continue to be maintained in the future. So even if we make
changes to the code in places, then if we move on like Polverone has, our successors here won't be stuck with a huge mess on their hands.
The main reason I thought phpBB would be a good choice had more to do with the similarities to the XMB interface. I went around to all the major
open-source bulletin board software sites and looked around, trying to rank them in how difficult they might be to get used to for people who don't
seem to want things to change very much. Here's how I ranked at least some of them:
1. phpBB https://www.phpbb.com/community/
2. Simple Machines https://www.simplemachines.org/community/
3. myBB https://community.mybb.com/
4. vBulletin https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/
5. Discourse https://meta.discourse.org/
I assumed the consensus among long-time contributors would be that the less "web 2.0" we went with it, the better. Correct me if I'm wrong. I've
used bbPress, and don't have any complaints about it. I'd assume there would be some hesitation about tying this site to the Wordpress ecosystem
though. When I was a system administrator, I cut our routing errors in half by setting up this route to where the Wordpress login page would be if we were running Wordpress. The security isn't necessarily bad, but it's
definitely where hackers are focusing their energies.
And yes, thank you to whoever pushed me in the direction of Google Cloud. I'd incorrectly assumed that since AWS was a huge mess to figure out, that
the same might hold true of Google's offerings. Unlike Amazon though, Google actually seems to put some priority on ease-of-use and having good
documentation.
As an aside, I think this has a lot to do with their corporate cultures. Amazon is notoriously competitive, even among themselves. So they don't
spend a lot of time thinking about how they can improve things for their uses. Google seems to prioritize making things more useful and helpful a lot
more, even if they aren't immediately profitable.
Once things are set up, you still spend most of the time using Linux through a terminal over ssh in any case. Google seems to use a less confusing
system of authentication between services too. For whatever reason, AWS made you copy and paste this modified JSON object into a textbox to set up
your S3 bucket to automatically allow publicly accessible downloads. With Google, not only can you just turn it on from the console, but they have a
few really powerful and really useful command-line utilities that are way more intuitive to use for authenticating connections between different
services. Like, it makes a lot more sense to log into your secured Linux server, and then use a command line utility there to establish your
credentials on that side. That way, you only need to look up the credentials for the other side.
As far as Ruby, I was only planning to use it for converting data between the databases. It's really good for writing "glue code", where you have to
make several different applications process each other's data in ways that they aren't quite set up to do. It fills a similar role as Python does,
but is more forgiving of syntax. I also use shells a lot, and Ruby does those really well. For the record, here's the Ruby script I used to pull out
all the attachment data and save them as files. After doing that, I used Google's command-line tool to transfer the whole attachment filesystem into
cloud storage:
https://github.com/toldani/sm-transition/blob/master/parse_a...
I've been making it a point to comment my code too, so even if Ruby isn't your language, it should be pretty obvious how it works.
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