Hi all,

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the old ZTreeWin Forum has gone offline. I’ve tried contacting Víctor García, the maintainer, but got no response to my e-mails.

This site is my attempt at setting up a replacement forum, in the hope that it will accommodate similar interesting and helpful discussions as the old forum.

I’ve e-mailed Kim to ask if he was interested, but haven’t received a reply as yet.

The forum software isn’t very fancy, but I hope it’s functional enough for this. It’s part of the Fossil versioning software that I use to keep track of my code projects (which made setting it up fairly easy); and is used by the developers of Fossil (and SQLite). Fossil also includes a wiki, and I know there were efforts to set up a ZTWiki, notably by Laurent Duchastel, so I’ve enabled that on this site as well.

Yours,

Martijn Coppoolse

Ah yes, that’s part of the text I copied verbatim from the archived forum homepage.

I’d better remove that until Kim responds. :-D

Note that I was faced with an invalid certificate alert (by Firefox) when first trying to visit here. That might drive some people away from this new Forum, if not fixed.

But let's hope people will find their way here!

An invalid certificate... 🤔 When was this, and on which URL?

I’ve only added the subdomain https://ztreewin-forum.2of4.net yesterday, and generated the certificate after the site first went up.

Cannot remember which page it was then, but I was able to reproduce it with this link (which came up with Google search):

https://www.2of4.net/ztreewin-forum/info

net::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

However, I confirm there is no such issue with https://ztreewin-forum.2of4.net/, and so apologies for the misleading info.

Thanks for notifying me: clearly I need to do some maintenance in my domains, if that URL shows up in Google...

FYI, the easiest way to 'linkify' a URL in Markdown is to put it between angle braces: <https://ztreewin-forum.2of4.net> will be rendered as https://ztreewin-forum.2of4.net.

Otherwise, you can use the notation [ZTreeWin Forum](https://ztreewin-forum.2of4.net), where the text between square brackets will be displayed, and the link will lead to the URL between parentheses:

ZTreeWin Forum

The links in your post all point to https://ztreewin-forum.2of4.net/url, which doesn't exist.

See also https://ztreewin-forum.2of4.net/md_rules for an overview of the Markdown formatting rules, as supported by Fossil. These are also accessible via the hyperlink ‘Markup style’ next to the drop-down with ‘Fossil Wiki / Markdown / Plain Text’ when you’re editing a post.

Hi Martijn,

I made a habit to google ztree forum from time to time, and today was my lucky day ;-) My big +1 for the initiative.

I took a glimpse at the other forums you linked, and the software looks to be plenty functional. One difference vs. Victor's old forum is that it doesn't appear to be possible to upload a file or inline an image here. IMHO neither is a critical feature, though.

Best,
Liviu

P.S. For those less familiar with the markdown syntax used on this forum, here is a Markdown Cheat Sheet.

Hi Liviu,

Welcome!

There's currently a discussion about images going on at the forum’s forum [🤓].

One of the suggestions is to use an external image hosting site, and link to that. I’ve tried including images directly from Imgur ("deeplinking"), but have failed so far.

I’ll post an update if I get that to work.

Thank you, Martijn, for your efforts.

Your forum maintains a familiar balance of efficiency and minimalist design, which most of us appreciate. Are you hosting the forum yourself, and is there any cost involved for you? The Wiki functionality is greatly appreciated. I still have backups of previous attempts, and some old posts might be reusable.

I really miss the point of contact we had in our former community. I hope nothing unfortunate has happened to Victor.

I looked at another forum proposal from the so well-named Zdenek (supporting Zedtek! ;-) ). Its features are interesting, including a wiki and file sharing, as well as other tools for a small fee. See https://groups.io/static/pricing One advantage I see from this option is that the forum would no longer rely on volunteer self-hosting, but is part of a larger and stable infrastructure. On the other hand, I don’t know much about groups.io.

My main concern, however, is how few exchanges there have been on Victor’s forum over the last year. The long-time members are quieter than ever (if not gone), and it seems the product has reached maturity. There’s definitely a need for a forum (though two would be overkill), but is this an opportunity to revitalize the community with something new?

No problem, Laurent!

There aren’t really any additional costs for me; this site runs on a modest VPS where I’m hosting several other sites anyway. (I also use it as a playground to practice my Linux coding skills 🤓).

I don’t expect this forum to add significant bandwidth; and to the CPU, it’s just another Fossil repository like the other 90 or so... (Though, aside from daily syncs from my local machine(s), those mostly get visited by bots, as opposed to actual users).

Zdenek’s forum at groups.io definitely looks nicer, and it does have the advantage of a larger infrastructure.

Like I said in reply to him, I really only set up this forum because I missed Víctor's old forum, and couldn’t find another one. It’s merely due to my lack of time that I didn’t look further than the software I was already running.

As for your last point, it is somewhat concerning, though not unexpected; but I have no idea what to do about that. All I was concerned about is that there be a forum, should someone need it. Whether people actually post is not really up to me. 🤷🏻‍♂️

As for your last point, it is somewhat concerning, though not unexpected; but I have no idea what to do about that. All I was concerned about is that there be a forum, should someone need it.

groups.io has

• Subgroups (useful for a specific point or organize groups for tutorials, developments, off-topics etc.)
• Files Section (useful for batches, utilities, recordered tutorials)
• Real-time Chat (could attract more users for a real quick question/answer).
• Wiki (documentation of course)
• Structured Databases, Polls (keeping tracks of ZEP ?)

Provided the right tools, these may help renew the user base ?

It's not free but it does not seem such a big issue. Cost of 0,04 cent/user over 100 users, with a potential of 400 users, only 16$/month (20$/month is minimum anyway). A short donation campaign might cover the fees.