ElkArte Community

Hello ElkArte community.

Like said ElkArte is based on SMF, but by eye look it looks almost identical to SMF. Are there any differences in code or system or it is almost similiar?

Elkarte is at least a couple of years ahead than SMF in terms of codes and features added to it. There are notifications, @ mentions, likes etc built in with Elkarte which is not present in the latest stable version of SMF. Elkarte can adjust itself to different screen sizes ( ie, it is responsive and mobile ready ) where as SMF still lacks this features among many other under the hood advancements.

ElkArte was forked from a  development stage of SMF 2.1, albeit a rather "old" one (almost 4 years ago), then we picked few minor things from the 2.1 development, but basically followed our own way.

On the user experience side of things, ElkArte 1.0 is somehow similar to SMF 2.1. They share many functionalities, even though they may work slightly differently (for example the @ mentions and the notifications system - that was introduced in SMF after the fork and we didn't consider to merge in), and each one has it's own set of peculiar features (at the moment I don't have a list handy). The upcoming ElkArte 1.1 is not an overhaul, it has few new features (like ILA, more granular notifications user options, etc.), but the two are forums, so not terribly different (and then again I don't have any list of differences handy, so I cannot really answer your question... :().

Code-wise, instead, I can say that ElkArte has evolved quite a bit. From the simple fact the file structure has changed (better exposing controllers and "models(-like)"), to a more object-oriented approach (not just for the sake of being OO, but because there are advantages... even if it was only the fact you are forced to code in a more organized way), more modular approach (in 1.1 many features are not "hard-coded", but they use the same tools available to addons in order to extend the core), and many other goodies.

And, to tell you the truth, these changes to the code are one of the reasons 1.1 doesn't have a tons of new features: first build strong foundations, then build on top of that. There is no good in continue patching something that may fall apart with a breath of wind. ... then, of course, we are talking about IT, so strong foundations may have a thousand meanings depending on who you talk to. :P

Comparing shipping stable versions ... from our front page:

    @Mentioning users including notifications
    Likes for posts and topics
    Drafts, including auto save
    OpenID 2.0
    Two modern, responsive themes that look good in any modern browser, smartphone or tablet.
    Integrated video embedding for youtube, vimeo and dailymotion
    Drag and drop ordering in the administration interface
    Drag and drop file attachments
    Improved Anti Spam measures
    Improved password hashing using industry standards
    Bad Behaviour built in
    Automatic combining and minifying of JavaScript and CSS
    Posting by Email
    Ajax previews and responses throughout the user interface
    Utilizes jQuery and Font Awesome
    ...and much more!

Oh I almost forgot to mention, the elkarte developers are better looking too, just take a look at my pretty face ;P LOL

xD

Elkarte is better. :D

This is a lie. :P

ElkArte devs are better because they do give a damn about feedback instead of bashing at people making suggestions, and they take each one of them very seriously (except emanuele :P) (jk)

Ant should know, he's the ugliest among you. Mirror, Mirrors on the Wall everywhere use him as their screensavers to get you to lower your bar of fairest standards.

I'll take that on faith, seeing as how I have only just found the site and the software. On my only other thread, I stated I started on IPB in 2003. I paid for two IPB lifetime licenses (and one perpetual license) when they first came out, even though they were overpriced IMHO compared to the standard version. I wanted to help a small company grow because it appeared to be one of the only serious competitors to VB and, at the time, it was simple for the average user to manipulate the code to get a personalized product. The "head guy" at IPB was a regular on the company's own forum and acted like he cared about the customer.
Now IPS has grown enough that it decided it could dump the old legacy lifetime license holders. The new gang at the company feel the loss of those old disgruntled legacy lifetime licenses are an acceptable loss in the war for recurring service fees and renewals. It has mutated to trying to be everything to everybody out there, and it has a flock of young hothead sycophants who verbally abused old timers (not just me, although I am probably the most outspoken) who didn't like the new business model.
In bloating the software up to dazzle the impressionable, IPB said it had to dump old components that people had depended on for years. IPB once had a built-in avatar gallery. No big deal, except that IPB boards had sprung up where the core of the communities WERE avatars, so much so that the bigger avatar boards were in the 20K member range. Maybe not big boards by today's numbers, but huge in those days. But IPB bulldozed its way through the damage it would cause these large customers by taking away a major component of their communities. They said users had to stay on older versions to keep a feature their boards were built around, or lose the feature to upgrade their software. Things started going down hill from there.
So yes, if it looks like I'll try the Elk and lurk around for a while, I'll take it on faith about the caring part. One thing, one small suggestion I'd offer as a newbie (please see my other thread for the topic) is that when I Googled "most secure forum software" and Elk came up as a hit, the page I landed on had no buttons or links that I could see, at first glance, to any installation documentation. For a lot of old timer board operators like myself, that's as important for us to look at as the actual look of any demo boards or screen grabs of the software.
A kind soul replied to my message in the other thread and pointed the github button on the index page. I hadn't seen github until that day, and I have been in the IT and computer field since 1968. I'm almost ready to retire as a network admin for the DOD. But I'm old school. My only smartphone was bought because I needed something that could bind to my drone. My only cellphone is an old flip phone. I have no social media accounts. I guess what I'm saying is that something that might be obvious to younger, more hip individuals might have to be spelled out for old people. Or people who don't use a lot of web resources. Sorry for the length. Just adding something of little or no consequence probably. BTW, I have used open source and non-commercial forum software for years; PHPbb, Mybb, even SMF when it first started. The only reasons I stayed with the overpriced commercial stuff was 1. security and 2. a paying customer usually gets some kind of company answer in a ticket. It'd be nice to see a place where both didn't cost an arm and a leg.

Thanks for bringing it up again. I've mentioned this a few times, that the download method is non-obvious.

As to the rest of you, it's a sad tale from IPB. I got into the forum market just after their heyday, so I missed the buzz about them. Still, it's sad that they've driven away their core supporters. We're glad to have you here, I can't imagine you'll find a repeat.

Ha. I am not an Elk dev. Therefore I am gorgeous. :P

I was one of the first users of AOL when it was really Q-Link. Stayed with it when AOL for Windows came out. That whole AOL back story is another edition of the same inevitable outcome when companies (or user communities) lose focus on what drew their core followers from the beginning. On AOL it was scrolling chat and chat rooms that drew people. People were flocking to an online version of our old dial-up BBS systems pre-internet (mine was 200+ members, 5 phone lines, based on Buffalo Creek's Spitfire, then Worldcom's Windows software). People eventually wanted more message retention so AOL increased the cache in each chat room so joiners could scroll older lines and catch on the conversations before jumping in. It was a essentially a scrolling version of forum software. People like to communicate. To share information. They still do today.
A lot of adults are leaving social media, the ones who tried it. The data mining, the policies, the incessant politics. People inherently want just to communicate without all the mind games, without the complicated bells and whistles. Just type something and come back later to see who has added something. It's not rocket science. But a lot of the early commercial forum companies, the ones who are still standing, have lost sight of that reality. So they build software that will sell you books, or call your phone or wash your car. And some do even worse, they drop the basics that drew people to their product from the beginning. Oh, and then there are the acquisitions, the companies are sold. New owners want more money, recurring fees, no freebies, no loyalty. It sucks.
In the past 13 years, just on forum software and the hosting plans, leased servers and the minutiae it takes to put a board online and keep it going, I've probably spent over $50K. and I only ran non-commercial boards And I'm just one person. Imagine the good that money like that could do in a user community, from more individuals. Or the impact that kind of money would have on startups. Or an established company that kept it's customers instead of running them off on a regular basis.

I like this place. I haven't installed the software yet, but I will this weekend. I'm curious and want to see. Thanks for the reply.

[OT] Personal rant... I wish all new users were as polite as you. Not sure about the other guys here, but I'm impressed, I've rarely seen someone behaving like this, it's probably the age I guess, education was actually being taught in schools, while now it's crap :/
You just gave me a little more hope for this world, nonetheless. Thanks.

CTalks, seems you know your way around quite well.  At the same time you've mentioned the need for documentation on a couple of occasions.  Are there specific questions we could ("we" as in the community....I'm not a dev) help answer?  Alternatively, would you like help getting an Elk install running?  I for one would be happy to help you set up a base install.  (please forgive the hijack). 

Sorry for the late reply, a lot has been going on.
Someone asked how people are finding the Elk site. Well, I came across it Googling "secure forum software". The page it led to had a list of the "Top twenty forum software (Paid & Free)". Security is a big concern for me. IPB let me down several times on that over the years.

Elk was on the list. When I saw it had an ancestral link to SMF, I decided to stop in and check it out.
The reason I went past the first page was the tone of the forums. Not the usual beating newbies up and making them regret reading the messages. That impressed me. Too many times today, the norm seems to follow the path of the trolls that infested the Yahoo boards when they first went online. It's an interesting atmosphere here.

Just went through the upgrade process that I was anxious about with my IPB licenses.
Out of the two lifetime licenses and one perpetual license, I ended up with one version 4 license and a $50 credit to be used for support.
I do NOT! like the software now. It is bloated and a nightmare to deal with for new comers. Just trying to do some simple documentation on the new stuff would take forever and be hundreds of pages. Like the owners manuals for new vehicles. Just bought the spouse a new vehicle and no paper manual, the documentation is on a DVD and has 366 pages.

I can see now why the move was made by IPB to dump the old customers in favor of the corporate/business model. There's almost no resemblance between the 3.X version and 4.X. Just about every aspect of what made IPB a decent forum software is gone. It wouldn't surprise me if IPS wasn't in talks with CompTIA or some other cert source to offer official company tech training and certification on the software.

Anyway, the upgrade was my one last hope of hanging on to IPB. I've decided I'm going to have to let it go after all these years.
I don't mean to drag down the Elk forum with ragging on IPB. But I do want to let Elk know that people are dropping IPB now. Lots of people. People who want to hang on to the basics of what they think community, online forum software is supposed to do. Allow people to communicate without an advanced degree in quantum cyberdynamics.

I'll be putting an Elk install up this weekend and hopefully have it going by Tuesday (31).

I kind of want to see how I do setting it up with just the documentation. But I hope I can get help here with the inevitable stump or two I'll hit on the way (senior citizen moments and the like).

I was driven away from SMF boards, I can't believe the way they treat people there. How can I participate in that community when discussing basic things as a new user will devolve into ugly name calling? Anyway, didn't want to start out with a negative foot here, I'm actually here to see if this might be my friendly forum community for the years to come.

I just wanted to comment that so far I'm pretty impressed by the quality of communication here and the Elkarte software looks promising, I think I'll give the SMF import a go and see if I manage to get a test board going! :) .. Elkarte seems to have just the things I've wanted in SMF, but haven't found right mods to do it and don't really have the time to customize that much. I will report next week how it went.

(A quick note, the drag & drop attachment doesn't seem to be working, I can't add an image to a post - Seems to work now, don't know why it didn't show the first time around I checked...)

If you are using a mobile device or a narrow browser window it may show you the "old" interface. I added few changes to the repo, but not yet uploaded here to have a similar interface for both mobile and "desktop".

Welcome @CTalks and @Kimurantti.  :)

A lot of text to read for me, english isn't my native language, so it takes some time. But I will read it all and can assure you, if you need help with the simpliest things, here's one around that tries to help you with it, without giving you the feeling you're not welcome. I'm coming from SMF too, had a german SMF support board for eight years. Things changed with SMF, so I am happy I've found a new "family".  ;)

The team is awesome!  :)

Without casting too many stones, the SMF treatment scheme brought me to seek alternatives as well.  This place is different.  Far better.  If it matters the coding is more sensible as well.  Once I figure out (or TE does it first) how to import attachments for a 2.1 conversion, all my sites will be Elk from now on. 

Thanks to the people who make this happen. 

SMF used to be a lot friendlier, but a large part of the problem now is that the survivors there have frankly just been through the mill too many times (due to various factors over many years). Some of the old hands are pretty much burned out and jaded, and there aren't many new bods on the crew. I can empathise to an extent, having been through the mill at SMF myself over a period of some years.

So don't worry. There is plenty of time and opportunity for Elk to turn into a bunch of old grumps. :D

Elk's coding was deliberately made as sensible as possible, given the obvious limitation that anyone who wants to make a forum app is arguably insane. SMF's codebase, in 2.0.x form, suffers from a lot of legacy stuff that was kept for backwards compatibility, and was old even at the time that 2.0.x was finally released. The 2.1 codebase should be a fair bit better.

I am sure ElkArte will never be what SMF is. It is all about culture on board and Elk's way to talking is one of the best you can find on public boards.