My head started swimming just by reading the question. I'm not sure, off the top of my head, if it could easily be done by us. I'll think on it and try to puzzle out a way, but my initial reaction and the most likely outcome is: Nope. At least not while having the same set of user accounts attached to it.

I dunno. It may be possible to have it that the forums take the user information from the database that all the accounts are already stored in.
At least, I'm guessing that's how other sites do it XD I have no idea.

Could you run a clone of this site under a subdomain like sleepymaid's yay? By clone I mean the software only, not a copy of all user accounts and posts. That way roleplayers would make a new user account for each of their characters in the subdomain and it would be kept separate from the existing users.

I have no idea if that would work because most of technology is as magical as mind control to me, but I was trying to think conceptually.

Oh, for sure. That's the simple part. What I was eluding to was that I'm not sure if I can "clone" the forums so easily. If I can't pull THAT off, the best I could do is use a cheap forum software for it, completely separate from the hub other than by URL. Even then, I'd need Slayer's express permission for it. He never said I needed to, or anything, but I'm not going to just install things on the server without his consent.


Possibly, but I have no idea how to do that w/o cpanel. :P This setup doesn't have cpanel. I just access the file server and database directly. I'm not even sure it can be done by me. Even if I could, though, I wouldn't want to. Duplicating the site in entirety would be very inefficient on server resources. There's no way to JUST have the forums that way, I mean.

Huh. Ok. Good point.

I'd say that a good solution is just putting up a forum software under a folder.

I'm sure Slayerduck has ssh access and/or root access, so he can set up a subdomain.

If Vanndril can modify root files (that is, if he can edit files outside the myimouto directory), I could help him set up a subdomain without using cPanel. For example, for Apache on CentOS (was it CentOS?), it should be the directory /etc/httpd/conf.d/.

Well I got lost about 3 posts ago when you people started discussing magic. Isn't it possible to just add another tab up top? Like right now it's got:


My Account â– 
Posts â– 
Comments â– 
Notes â– 
Artists â– 
Tags â– 
Pools â– 
Wiki â– 
Forum â– 
Help â– 
More »

-----------------------------
Couldn't you just add another tab like:


My Account â– 
Posts â– 
Comments â– 
Notes â– 
Artists â– 
Tags â– 
Pools â– 
Wiki â– 
Forum â– 
Roleplay â– 
Help â– 
More »

Again, I'm sure this has been said by someone up above, but with your zibbita zabbata zoobita, I have no clue.

Haha!

It's not a huge deal. Probably doable by cloning/renaming a whole bunch of files. The site code is broken up in such a way that the pieces are all over the code, though: everything from the links to the posts to the profile pics etc. has its own file, and it would take a bit of work to sort through it all and figure out a way to replicate just the parts you want, and make it all work again.

A matter of investing the time to understand the code, and edit it.

Exactly. :P
Time I don't really have to spare, to be fair.
Doubly so, since I'd have to deepen my understanding of the code quite a bit to even begin understanding the design.


Trust me, if it were that easy, I'd have done it ages ago. XD

When you post something, the text isn't hard-coded into the web page or anything, it's added to a database and then rendered on page load. Think of a database as a bunch of tables that hold information. For example, the "user" table will hold all user information. Such a table will have separate columns (called "fields") to hold each user's username, password, email address, access value (whether they're a banned, admin, or a normal user, for example), and other such user-related information.

Similarly, the "forums" table holds fields for forum posts. The fields, for example, would be a post's "id" (in ascending numeric order, from 1 to a full database), "title" (ignored unless it's a new thread), "body" (the actual content of a post), "poster ID" (the ID of the user who made the post, so that the username and avatar can be displayed), etc.

So, basically, when you make a post, you're telling the site, "Store this information that is inside these fields/text boxes in the database's 'forums' table." Then, when a user loads the forum page, the website notices and tells the database, "I need all of the post information related to this page." This information is given to the site from the database, and then rendered (fancy word for "displayed") on your screen so that you can view it.

The problem in duplicating the forums is that I don't know how. :P
I can easily duplicate the forum FILES. That's just copy + paste. The issues are...

* The software for the site uses fancy redirect URLs that don't actually go directly to files. I don't know how to use those, and even if I do duplicate the forum files, no one could access them unless this is done.
* The database would need a duplicate of the forums table (i.e. roleplay_forums), and the duplicated forum files would need to be edited so that they would know to send information to the "roleplay_forum" table in the database, instead of the "forum" table. I can hardly wrap my mind around how the site is designed to begin with, let alone understand how to tell it to send information to another table of the database.
** There are other things you could do, some of them probably more efficient, but the above is the simplest one to implement that I know of.

It was.

The folder path you mentioned does exist, and I do have, at least, read access to it. Not gonna test write access atm. Though, I can open the files for edit, too, so I seem to have write access.

Now, all that aside, I really don't want to try to use a subdomain and a free forum software install; at least not without permission from Slayerduck. See, this is his development server. Now, I don't mean to put words in his mouth - I haven't spoken to him about it - but I'm mostly sure that he doesn't want random things installed on his dev server when they're largely unrelated to the testing of the myimouto software.

That, and someday, we're likely to move back to the main booru servers when/if Slayer adopts this software. When that happens, what do we do about the roleplay forum? Chances are we wouldn't be able to keep it, especially since that would be special treatment and others would probably complain. I wouldn't want to fill a niche while knowing full well that it's only short-term, thus removing the need for it and making it so someone else, who may have a more permanent solution, lacks the inspiration to handle it, themselves.

Well, it does make sense. Mainly for the "what happens if/when we go back to booru.org" part.

In any case, for whoever's interested, hosting something as simple as a forum wouldn't be too hard or expensive - I think it fits nicely into a $5/month budget and I could help anyone who would like to host one into setting it up.

on rule34.xxx people RP all the time. We just enforced to put [RP] on the title and off they go. no need for separated forums (i think?)

I don't know, I really don't think I'm ready to allow roleplaying on the main forums.

I guess we could use the message/mail feature on this site. The only problem I see is that it would only work between 2 people.

I don't really see what's the problem with just picking a free PHP host and dropping some files on it.

Unreliable? Yes. But free.