I wasn't sure where to post this so please move if in the wrong section.
My biggest gripe with Virtualmin isn't Virtualmin... but these forums! They are just so sluggish, and I know from experience that that can have a big impact on users.
Any chance you can upgrade to one of the leading forum platforms please? Such as vbulletin, Xenforo or IPB? The pages load much faster on those systems and users are far more likely to want to stick around.
If I was to recommend one over the others it would be Xenforo - the lead devs from vB (the previous leader of forum software) left and created Xenforo (after vB was sold off) it is the fastest forum I have used, with great features and already adopted by some very large forums (such as on ign.com).
I'd like to spend more time here - but the forums here just feel so sluggish.
Hope I haven't offended anyone!
To me at least, the forums work fine.
Accessibility for the blind user such as myself is something I suggest you do plenty of hours (days) maybe months of homework and hard research on.
If Virtualmin were to implement something like this forum software wich would need plenty of testing from me and thousands of others (and I probably won't do that without being paid for it), well, if it wasn't accessibal, you could pretty much forget me showing back up in general, because for one thing, I am too lazy to learn a thousand web interfaces, nor do I care to do it, so my willingness to readjust would probably be zilch.
I'm perfectly fine with the current system, and know my way around it.
I woudl think hard about making a change before allowing someone to test the development site forum system or whatever.
I would insist on letting me get access to the software before live production in such a situation.
The issue then, would be that any problems I found wouldn't be Virtualmin Inc's problems to resolve.
The web2.0 world is extremely cutthroat in terms of caring about blidn users; in fact, any body with a disability is really at a disadvantage, and frankly is left to do things alone in most cases, or be screwed over pretty much wi the evolving demand for graphical applications.
It is not possible, to make a graphical application, specificly a web-based one screen-reader friendly, never has been, never will be.
As the entire Internet in general continues to insist that graphical-only apps be written at an alarming rate, and more web-based textual apps go away, not to mention developers tampering constantly with websites on a monthly or weekly basis, you can expect less of the disabled community to be browsing sites in general.
Why break something on an accessibility level simply because of slow page loads?
Many factors and not simply your system, can result in slow load times.
It is called Buffer Bloat, a new topic that is alarming to the Internet at large, and poses a net-wwide problem.
I suggest reading that as well.
Also, don't forget about Internet trafic flows that can be occuring upstream of you on the ISP network you use, and many other factors outside of the control of Virtualmin, Inc.
You may be experiencing slow load times with the forums, but I do not.
This will also apply to others as well.
However, no offenses have been taken.
Hopefully you find my feedback to you in return constructive as a fello website user of Virtualmin's over-all site.
You can take a look at the XF forums here: http://xenforo.com/community/
I am fairly sure screen readers won't have any major problems with it.
Performance issues are somewhat orthogonal to which forum software we use (though, admittedly they can be correlated). Drupal is reasonably performant, and is used on many very large-scale sites...we double our userbase and visitor count every few months, so we just have to keep bumping up our hardware and tweaking our database to stay ahead of that usage. We seem to be, once again, running into the "too many users, not enough hardware". It's been about six month since the last hardware upgrade, so that'd not entirely surprising, though I was hoping we'd make it another year or two before needing more muscle.
I'm looking into the performance issues, and will get them resolved ASAP.
We chose an integrated solution for our website for a lot of reasons...we didn't want users to have to login multiple times to reach the store, forums, license manager, etc. I also swore off of "bridged" applications during our last Joomla-based website fiasco. Any of these standalone forums would need to be bridged into the Drupal user base and have to be customized heavily to have similar look and feel. Also, I hate most of the leading forums; they've all just got too much crap on the page. That's an accessibility issue, as well as an offense to good taste. ;-)
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Check out the forum guidelines!
If I may suggest, css + js aggregation (under Site Config -> Performance) to get the calls down a little, Boost to static page cache part of the site (works wonders), then APC if you're interested in that area. Nginx has been doing the rounds lately and is performing exceptionally before any kind of other caching setup on top, but obviously that depends on what you're doing with Apache at the moment.
You can apply a looooot of performance tweaks to Drupal to minimise the need for hardware. Google will drown you in info and there's also #drupal-support, as well as #drupal-consultants (if you want some paid help) on Freenode :)