Please wait...
I'm pretty patient. Ig is doing awesome stuff with Citadel right now - and I feel like there is a renewed interest in running small sites that are an alternative to big Social Media - and Citadel is really the best game in town for that, right now.
Sun Jun 06 2021 14:47:41 EDT from Nurb432If i remember right, a 'responsive' webcit is coming.
Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions
I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it.
I don't know IG's position on the future of this software package, but here are my thoughts.
Many inferior software "suites" that perform (largely at a lesser scale or stability level) are available for purchase. The proprietary ones have a company behind them that rhymes with Noracle, (well ok so F it, its Oracle). Citadel is GNU GPL released, so that means that ANYONE READING THIS is free to fork it to their own tune.
This is where, I think, we recon with the age old concept of "Caveat Emptor".
My ruby on rails and PHP and C++ and VB skills are all in the same boat: I know how, but I am what Commodore BBS sysops have and still called "domesticated". (wife2.0/exwife/kids/dog/bills). This means, I can not reasonably stay up all night, consuming a whole sleeve of Coca Cola throughout the night to bang out the next release. (I am talking commodore, I never had a citadel release). These days, it might look like burning through a 30 pack but that's another story.
What I have noticed is that making change happen for citadel, adding features, making citadel do more things, requires development for conjoined twins. If I want citadel to perform a function it currently does not, I have to make sure it flows as equally as possible and is as functionally accurate as possible between webcit and textcit. Webcit is pretty much javascript, html and xml. But- I cut my teeth on text, so naturally, webcit needs to work nicely with textcit. THIS IS HARD. Lots of peeps could just add shit to webcit, but then the whole reason citadel is what it is- a bbs with a web face, gets lost.
I may be in the dark, or maybe I have been gone so long from activity that I missed if this has already happened but,
I propose directing more interest to the current incarnation of citadel to its sourceforge presence.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/citadel
Others might be attracted to the code, and contribute.
Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 EDT from ParanoidDelusionsBut I do agree, the high contrast theme of Smashbot is easier on my old eyes and I find it easier to find the buttons.
I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it. I know you can point a mail client at it, and I guess that would get something like the same result - but a mobile app or mobile web version would be awesome.
Some of these things, I've discussed with Ig in the past - and his argument - and I can see it - is that he doesn't want to add the same kind of vapid features that are present in most mainstream social media sites, like "like" buttons - or that the way that Citadel handles message stores and what not makes it difficult or impossible to implement some of these features without rewriting all of the core logic.
I think the SourceForge was abandoned a long time ago as kind of a different direction and approach than Citadel takes.
I *like* this about Citadel. It has always stood apart from the "expected norms" of technology - and it still does today. Back during the start, it was "Menu Driven BBS formats".
"I can't undertstand Citadel, it is too difficult and confusing. Why doesn't it have a menu driven interface like every other BBS. That is why Citadel sucks and I don't use it!"
"That isn't a problem... it is a FEATURE..."
:)
Mon Jun 07 2021 02:34:43 EDT from smashbot64and the last commit was 2007. come on.
Some of these things, I've discussed with Ig in the past - and his
argument - and I can see it - is that he doesn't want to add the same
kind of vapid features that are present in most mainstream social
Citadel is a lot of things to a lot of people. As the "upstream" we have to stay as generic as possible. If someone wants to maintain specific clients for specific workloads (for example, a web client focused on BBS workloads only) I'd be thrilled to see that. The core team only has so much time to go around.
If i remember right, a 'responsive' webcit is coming.
Yes ... the basic framework is all written and tested, and the front end will resume development soon. It stalled because a couple of "side quests" were taken to clean up some loose ends and make the base system even easier to install (such as the AppImage, which theoretically will make Citadel as easy to install as an MS-DOS program, just download it and run it).
webcit-ng is fully REST/DAV architecture with the UI running on the client browser. This means that it will be even easier to write custom web applications that run on top of Citadel.
But it will still be some time before it's ready.
conjoined twins. If I want citadel to perform a function it currently
does not, I have to make sure it flows as equally as possible and
is as functionally accurate as possible between webcit and textcit.
Sort of.
WebCit is intended to expose the full set of features of the Citadel system: email, forums, calendars, contacts, blog, wiki, chat, all of the groupware and content management stuff has to work 100% inside of WebCit. (In the future I would like to make it configurable so that a site can choose not to expose the features they don't need, but that's another discussion.)
The text client is intended *specifically* for BBS workloads. It does not expose the full Citadel feature set. All you will see is the functionality of an old-school BBS: forums, email, and chat. It doesn't run the calendar.
It doesn't give you access to your contacts. Wiki doesn't work, notes doesn't work, blogging works but you see those rooms as if they were regular forums in which you can only <R>eply to existing messages unless you're the blog owner.
What does "responsive" mean in this context?
Sun Jun 06 2021 14:47:41 EDT from Nurb432If i remember right, a 'responsive' webcit is coming.
Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions
I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it.
It's a buzzword that means the site automatically adjusts its layout to look good on any size device. Some people use it to mean other things.
Thank you. :)
Mon Jun 07 2021 13:07:45 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
It's a buzzword that means the site automatically adjusts its layout to look good on any size device. Some people use it to mean other things.
Quite honestly, i have a galaxy s9 and a galaxy 21 something and citadel as it curls up from the current build IS ALREADY displayed nicely on my android devices.
Mon Jun 07 2021 12:08:25 EDT from ParanoidDelusionsWhat does "responsive" mean in this context?
Sun Jun 06 2021 14:47:41 EDT from Nurb432If i remember right, a 'responsive' webcit is coming.
Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions
I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it.
I access citadel using my iphone web browser. works fine.
Wed Jun 09 2021 10:48:00 PM EDT from smashbot64Quite honestly, i have a galaxy s9 and a galaxy 21 something and citadel as it curls up from the current build IS ALREADY displayed nicely on my android devices.
Mon Jun 07 2021 12:08:25 EDT from ParanoidDelusionsWhat does "responsive" mean in this context?
Sun Jun 06 2021 14:47:41 EDT from Nurb432If i remember right, a 'responsive' webcit is coming.
Sun Jun 06 2021 11:52:24 AM EDT from ParanoidDelusions
I really wish there was a mobile-browser friendly Citadel format - or better yet, Android and iOS front end apps for it.
I've used Citadel on and off for years now on a very small scale, but never tried the text client (which sounds right up my street) until yesterday. I was able to log in to my server using it, but that's all - it seems to just hang at that point, I can't enter any text at all and have to kill the client to get out. I thought at first it might be some interaction with tmux but it happens regardless of terminal. Am I missing something?
Subject: Re: Text client doesn't want my input!
It tells me I have 3 new private messages in Mail, shows the commands menu and leaves me at a Lobby> prompt. Nothing I type from that point on shows up or appears to do anything though!
Subject: Re: Text client doesn't want my input!
It's not a dumb question, I have tried many commands but ? was not one of them - in fact it's apparently the only one that does anything at all. To be precise, it prints
One of ...
Which (call me ungrateful) isn't especially helpful! Not even ctrl-c does anything...
Subject: Re: Text client doesn't want my input!
It will look in your Citadel build directory for "citadel.rc"
But it will also look in your home directory for ".citadelrc"
The current format is pretty simple: messages are formatted to the reader's screen width. For the first 20 years we simply displayed messages that way, regardless of how they were entered. To begin a new line, for pre-formatted text or paragraph breaks or whatever, the user was expected to indent new lines by at least one space. Then in 2002 we changed it slightly, automatically wrapping words that were approaching the screen width and moving them to the next line, so that the user would see something more realistic. If they hit the Enter key it would begin a new line and do the indentation for them.
But it is the Current Year and this seems antiquated. Most non-technical users are going to be using WebCit anyway, which generates messages in HTML format.
(These are of course converted to plain text when rendered in the text client.)
If there is to be a successor to the existing method for entering messages in the text client, it's pretty clear that Markdown is the leading candidate.
My concerns revolve around how to enter Markdown text in Citadel. Keep in mind that "every terminal is ANSI" now, so it's actually acceptable to call out to "nano" or some other editor. But that would also clear the screen.
Will users accept that? Extending the built-in editor to be more friendly to Markdown would consume more time than I'm willing to spend right now.
There's also the question of what to do with the message once it's saved.
My initial thought here is to just keep things completely contained in the text client by converting the message to HTML before saving it. Saving as Markdown would require renderers in *all* clients, and it would also cause problems when messages are sent out over the Internet. I suppose there's multipart/alternative, but that gets ugly pretty fast.
Am I thinking too much?
But I would love to be able to configure it to call out to vi for editing. In fact, if you gave me that capability, then I would probably prefer to keep it plain text because I would format my messages the way I want them. On the other hand, that would only work if you go back to the model of preserving the formatting the way it was entered, so maybe markdown or some other markup language is the way to go.
You've obviously thought about it more than I have, but that's my initial reaction.