Arantor

I'm sorry I happen to give a crap about people in different situations to me. But that seems like a solveable problem.

You should probably have read my very first post on the matter first where I laid out the exact same thesis - don’t dump on what you don’t know. Yes, there are emotional ones in my case, but there are people who merge for financial reasons (namely they can’t afford to run the site any more), some merge because they’re moving on, some merge… there’s any number of reasons, far more than just the ones you and Bawse are pointing to. People invested a lot of time and energy into forums. Giving them up for any reason is not trivial. Don’t sneer at it just because you find a subset worthy of derision.

That is literally every occasion. AI doesn't know anything, it just assembles things that look statistically appropriate, and it so happens that there's enough statistically significant material to chain together things to make something look right. e.g. PHP syntax - there's no shortage of examples to train on, so it'll statistically get it right (because there's vastly more correct syntax than invalid syntax posted online), but it will also entirely synthesise methods etc because it knows what they should statistically look like but it has zero comprehension of whether it's correct.

Not at all. I'm specifically against the attitude of standing back and being all smug about choices other people made, without any understanding of why that choice was made. My point appears to have eluded you as well, I see: it doesn't matter why it happens. It matters that you don't take a dump on choices other people made without knowing why they were made.

This hasn't happened to me, but not because I had backups, per se. I don't just take automated backups, I also test my backups. I don't care if you take manual backups once a day or whatever makes sense for the speed of your site (once a week may well be fine) - but you need to verify you can retrieve from that backup, otherwise it's not a backup, it's a false peace of mind.

I’d be doing more writing. I would possibly even have skipped the career change and be on a different path - my job today is a result of running forums, and if I hadn’t run forums, it’s very possible I wouldn’t be in this job.

Whether it has everything built in that I need, how much dev effort it needs to get from where it is to where I want to be, and can I get someone to make it pretty. I haven’t deployed just a pure forum in a very long time, they almost always had other stuff attached, whether that was a help desk, a wiki, a blog, a bug tracker + source repository (back in the pre GitHub-is-everywhere days), and sometimes like with the roleplay stuff there isn’t a good option on the market for what I wanted. (Even MediaWiki needed custom development for what I wanted to do)

Opera back in the day, when it was still legitimately its own engine, it was amazing. Worth even paying for. These days, though, there's Google Chrome, Microsoft Chrome, NFT Chrome, Apple Chrome, Opera Chrome, ex-Opera Chrome and then there's Firefox - I remain #teamfirefox.

I am glad to see it come back too. Looks like progress on the changelog, too!

Which forum platform or software was that?

I tried many forum platforms, mostly to see what they all offered. I mostly stayed with SMF and later StoryBB because familiar with the codebase and they did what I needed (and in StoryBB’s case nothing else does what that does) Tried: phpBB (didn’t like the ACP), MyBB (no responsive by default), SMF, Wedge (couldn’t deal with the other dev), MiniBB (no ACP), CBACK (confusing ACP), Flarum (no attachments by default), XF (pretty good, wish there was a better content solution), Invision (expensive, and I dislike the shrinking addon ecosystem), vBulletin (hate the ACP), Woltlab (it’s alright but it doesn’t wow me), Flatboard (dislike how it handles users), NodeBB (I don’t like Node much), Discourse (lots to dislike about management at scale, not to mention it’s in Ruby) There’s probably some I’m forgetting.

Have you dealt with the conversation between Tracy and Carlos throwing around the R word in big bold letters yet? Those two just utterly butt heads, more so than Tracy and I do!

The whole identity thing… I have seen plenty of very vile comments on FB completely owned by the individuals posting them. They see no issue whatsoever in being blatantly offensive - but nothing illegal. (Just about.) As for parasocial relationships with a pseudonym… more people know me as Arantor than my real name, for sure.

I didn’t say I was merging. I’ve just been around long enough to have lost friends who merged as one of their final acts to ensure their work didn’t get lost. I do not find it funny, at all.

Three thoughts: 1. Putting a real name on it doesn’t detract from how awful people can be in the way previously assumed about pseudonyms. 2. That the real name was a tag of an identity that could be used for marketing/targeted advertising but perhaps that’s less relevant now. 3. Perfect cover for disguising the AI bots they already announced they were adding.

Like I said, not everyone who merges forums does so the way you think is funny. Just have a bit of empathy for others who aren’t as fortunate as you. (Not everyone who merges is a serial forum starter. Not everyone who merges does so because they’re bored. Not everyone who gives up their forum to a merger lives to see the other side of 10+ years of history trying to be preserved.)

Depends on the domain extension. Some you are not getting that cheaply and you will not have a choice in the matter. Things like .io and .ly come to mind - these often have limited access to registrars and usually at higher prices. (E.g. I can’t find an .io registrar that will sell me one for less than $30 for the first year and $50 annual renewal, and even then that’s a special offer.)

It’s not about agreeing with it, it’s about how insulting it is to some of the people who chose to merge, because you think it’s only ever about how weak they are, that they can’t stay the course. Don’t laugh about people I’m situations you have no understanding of, because it makes you look like an arrogant fool, with limited empathy. Some of the people that have merged forums over the years did so to ensure that the information wouldn’t be lost before they died. Some of the people I have called friends over the years have died, and you think it’s fine to laugh at the idea that they want some of their legacy preserved.

Well this is solveable in the modern era with OAuth style authentication, and where you end up is essentially what Mastodon does. Which is fine until your home instance/server/forum shuts down, leaving you stranded from the entire network, not just your corner of it. Which means you get people running their own Mastodon instance just to ensure they’re never booted off the wider network, which is firmly ah unintended consequence.

You have no idea of the story behind some of the mergers. Do not assume it was a lack of desire or time. Other reasons exist.

The lack of attachments are hurting though :(

From the merge, also the attachments are missing. The updated link is otherwise https://administrata.net/articles/the-power-of-pages-in-invision-community-for-your-online-community.12/

Consider also Mastodon vs BlueSky - this is in effect the same issue, decentralised everything vs centralised everything. Plenty of people will happily cede control if they don't have to manage it and just want somewhere to talk. I think we have to begin by fostering the idea that people should want their own little shared spaces and that making these should be easy to do, in a way they currently are not.

Interesting to note that Stack Overflow has had a substantial drop the last couple of years. It was already in decline before that but the last couple of years (since ChatGPT) have been more substantial. I wonder if the pendulum is about to swing back the other way (or, more accurately, how long it's going to take for the pendulum to swing back the other way, when people want to start reclaiming things)

No worries there because AI can’t do any thinking whatsoever.