Once upon a time I was looking for an Impulse Tracker clone for Windows, stumbled upon Schism Tracker, downloaded it and enjoyed it. Back then, it had a comprehensive homepage on the web, clear links to information, and a user-friendly message board - I could actually keep track of changes, ask questions,
and generally know what's going on.
Now I come back looking for news on the project and.. uh... where is everything? No real homepage, a wiki mostly devoted to comedy, links to changes/CVS updates that I can barely comprehend (probably because I'm not a programmer), and a barely comprehensible message board format. What happened? The old website DID get abducted by aliens and this is just a temporary placeholder, right? The whole thing looks like an in-joke which is not supposed to be intelligible to users, let alone to people who aren't pretending to be Japanese on teh interwebs. :(
Commencing crying to my mom :(
Well, the wiki page is the project homepage now: http://schismtracker.org/ points there.
Ok, yeah, it's kind of shared with a bunch of random stuff. But, if you compare with the old page it's still mostly the same – albeit with an autopackage rather than the [rather redundant] distro-specific packages.
We're mostly missing the old "roadmap", as most/all of Impulse Tracker's features have been implemented; the version history is gone because it was mostly redundant; and I believe everything else on the old page is on the wiki now.
As far as the forum goes: "user friendly" is fully subjective. Personally, I hated the old forum, and particularly having to constantly log in (which was only necessary in the first place because YaBB is a particularly ripe target for spambots, and its code wasn't very good so it was simply easier to disable anonymous comments than to code in a spamtrap). YaBB was only there because I was fiddling with the code and it kind of stuck as Schism's forum.
Nevertheless, you can certainly ask questions here, we're still around! :) I've also been meaning for a while now to switch the page style for /sc/ and /scdev/, because people do seem to have issues – technical or philosophical – with posting on a "4chan style" board. (Mind, these two boards have practically nothing to do with 4chan, and indeed, anyone trying to instigate raids or other such nonsense here will be forcefully removed if need be.)
I like it, but there's no /sc/ or /scdev/ links anywhere, or am I missing something?
> most/all of Impulse Tracker's features have been implemented
These few are missing as of 24.oct.2008:
> The whole thing looks like an in-joke which is not supposed to be intelligible to users, let alone to people who aren't pretending to be Japanese on teh interwebs. :(
For the new board, yeah you say "yuck" at first, but you get used to it. :D
...but i still don't get how a spammer would be unable to post junk on this (or any other) *chan style board: no accounts, anonymous posting, no "type text from this image" check....
Account registration generally has no significant effect on spam. In many cases, it can actually increase the amount of spam a board gets, especially with popular forum systems – since they're well-known, spambots are written specifically to register accounts and post on them. Some of these even handle requisite e-mail validation before posting.
Also, captchas are really stupid, and 99% of the time they're frankly useless. The other 1% is someone deliberately flooding the board, and they'd probably do that anyway even if a captcha was in place; it'd just be a bit slower because they have to sit there and type the words in. (And sometimes they can just be cracked. Neural nets can be very powerful.)
Ultimately the largest annoyance and the most difficult to eradicate is a persistent troll. No automated system can detect "troll" behavior reliably, so regardless of any captchas or other spam countermeasures you have in place, the board still needs moderators.