ZooChat v4 suggestions

The problem then is that you would largely be seeing the same photos over and over again.

 

Yes - there's still plenty of work to do before I'll be ready to upgrade, so feel free to suggestion changes or improvements or even new functionality.

 

I think he means that when he has more than one tab open at the same time (say: Zoochat, email, and Youtube), then he wants an alert to show on the Zoochat tab - so that if he is watching Youtube he can see that he still has an alert on Zoochat.

 

Next version has push notifications as an option so you'll get browser based notifications for certain events you select. Unfortunately, due to restrictions imposed by Apple, it does not work on Safari on macOS or on any iOS based browser, but it works really well on Chrome / Firefox / Edge / Android / etc

There are also tab alerts for the next version too ... I think this is what you are looking for?:

 

It's not directly related to ZooChat, but I thought I'd mention that I have spent this week upgrading one of my other sites to the latest version of the forum software. This is the first of my sites I've been able to upgrade from the same version that we run ZooChat on, up to the latest version.

The majority of the work I've had to do to get this site ready is directly re-usable in upgrading ZooChat too - there are a lot of shared components - so this represents a major milestone for me and shows real progress towards ZooChat v4.

I've got two small sites to migrate in the next few weeks and then I start work on my main site, PropertyChat which I'm aiming to have upgraded by the end of June.

Once that is done, the next major project will be ZooChat, which unfortunately has a lot more customisation work due to the unique nature of this site. I still aim to have ZooChat upgraded by the end of this year at the latest and based on progress I've been making, I'm confident I can make that goal.

FYI - the site I just upgraded is the forum that I built before I started ZooChat, which was Somersoft.

Somersoft Property Investment Forums was a forum that I built and ran on behalf of the owners of that site from 2002 until 2015 when we decided to archive it and I then launched PropertyChat as a replacement.

Somersoft was running vBulletin, just like ZooChat up until 2016 when I migrated it to XenForo v1.5 and now it is running XenForo 2.1

However, because the site is archived with no users allowed to log in and no new content being created, I've customised the interface somewhat to hide a lot of the features which no longer make sense - for example, showing what's new or recent posts. So while the site demonstrates some of the potential for ZooChat v4, you're seeing only a very small part of the functionality.

One thing to note is that the mobile UI has been significantly improved over what we have on ZooChat now - so that will be one of the main features I'm looking forward to once we can get this site upgraded too.

 

Assuming you upgraded it to the latest software as a "dry run" rather than because of any actual need to upgrade it, given the archived status of the forum?

 

No actually. Yes, it is a useful exercise as a dry-run, but that wasn't the primary motivator. Old software becomes unsupported, which means that it no longer receives any upgrades or security fixes.

What's more, the forum software doesn't operate in isolation - the actual tech stack required to run a forum is as follows:

• forum software (XenForo)
• programming language (PHP)
• CGI process manager (PHP-FPM)
• web server (Nginx)
• database server (MySQL)
• cache server (Redis/Memcached)
  
• operating system (Ubuntu)
• virtual machine (KVM)
• physical hardware

... plus a whole heap of other supporting software and systems which go into running a complex site like this.

The problem arises when the underlying elements change - for example, a new version of the operating system is released and ships with a higher version of MySQL or PHP, which turns out to be incompatible with the forum software.

That's what has happened here. The version of XenForo we currently use is no longer supported - meaning the developers won't release updates or even security fixes for it. It also doesn't support the latest version of PHP which is now standard on the latest version of the operating system we use - so I can't upgrade the operating system without upgrading the forum software (well, I could - but it introduces quite a bit more complexity and risk).

XenForo 1.5 was released nearly 5 years ago and stopped receiving updates more than 1 year ago. To continue running this old version, we would have to keep our tech stack on supported versions - which means not upgrading them either, despite the fact that there may be security issues.

We need to update the forum software so that we can update the programming language so that we can update the operating system and all the other components we run on, etc.

It is of course possible to continue running old software on an old stack - but eventually things will stop working.

It's kind of like buying a house. You don't need to spend any time or money maintaining it - but if you don't, it will eventually fall down. Own a house long enough and the wiring and plumbing and roofing and internal fixtures will all need replacing at some point.

Software requires maintenance too because it does not exist in a vacuum - it interacts with other components and over time will need to be updated. Also, the longer software exists - the more likely that hackers will find a weakness they can exploit.

As a bonus, the newer versions of everything run much faster - so we get improvements from upgrades too. Actually, the most important thing to come out of this upgrade for me is that the forum software upgrade process has now been automated (basically one click updates), which is going to make it much easier for me to maintain the site going forward.

In this specific case, the old site was hosted in Singapore (the closest I could get to Australia at the time), but now the hosting provider I use has a data centre in Australia. So I built a new server in Australia running the latest software versions - Ubuntu 20.04, MySQL 8.0 and PHP 7.4 - but I couldn't move any of my forums to that new server until they were upgraded to the latest version too, which is what I've been doing.

For reference, ZooChat runs on a separate server in Newark, New Jersey - once I'm ready to upgrade ZooChat later this year, I'll build a new server running the latest versions of everything for it as well.

 

Very interesting the fact that the maintainance procedure will be streamlined and automated sounds particularly promising. Fingers crossed all goes smoothly in the coming months!