This week the new forums went online. Apparently CCP uses a modified version of the asp.net Yet Another Forum software. According to the license (GPL) CCP should give back their modifications to the community (as you can read here on their forum), which should be interesting as we can see the authentication code in there. Somehow I doubt ccp intends to do this.
Anyways, the old forums were uhm well, a bit outdated, but we were used to them and readability was ok. In these new forums, readability was worse. Especially the front page and the fonts / colors chosen were not so easy on the eyes. Also the new avatars are a little too big. To me they also seem sluggish. I don’t want to diss asp.net right away (why not create something new in asp.net mvc ? would have been a better choice imho), but snappy isn’t how I would describe them.
On top of all this, through #tweetfleet yesterday came in reports (mainly by Helicity Boson) that the new forums also had several security holes. Pretty soon thereafter they were taken offline to fix those issues ! Let’s hope they also fix some of the readability issues and we’re set to go. Oh fix that like button too while you’re at it ;).
If you really miss the old forum’s look you can use a plugin in firefox called stylish to make it look like the old one.
Link: Eve24 news article
Update: The new forums were taken down again, obviously the security issues are much broad than just the signature issue. For a good timeline of the events check out Jester’s Trek.
Update II : Helicity Boson did a nice writeup in the day the forums died.
YAF is licensed with GPLv2 so I’m not sure how this works for them. If you take the source for a GPLv2 piece of software and modify it for your internal use and don’t release it publicly you have no obligation to release the source for your modified version (obviously if you improve on the original code it would be NICE if you put those improvements back into the community)
I’m not sure how that applies to a piece of web software though. Are they using it just internally? They’re not actually distributing the software so that you can download it and use it to run your own forums.
Ah the fun of the GPL 🙂
Yes licenses are always a topic for debate. Being far from an expert on the subject you might have a point.
The GPL doesn’t force someone who hosts a website to publish the source, since hosting the website is using the code for oneself.
Take Google for example, they use and modify open source software a lot but, they don’t publish their code. They do work a lot on the underlying OSS frameworks, the same as CCP does with Stackless python on which EVE is written.
I can imagine that CCP contributes parts of the forum code back to the community, but don’t expect the authentication to be part of that…