pfm Outage and major upgrade Monday 2nd Oct 11:00am
- Thread starter Tony L
- Start date
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
I’m going to cross-post this here as it makes more sense on this thread. It is the new XF2.2 pfm running in the Chromium browser on a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4. I took the picture as @Jim Audiomisc is apparently having issues running the site on the hardware and software he chooses (IIRC a Acorn RISC machine running some version of RISC OS). I suspect Jim is a real outlier here and from my perspective it is impossible to retain legacy compatibility with such obsolete hardware and what can only be described as an abandon-ware OS. There are still some people tinkering around with RISC OS, but it is still a late-80s OS at its core. In website terms it is the technology of several millennia ago.
I’m curious if anyone else is having any hardware or software issues, but as far as I’m concerned if the site runs well enough on a computer that costs £60 brand new to the point it can even run inline video content (that’s a Star Trek clip playing in the photo, and without any glitches that I noticed) I think I’m good.
PS I do want to sort Jim out though. I’ll send him the Pi 4 if I have to!
FWIW The problem isn't RO or the hardware. It is two factors.
1) I prefer JS off.
2) Prefer a light browser.
Thus I use "!Oregano" usually with scripting off, on my RO machine. Gives less cruft or bother. Worked perfectly with the old arrangement for PFM. So can clearly work fine.
I also have a webkit based browswer (!Iris) for RO which copes with more bells and whistles. FWIW As a paid up 'developer' of RO* I get a copy of that for free. Out of curiosity I may give it a try (again). I did try it in the past for PFM but found the site much less clear to read. Forget why. However it is quite clear from PFM before now that it is possible for the site to work fine with a plain browser that is simply faster and gives clean layout.
*There are two versions of RO. One open source, the other commercially developed. That said we tend to feed into the Open version a lot of what gets done for the commercial version which uses the money to port onto more hardwares and add features, etc.
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
BTW Ialso use 4 Linux boxes at present. Tend to go with a tweaked Mint XFCE ... but then add ROXFiler on top to give a better (i.e. more RO like) desktop filer behaviour and apps method. 
So in extremis I could just use FF for PFM. But it really should be possible not to have my choice limited when we know PFM can work nicely without that limit.
So in extremis I could just use FF for PFM. But it really should be possible not to have my choice limited when we know PFM can work nicely without that limit.
Tony L
Administrator
Sadly it isn’t. The previous XenForo installation was actually four years past end of life, it was unsupported and arguably not secure as it was reliant on a long obsolete version of PHP. pfm is a commercial site serving well over a million page-views a month. It holds a lot of data and I have to be fully compliant with GDPR and various other standards. There are more coming too. I also need to cater for the 50% or so of users who browse using mobile devices. It just isn’t possible to support obsolete browser technology in 2023. The plain text internet no longer exists.
You really shouldn’t have any problem with speed running the full site. As I say a humble Pi4 runs it absolutely fine, even the inline videos. That is a £60 computer!
PS I’m not joking regarding the Pi 4. I’d hate to lose you as a poster and you can have it if would keep you on pfm! I’ve got a 5 on order so it will be surplus to requirements soon.
gintonic
50 shades of grey pussy cats
this is incorrect - we know PFM played nicely for your context with an old out of date software supporting it. An obsolete version of PHP is a massive security risk.
Tony L
Administrator
Once vBulletin moved in a direction I didn’t like after a take-over I just followed the developers to XenForo. I’ve no experience with PHPBB, and initially when I was making the real decisions all those years ago it just didn’t have the standing or product support. I get the impression it is very much a contender now, but I’m not convinced it was when I made the initial vBulletin and XenForo decisions. Another factor that led me to XenForo was Steve Hoffman and a couple of other forums I visit used it, so I was already familiar with the user interface and I figured most users would be too. Again at that time vBulletin and XenForo really dominated the market.
I’ve been pretty happy with XenForo and it has so far proved remarkably solid and resilient over the years, as in fairness was vBulletin previously. I really can’t complain, plus on the few times I’ve needed support it has been available and of a very high quality. This is not free software, but in the grand scheme of things it isn’t expensive either. I’m liking v2.2 too. I was fearing the upgrade as I was expecting a ton of bloat, but it isn’t at all, and the admin CP is a lot better than it was in v1.5.
Tony L
Administrator
Shouldn’t be. There are only two ad locations currently defined; one in the header, one in the footer. Exactly the same as the old forum. It is the same ad code block.
Every now and again Google tries to get me to adopt their auto ad placement, but I don’t think I’ve turned that on accidentally. I’ve not seen any where they shouldn’t be myself.
RobFTM
pfm Member
Nice upgrade Tony, thanks. Just FWIW, I’m also getting occasional ads in posts, which I also assumed was a thing.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
Maybe it's worth having a planned update cycle rather than going with 'if it ain't broke etc'. An annual donations push to pay for it and for someone to do it for you again might pay off longer term...
Tony L
Administrator
I need to have a very long and hard think about financing as ad revenue is dropping through the floor thanks to modern browsers having ad blockers enabled by default. I was really shocked yesterday to see Chromium I had running on the Pi 4 upthread, which is a Google software product, has ad blocking enabled by default. Ad blocking that even blocks Googles own ads! I’d never done anything to it and it was entirely blocking my income yet happily displaying my site. No word or warning to the user that it had a content piracy device enabled that will totally deny the site its income stream. It is theft. Nothing more or less.
This being the current situation has seem my income pretty much half over the past two years, certainly drop by a third, and that is against a backdrop of spiralling inflation, i.e. I’ve probably had a pay cut of 50% in real terms. This has been balanced in recent weeks by an astonishing level of donations, for which I’m truly grateful. The record shop is in very good health too with a lot of great stuff waiting to list, but the underlying issue that ad blocking is destroying independent sites remains. As such currently I’m fine, but I obviously need to plan long-term.
This will likely get exponentially worse in January as new legislation requiring ‘Consent Management Systems‘ and that users actively opt-in to ads will take a scythe to every site that is not an active shop fronts or owned by £millionaire political propagandists. So much of the rest will just be strangled out of existence. Once viable sites denied the basic tools of their trade.
There are dark times ahead for all independent websites for sure.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
Sounds harsh indeed. I'm sure people would be more than happy to help, you just need to find a way of doing it. Not too pushy like the Guardian has become but I was thinking timed with improvements, coupled with a Wiki style annual bigger push. Anyway don't be too polite to ask will you...
Tony L
Administrator
I will have a play with a dark theme, but give me a couple of weeks to just get used to things. I’m totally burnt out at present, can’t really see straight! It is definitely on my ‘to do’ list.
PS It would help me if people linked to dark themes they really like. I hare the things as they just make me see lines everywhere I look, so I have no real understanding of what a good one looks like!
PS It would help me if people linked to dark themes they really like. I hare the things as they just make me see lines everywhere I look, so I have no real understanding of what a good one looks like!
Patu
pfm Member
I visit Roon, Hifiwigwam and Naim -forums frequently. They all have good looking and working dark themes. Also our local finnish hifi forum uses the same forum software as pfm and it has a working and good looking dark theme.
Mike Hughes
pfm Member
I use Naim in dark mode and it’s pretty much perfect. In normal use the white is overwhelming for my vision.