With the transition of MacScripter from Ray to me completed and the site mostly stabilized, I’m beginning to think about the site’s future. Here is your chance to make suggestions about how you would like to see MacScripter.net evolve over the next couple of years?
There are also some technology issues to consider. MacScripter is based on a hacked version of FluxBB which means that maintenance and upgrades are difficult. FluxBB is a pretty old-school BBS platform and discussion platforms have evolved. My Script Debugger support forum uses Discourse and is much simpler to maintain. A move of MacScripter to Discourse would be jarring to the users, but it would reduce my operations and maintenance workload.
I’m also interested in people’s ideas for expanding MacScripter’s reach. For instance, I think Shortcuts on iOS is quite interesting and may be something around which we can create a community.
Early in this millennium there was a section of MacScripter called ScriptWire in which we hosted (and I edited) a huge selection of tutorials. Andy Innatko said this about us:
My only adder to that is that there were more than 1600 scripts in ScriptBuilders, about 300 threads in Code Exchange, and thousands in the bbs. When Ray decided to change servers instead of running his own some years ago, he wanted to simplify and shrink the site, so he eliminated several sections and recast ScriptBuilders into ScriptWire. I don’t recall the details, but ScriptWire doesn’t have the editorial degrees of freedom that ScriptBuilders did, so it really isn’t edited any more and most of the contributors dropped out.
At 81 with health problems, I’m not interested in resuming any editorial duties, but I still believe that ScriptBuilders served a really great purpose; it got newbies interested in scripting and served as a repository to which contributors to the regular channels could refer for a more extensive discussion of a particular problem. Good stuff, in my view.
Be nice if you resurrected something like that. It would be really great to have some extensive tutorials on using Shane Stanley’s AppleScriptObjC and script libraries and some on using Pfiddlesoft’s UI Browser tools. I realize that Apple is kind of backing out of AppleScripting, but there still exists a community that uses it every day. Even though I use, for examples, both Typinator and Keyboard Maestro, I almost always accomplish what I want them to do by embedding an AppleScript. MacScripter.net is virtually the only site with the kind of coverage and friendly help it has on the web. Be nice to enhance it back to its former breadth.
As I recall, MacScripter’s front page used to be a freshly written tutorial article written by either one of the adminstrators or one of the moderators. The articles would firstly be submitted to a private forum on the site called unScripted [staging] for feedback from the other contributors and would be published when Adam deemed it time. As each new article was published, the previous one would be added the unScripted forum. (Or it may have been added immediately upon publication. I’m not sure now.)
ScriptBuilders was a part of the site to which people could upload actual script files which they thought might be useful or interesting to others. It was necessary to join ScriptBuilders in addition to MacScripter to be allowed to upload. ScriptBuilders and everything in it disappeared when the site was revamped. Some of my own scripts later turned up in script libraries elsewhere on the Web — without my knowledge or consent — but I’ve lost track of them now. They’d be mostly out of date now anyway.
Hi,
I’m a newbie here so forgive my lack of familiarity with the history of the group but what about establishing macscripter in StackOverflow? Or Reddit?
Either would leave the infrastructure to others and allow focus on content.
SO would bring these discussions into view of a wider group of technical users.
I imagine the transition would be taken well once users feel the superiority of Discourse forums and how much easier it makes life for both maintainers and users alike. An initial period of discomfort versus the long-term benefits would likely be worth it.
A Discourse site with room for a Shortcuts community seems like the obvious way to go, particularly if the higher priorities are to expand the reach of this board while making it easier to administer. Plus Discourse is so much easier to use on iOS devices.
Discourse isn’t perfect. It took me a while to learn to stop fighting against it and start to learn how to use it the way it’s designed to work. But I’ve grown accustomed to it.
I don’t know how well Discourse works for a site like this one that has such a rich archive of useful information. I haven’t done much searching on the Discourse sites I frequent. I’m mostly just keeping up with the latest conversations.
I’m completely ignorant about how this works, so I’ll just ask: I like that I usually get a discrete set of MacScripter results when I use Google to search for answers to my AppleScript questions. Would a Discourse version of MacScripter eventually accumulate whatever digital equity/credibility is required for results to show up like that in a Google search?
I Google’d importing FluxBB to discourse and the first hit describes a step-by-step process, stating that the following data can be imported:
[format]• Users
• Groups
• Categories
• Topics
• Posts
• Suspended users[/format]
The current design is a homage to old-school - no distraction, nice colour pallet (without greyish whites), easy to navigate, doesn’t hog resources. The 99% is text so I’d suggest to keep it as simple as it’s now without this “updated security” non-sense that breaks browsing experience. I love to be able to use it in any version of any browser.