SBS website update March 2022

They mean using an auto-refreshing shoutbox on the new frontend as a chat replacement, instead of using Discord for chat.

Oh I see, I'm sorry. I suppose that's possible, but if I'm redoing this website anyway, chat may be easily added (maybe). I appreciate the suggestion though, and if I can't manage a chat, I can probably do a shoutbox perhaps... if that's what people want.

Been a while, and I haven't fully read the thread but, personally having a discord server for chatting and sharing could be useful. Sure this is a niche community/application but considering the trends of the internet in the past few years, chats like Slack and Discord have become more suiting of users needs. Also hi hello, life is neat

There is a Discord server called SmileBASIC Programming Corner with quite a few people in it already, though it's not associated with SmileBASIC Source.

Oh wow, the familiar old grid. It's like a warm hug on a cold night. I missed the look and layout of this site. The old game presentation pages were awesome! I see we're reminiscing about embarrassing old times, ahh, the regrets and misery. Such good times! I think it would be cool to see the old chat come back as long as it's minimal effort for rando. The dynamic here was very fun for quite a while. I bought a switch and have SB4 but haven't created anything yet because (aside from my skills not advancing) because the English community seemed so dead. This might be some motivation to get going again. I've got some fun ideas. And some of them aren't even text-based! Hello from the arctic circle, where it's still -40 with the wind and we've had blizzards for the past week. Life has changed considerably yet at the same time remains eerily similar.

Hello Lacks, good to see you're doing well. Yes, I definitely want to preserve the game presentation, I think that's particularly fun. As for chat, yes I might bring it back. The hardest part is just squeezing all this stuff into another system; if I can do that, the chat won't be so bad, because the new system has chat builtin already... but still can't promise anything, it's a lot of work to just get this rewrite up and running in the first place.

Man, my young self feels slightly older looking at all the dates on posts. I remember when some of the ‘7 years ago’ were ‘2 years ago’. I’m sure some remember when they were ‘1 day ago’.

The "SB Programming Corner" Discord server has always felt like the official server for this site.

I think the people calling for a chat would like to recreate the environment we had here a few years back where it was a hang out area. SmileBASIC programming corner doesn't seem like a place I'd go to hang out with old friends. Been in there for a years or more and it's more fun to shout "ROSE TATTOO" at Lumage than anything else.

though I had no content on the redesign (but I do remember participating!), I am curious to know if the content on there is accessible somewhere and about the content of the email that was sent to people who did.

PS: I consider conducting anything on discord to be a bad idea.

Just wanted to say as someone that hasn't been around in a while, I'm really glad to still see you all keeping this going. Picked up the Switch version of SmileBASIC on a whim last week and it's so nice to see some familiar users still here.

I logged back to SmileBASIC Source after... 2 years of inactivity, if I remember correctly. Never expected to find this post about recent changes on the site. I've changed a lot about myself recently, I entered a new school and I am at 9th grade. Not terrible so far, and I've already started to program small things in C. Life's good so far. It's just difficult to make friends. Glad to see that the community still wants to keep this site alive. Although I don't program on SmileBASIC frequently anymore, I'll make sure I visit this site often.

Sorry for the extended time with no news. I haven't been working on this, I'm sorry. Every time I get motivation to do so, I discover some major problem that has to be solved, and end up spending all my time solving that external problem and never getting anything done here. See, I'm trying to move this data over to a generic content system that's well maintained, but there's always some hiccup that requires massive fixes on the "generic" side. The last one I found back in July, and it just took so long and so much energy out of me to fix that I didn't end up working on this website afterwards. Anyway, I did start working on this again today and I really hope to make progress now (let's hope there's no more insane hurdles). And I want to really stress to everyone that this is NOT an upgrade, I'm really REALLY sorry, it will absolutely be a downgrade. The reason for the rewrite is to get you guys off an ancient server and a codebase that can't be maintained, so that if you DO have needs or there are problems or anything, I can actually address them in the future. So once the transition is made, things will be a bit rough. You'll lose out on a lot of features, and I'm sure some of the bbcode formatting will be broken and take some work to fix. You'll lose a lot of your preferences because they simply won't exist anymore, your notifications will get reset, we'll lose popularity metrics, polls won't be available, etc. I'm going to try to preserve all the data itself, just that the USE of the data will not be implemented until I have time and the need arises. I want to focus on what people want, and that might be getting a place where people can post and browse the entire range of SmileBASIC programs, from PTC to SB3 to SB4.

OK so it took me ALL DAY just to get a single table converted (users), and there's still like... maybe 30 more? Maybe 20, IDR. This conversion may take a long time. I know there's nothing really going on here, so whether it's fast or slow doesn't matter, but figured I'd keep anybody watching in the loop.

You created this wonderful site for the community, and that's mad respect. Many good memories come from here. I don't know much, but I know enough about site maintenance to give thanks for your sacrifice lol. I know you have the best intentions of the community at heart so even if we see downgrades, whatever it takes, I'm 100% for it.

Thank you very much MZ952. I'm getting farther, things are moving along. Still super far from even a "little" done. But I was thinking of something: I'm going to support the old URLs, but I'd like to change the default link format for new URLs to be less annoying. I'd like your opinion (anyone who's left), which of these do you like better: https://smilebasicsource.com/forum/the-original-thread-title/12345 https://smilebasicsource.com/forum/68/12345 https://smilebasicsource.com/forum/5letterhash/12345 https://smilebasicsource.com/forum?fpid=12345 Several things: * All of the 'new' formats would include both the thread and the post identifier. The old format (the last one) just has the post id, and the thread is inferred * Everything in the new website has a permanent unique stringcode associated with it. By default, this is a set of 5 random lowercase letters, hence the third option. However, it could also be a sanitized version of the original thread title, hence the first option. I like this option because it gives you clear information in the url at a glance, and is in line with other websites. The problems though are the url length and the fact that changing the title WON'T change your url, so it could have a mismatch (although we rarely change our thread titles) * All IDs are going to be significantly longer in the new website, I'm sorry. All threads will start at 10000 (5 digits) and all post ids will start at 100000 (6 digits). With all these numbers, the second option (which is thread id / post id) just looks like a jumble of numbers. It might look like /forum/12573/109884, which doesn't really tell anybody anything. * The third option is a bit silly but sometimes the API comes up with funny 5 letter codes. Could be fun, and it differentiates the thread identifier from the post identifier. It's still nonsense though. It might look like /forum/fploo/109884 * The last option is ofc just the old format. We could keep the old format if you like it better, there's no real need to change anything. Just figured I'd offer, since we have access to new options. Note: all of this applies to pages as well, keep that in mind. If we go with the first option, which is long but informative, we could be consistent and make pages link like that too, like https://smilebasicsource.com/page/Spooky-Maze. I want the URLs to be consistent, so if we go with titles, I'd like titles everywhere. If we go with numeric IDs, I'd like THOSE everywhere.

I like the first option, for the reasons you listed.

I also like the first URL, is more convenient for when posting the URL somewhere so it can give relevant context by itself instead of looking dummy for uninitiated people. (Besides Discord, I mean for like my own site or GitHub when I refer to a program/resource here, for example)