Dan Ros

I recently had to evaluate some django forum apps, and I thought I should share my findings.

The general list of apps I got from here. While django-pluggables looks nice, it isn’t searchable or categorised in any way that I could see, which strikes me as pretty bizzare.

Sphene - This has a good feature list, so I tried it first. However, I found that for my purposes, Sphene has a number of flaws:

1. Sphene comes as a suite of different apps intended to build a ‘community’ website. I thought the idea of django apps was to put different apps together and build your own site, so why do developers keep making ’suites’ of apps? There are much better solutions out there which provide a ready-made community site. 
2. It’s hard to only use some of sphene. If you just want the forum part, you’ve got to install a sack of middleware and template loaders, and the community app. This all seems like uncessary complexity to me. 
3. Code quality is rather low. There are functions which aren’t used, half finished functions, functions which are way too long (the function for posting a new message on the forum is 200 lines long!), lots of TODO’s and that sort of thing. In just the forum and the community apps alone, there is 7180 lines of python. That’s just the python, not the templates. Bringing in 7k lines of of questionable quality code into my site scares me.

PyBB - I tried this next. There’s a few reasons I like PyBB:

1. Clean styling, meaning less work for me to do.
2. Excellent code quality, so extending it won’t be a headache. Also, it’s a completely standalone forum app. It doesn’t presume to try and take over your whole django site.
3. Good feature set. The only feature you’d probably want is file uploads, but that wasn’t too hard to add.

What I’d add are file uploads, post previews, and perhaps a way of limiting certain users from being able to view/post to some forums. But that’s got to be done in a way which doesn’t interfere with an existing django site.

Two search requests on the internet website Google produce as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7823387.stm

This “Harvard University academic”, Alex Wissner-Gross, has also created this highly dubious service:

http://www.co2stats.com/about.php

CO2Stats is very smart, and is able to capture a large amount of data about your site’s total energy consumption. For example, it can tell what make and model of computer your visitor is using, what its electrical consumption is, and even what types of fossil fuels are being burned in order to power that computer. Likewise, it is able to detect how much and what type of energy your server is using, and even how much and what type of energy is being used to power the networks that are connecting your visitors’ computers with your servers. 

Errrm, ok. This is plainly completely made up. I’m all for reducing energy consumption but that kind of snake oil environmentalism actually hinders more than it helps, by clouding the issue with myths and untruths.

As for detecting the means of generation of the electricity used, contrary to the laughable “CO2Stats” claim, this is largely impossible. In the vast majority of countries, electricity is provided by a grid which aggregates all generation sources.

Funnily enough, the oft-lampooned Bill Thompson had a interesting idea  in http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7300403.stm  -  

Perhaps we should develop a Network Energy Protocol that lets servers and services report their electricity consumption in real time, so I can change my usage patterns. 

You’ll want to use this patch: http://www.insecure.ws/warehouse/vmware-update-2.6.27-5.5.7-2.tar.gz