Discussion forum#

CLUB1 hosts a discussion forum at https://forum.club1.fr. It aims to fulfill three main roles:

  • Ticket management (problems, suggestions, questions).

  • System administrator roadmap management.

  • Offer a public asynchronous discussion channel, allowing varied discussions to coexist over time.

See also

The journal article “Création d’un forum” (in French)

Login#

The forum is an internal management tool, but it is also open to the outside. That’s why there are two ways to log in. In all cases, an e-mail address is required. It will allow, if you wish, to receive notifications about conversations you will have chosen.

Login via CLUB1 account#

This type of login is dedicated to CLUB1 members wishing to use their CLUB1 account to identify themselves on the forum. This implies using the same identifier and the same password as for all services. The advantage of such a login method is that you do not have to remember a new username/password pair, that your password will be updated if you modify your CLUB1 account password and that you will automatically have the badge membre CLUB1.

Warning

Your CLUB1 identifier will be your nickname and will therefore be visible when you post public messages.

Open login#

This type of connection allows anyone to create an account on the forum and interact with it. Obligatory passage if you do not have a CLUB1 account, but also in the case where these are accounts of legal entities (associations, collectives) and people wish to express themselves there as an individual.

If you are a member of CLUB1 or belong to a group with a CLUB1 account and you have registered via this method, we invite you to send an email to contact@club1.fr indicating the situation, so that people responsible for administering the forum can give you the membre CLUB1 badge.

Usage#

The CLUB1 forum is based on a tag system rather than categories. A discussion thread can therefore have several tags.

Important

Some tags are called primary and there should only be one primary tag per discussion, which recreates sort of categories.

Tags organization#

The primary tags are as follows:

  • Tickets: Groups open tickets.

  • Terminé: Groups closed tickets (“resolved” or “refused”).

  • Cafet: Brings together discussions that are not directly related to CLUB1’s hosting activity, and are therefore not tickets.

  • English: Groups discussions in English.

Lifecycle of a ticket#

The word “ticket” represents a problem, a suggestion, a question that is taken to the ticket sorting center where the appropriate people, capable of responding, can resolve the tickets as they arise. Tickets are intended to be closed once the problem has been resolved, the suggestion received or the question answered.

New tickets must be created with the Tickets label. If the subject of the ticket is still nebulous and requires more discussion, it is better to add the label rêve.

Once a ticket is resolved (or refused), you must remove the Tickets label from it to be able to assign it the labels Terminé and résolu or refusé based on its condition.

System administrators roadmap#

Transversely to the ticket management system, the Roadmap Admin label is used by CLUB1 system administrators to organize themselves. It also allows to make “current”, “next” and “planned” tasks public.

This is actually a primary tag that only certain forum users can use, bypassing tag restrictions.

Administration#

This section is primarily intended for forum administrators, namely CLUB1 members being part of the forum group.

Software used#

The forum is based on Flarum. It is executed by PHP-FPM with the user forum, directly from Nginx.

It uses a SQL database managed by MariaDB.

Flarum#

Forum software written in PHP. It is designed to be extremely modular with very few features actually being part of the core. It is thus easy to develop extensions of all kinds, which can take the forum tool in very different directions. — Sources

CLUB1 maintains several extensions for this forum:

club-1/flarum-ext-cross-references

Adds cross-reference links when a discussion has been mentioned from another. — Sources

club-1/flarum-ext-french-typography

Improved typography for French writings, mainly around punctuation. — Sources

club-1/flarum-ext-sphinx-glossary

Automatic links to the definitions of a Sphinx documentation. — Sources

club-1/flarum-ext-server-side-highlight

Server-side and cached syntax colouring for code blocks. — Sources

Files and folders#

Some files and folders related to the CLUB1 forum.

/var/www/forum.club1.fr/#

Flarum installation folder. It includes the following files:

  • config.php: Flarum’s configuration file. It only contains the installation parameters. The rest of the configuration is in the database.

  • composer.json: File describing Composer dependencies. It is via this software that Flarum extensions are installed.

/etc/nginx/sites-available/forum.club1.fr#

Nginx configuration file containing the virtual host of the forum.

/etc/php/*/fpm/pool.d/forum.conf#

PHP-FPM configuration file of the forum users’ pool.