The FOSSBilling Forum

What happened?

Recently, the FOSSBilling forum has suffered from a significant amount of downtime with the uptime being as low as 80% over the month of July.
This forum is hosted by one of our Steering Committee members who has remained unresponsive during this downtime despite multiple attempts to make contact from other team members.

Now what?

While as of the time of writing this the existing forum is online and working, we are working to replace it with this newly built version of it to ensure future stability. (and if you are reading this, the switch has been made!)

Two things will be immediately clear:

1. All previous posts have been lost.
   
2. The forum is now running entirely different software.
   

The new forum is utilizing the older, more established MyBB forum software rather than the newer and more modern Flarum software which powered the previews forum.

So why the switch?

• With the user who hosts the existing forum being unresponsive, we do not have access to a database backup of the existing forum.
  
• One of the driving reasons for us to create the forum originally was to have an easily indexable source of data which would be discoverable with a Google search, something that Flarum has proved to be very ineffective at due to it's lack of focus with SEO and the JS dependent nature of it's infinitely scrolling design.
  
• The Flarum installation we previously were using broke somewhat frequently with any actions within the forum resulting in errors being generated. We are unsure if these were related to the server that it resided on or if the issues were due to Flarum itself, though.
  
• While they aren't as fluid and modern interfaces to use, older forum software such as MyBB offers us greater control over the community we build and how information is presented on the forum.
  

What else is effected?

In addition to the forum, we have also seen high levels of outages with email and the preview build downloads.
We will be looking to replace both of these items as well to ensure reliability across the board however in the meantime neither of these items will prove to have much effect on FOSSBilling users when they do have outages.

The new forum does not use the existing email server for outbound emails and will continue to function correctly if the FOSSBilling email server goes down.

Forum Update

The new forum has been swapped into the old one's place via DNS, soon users should get swapped over to it as the changes propagate.

What's Done?

• Discord webhooks (These were previously working, however they ended up breaking and a uninstall + reinstall of the plugin has not resolved it)
  
• Swapping off of the default MyBB theme for one that is more responsive and will work better on smaller devices.
  
• Sitemap generation has been setup.
  
• Email functionality is setup & confirmed working.
  
• Registration is allowed.
  
• A very basic forum structure has been created.
  

What still needs to be done?

• Logging in via other platforms (Discord, GitHub)
  
• Further theme customization and improvements
  
• Fixing display bugs
  
• Swapping to hCaptcha for improved forum protection against spam.
  
• Loading any requested languages for the UI (though we are an English speaking community, but there's nothing to stop you from preferring the UI to be in your native language)
  

N = N + 1

Hi!

Just signed up, so another +1. Happily I can report immediate receipt of the sign-up confirmation email. Also, I like the MyBB forum software because I can see everything clearly despite my challenged vision. Thanks to Belle Nottelling for lots of work getting the new forum set up! Thanks to FOSSBilling for adding a great free billing software alternative!

Best wishes!

Tom

(07-25-2024, 06:10 AM)Not_Oles Wrote: [ -> ]Hi!

Just signed up, so another +1. Happily I can report immediate receipt of the sign-up confirmation email. Also, I like the MyBB forum software because I can see everything clearly despite my challenged vision. Thanks to Belle Nottelling for lots of work getting the new forum set up! Thanks to FOSSBilling for adding a great free billing software alternative!

Best wishes!

Tom

Hi Tom!

Happy to see you're still following the FOSSBilling project & that the new forum is easy for you to read

Hmm it looks like the webhooks have stopped working.
Well I suppose new software deployments will always have their quirks that need to be sorted out

Social login is now enabled for both Discord and GitHub.
GitHub is a bit limited due the plugin we are using and as such it relies on your GitHub profile having a public email address.

If you already have an existing account on our forum and wish to connect it to one of your social media accounts, you may do so from the connections section in the user control panel:

No wonder it couldn’t be opened some time ago. It’s a pity that all the previous resources are gone.

Everything will get better and better if we start over again.

Yeah it's a shame to have lost the previous posts that were on the previous forum, however we should have an easier time retaining full backups of this one and I expect it to be quite a bit more reliable long-term

It is a pity that I am looking for tutorials related to the extension and configuration of PayPal payment, which I have just built and are groping for.

I'm sure everything will get better, because fossbilling products are good, aren't they?