Poll: The first step towards making the forum better?

[HolyK]

Well, i had spare vBull license at that time but i did not had sufficient hosting for it (not counting free hostings). Hosting at the IX was quite tricky since they will not grant access to their network to someone they don't know and who does not has any contract with them ... this is completely reasonable so no hard feelings at all. There were also some ideas (proposed by IX) to create isolated jail which they could grant access into, but that never happened :/ But the biggest concern was already mentioned above ... the legal one ... imagine that the community-based forum will succeed, there will be a need to migrate to some more powerful hosting, maybe dedicated one instead of shared, which is not *that* cheap. So there would be need of some donation or maybe advertisement, so there will be some "profit" from it. And THAT could cause some issues one day, that some 3rd party is making money mainly because of the IX's project. Or one day there could be some disagreement and IX could say "ok, we're shutting you down".
Also i can imagine some simple system for "paid" support from one member to another ... something like "Hey, our company is running FreeNAS and we're completely f*ked up our system and duno what to do now! ... We will pay someone for fixing that asap since our teambulding photos where drunken Thomas kissed dog are there!!" And then someone like o-mighty-Cyberjock will be summoned and magically fix everything including their leaking toilet in third floor ... via TeamViewer only! (no offense bro! ^^)
I don't know what are the exact laws in US, but i can imagine that. So only way how to do that is to have written and signed approval from IX that they're fine with running that including the money part for covering the expenses and rest of the things.

BTW: vBulletin 5 is piece of sh!t ... vB 4 is the golden one.

BTW2: XenForo will be very good one day, most probably better than vB and IP.B (since vB 5 is crap and IP.... well :/), but that day is not coming yet. vB 4.x is using old engine and does not use "modern" *things* but even it is a bit nasty in matter of resources needed to run flawlessly, it is still most-used engine with large mod community and it's already here for some time. It also has the best customization support (personal opinion, but check the XDAdev for example, it IS vBulletin).
Xenforo in other hand runs faster and has more "modern" look/techniques, but for example customization support is ... baaaaad ... and it still has some "labor pains". But can't argue with their effort, it will be good one day.

 

[Noctris]

Is this the official point of view from IX or is this something you guys are worried about ?

Because in all honesty: If they are willing to dump their whole community to Reddit ( who also makes money from this) and be done with it... i would find it rather strange for them to have issues with "the unofficial freenas forum"

I think with an agreed code of conduct ( don't pretend to be freenas/IX.. make clear you are a community of folks that offer their free time), this could be easily solved. I know the viewpoint concerning legal matters is different between the US and EU, but there is no need to invent problems that are not there ;-)

Reddit has a freenas section
servethehome has a freenas section in the forums
Tweakers.net has a rather non-windows operating systems section where a lot of freenas stuff is posted

And i'm pretty sure many more can be found... ALL of these run ads and/or make money from their community and thus , at least in part, from freenas...

I think as long as this "spinoff" does not start offering hardware solutions, services , it should be ok ( and even then.. tons of shops offere pfsense appliance with os installed for example)

Concerning hosting: this forum is FILLED with sysadmins and folk that do this stuff on a day to day basis. Next to that, vbulletin has cloud offerings or, last but not least, a small crowdfunding combined with ads ( again -> check the pfsense forums, they have a little bit of ads aswell).

I have no idea of how much traffic etc this board pulls.. but i cannot image this would THAT expansive in a world where you can spin up quite a beefy VM on a cloudplatform for < 2k a year and have al sorts of service offerings which can provide, for example, a powerfull and high available DB. I think that if there would be some looking in to this thing, it's just a matter of getting it planned, and getting it done.

My personal main concern would be that this community would pull itself away from IX and thus creating more distance between community and devs... THAT would be something a talk with IX is important for.

 

[flatterlight]

The problem with that is the same as the forum rules (on every forum): you just check the checkbox and click on "next" without reading them...

maybe remove some of the keywords like 'ECC' and/'8'GB ram....

 

[jgreco]

The main problem was that, while I've got the facilities to provide a home for such a thing, I wanted some assurances that iX wasn't going to later on come by and throw a fit about the use of their trademark, and I didn't really want to put up cash for a forum license for such a speculative venture when a license already existed.