Reshaping the community portal.

I know! It may be a bit excessive to both run a WordPress-info-portal AND a community forum-portal in the same time, as WordPress have quite ok tools for running forum-ish stuff from there. However, I’m not entirely pleased with that, especially since I like the old community-threaded non-Facebook-forum form. vBulletin 5 left this concept for a few years ago, but it really is possible to reorganize things and make them work quite well. And this is what I’ve done the last day.

Once upon a time, there was “Tornis”. It was a realityshow based forum that had Big Brother Sweden as the primary target. However, when Facebook took control over forums with the group-concept many forums went into a graveyard of dead forums. Some of “us” (me) still appreciate the simple overview of threads instead of the compact Facebook view where everything is mixed up in 2 sublevels of comments and all text exposed in the same place. So the decision to reorganize this place have been there for several years. I still feel there might needs of some other kind of privacy than Facebook monitoring all your information. Besides, you still can be reported for practically nothing and get banned.

The purpose over time has therefore changed. There are ongoing projects that has been planned to be placed in this forum. The first problem to fight was to clean up the forum without being forced to delete everything. This is now finished. There is a Facebook-group mirrored to this portal (Making internet a better place), where I was supposed to support and update information about the API that should have been making internet a better place. This project has been delayed for a long time now, but since the reorganization FINALLY have taken place, the future might be a bit more brighter. However, there’s a few things left to do before we can go all in on it…

https://www.tornevall.net/portal/articles/1062744-reshaping-the-community-portal

We’re working on it…

Currently there’s a few steps left before we can release the new portal system (as shown via the test site at https://www.tornevall.net) and the new portal configurator (Test site located at https://auth.tornevall.com). The old platform for handling DNS Blacklists became deprecated as the development of NetCURL (https://www.netcurl.org) have been highly upgraded to fit other (ecommerce) needs. The behaviour of netcurl is backward compatible, but the DNS blacklist and portal software really needed a facelift anyway.

I’ve been looking for a platform that I can handle easier than the self built, and got stuck into a million of alternatives. However, the forum platform is still there, since there are too many posts and history behind. So those parts can’t be replaced (yet). Besides, if everything goes well, there might be no need of doing so.

So what’s left before a release? Actually, TorneAPI (3.0) is ready to go live and the applications built in the API is also very dynamic. As I proceed more things will be added to it and currently, the big focus is the DNS Blacklist, FraudBL and NETFILTER.