It would be cool if we could get the old Badges added into the forum. Badges if allowed to can be used as a title which is a nifty feature since as far as I can see this one doesn’t support custom titles?
If anyone else has some cool ideas please share!
Maybe the forum software should be kept as vanilla as possible this time around so that updating it isn’t a hassle.
I agree. But on the other hand, it would be nice to have some additional features on the forum to keep users engaged.
I’m all for keeping it vanilla but for the love of god please get a better theme than all white.
Creating new badges isn’t a hack for this software. It makes it easy to do so. Smf on the other hand needed a million lines of hackery just to get shit done. This one already proves a lot of the features we wanted straight out of the box with no hackery,
@lurtz1230, themes should be easy to get for this software compared to smf.
I am sure we can figure out how to create a darker theme / any theme.
agreed old badges back + throw an irc addict badge my way pls
Yeah, might as well keep it for the history. I don’t really care to be honest. I would like to emphasize on the reward system this time around though, I think it’s a neat, nifty feature.
As long as I get to oppress the masses with my IRC badge and Java badge I’m pleased.
Actually with SMF a ‘plugin’ actually meant patching the source code making it an unmaintainable mess, with discourse its a real plugin, so find/write one and I’ll install it!
It should be in the admin panel?
Making us write a plugin? Can’t we outsource this to the less fortunate
I could be convinced to do one, but the last time I tried to contribute a change to the forum it was left in the dark: https://github.com/moparisthebest/moparscape.org-smf/pull/9.
Because of the literal nightmare of maintaining custom patches on top of SMF though 
To be fair, I think SMF was written at a point in time where having injection points throughout the code (which would have enabled arbitrary pluggable functionality without mutilating the existing source code) was inconceivable.
I mean, even now the PHP software space has relatively less capable developers than other languages.
I think you are right, but here it is, 2016, and it hasn’t changed in any remotely major way. They don’t even have a public code repository, still just release patches and .zip files every so often…
That’s not really surprising though. Old habits die hard.
And the reality is that, being such an old project, there’s likely an Old Guard that resists and stymies any effort to modernise the project.
I think the best innovations usually come out of wholly new projects.
As someone who used to be intimately involved with the SMF community and some of its related projects, they’ve been desperately trying to better the software but it appears that the team has been dysfunctional for years (and still continues to be). The number of times conflicts have been made public and the bitterness that caused some talented developers to leave is quite disappointing and is hurting their product tremendously.
I think it needs a re-write from the ground up to be honest. I just think there are too many changes they’d have to make to compete with IPB/Xenforo to use the existing codebase.
Even without those two competitors and their current advantages in areas such as SEO, I suspect the PHP in SMF is very much ‘old’ PHP.
Array heavy, and inconsistent with newer PHP ‘best practice’.
It is very much ‘old PHP’. One of the projects they have been “working” on for the past few years is an idea called smCore where you build a core framework and have other features plug into it like a giant plugin system. One of these plugins would be a heavily-customized SMF forum.
Unfortunately, due to the reasons I mentioned above, progress has stalled (completely stopped?) or hasn’t gone anywhere really.
On a side-note since were talking about forum plugins for readability. Could we have a better code view that isn’t all black and white like normal text?