Arantor

Worse, it seems to be a feature of sites that tell their users to 'use the search first' - so they do, which is how come they find what they think is their problem in a 10+ year old thread, then necro it. If y'all don't want necro posts, lock old threads. Heck, in SMF's case I even wrote the very mod for it.

This is literally zero surprise. ChatGPT does not “know” anything. It however knows what things “look like”. So it can construct something that looks like a legal citation because it has enough references to be able to recognise the patterns. But it doesn’t actually know anything. Any time it gives you facts, it’s giving you sentences where the statistical correlations of those words is higher than not, I.e. enough other people have said it for it to be probably true. But that’s the extent of its cleverness.

I generally don’t mind as long as it’s on topic. However it kills me when a forum has a rule on necroposting, but then leaves a board full of 10+ year old topics open, and just beats people over the head when they inevitably necropost. Just lock the old topics already!

The answer is always more nuanced than yes or no. It’s always been the case that a chat box, shoutbox, Discord etc, will take attention and traffic from the forum. The rapid response cycle alone somewhat guarantees a divide of attention. However, this is not to say one will “kill” the other. They can, under the right circumstances, be a suitable complement - it is normal now in the RP scene for example, to do plotting and planning and the general community “off topic” stuff lives on the Discord while the actual storytelling lives on the forum. But this has its own perils and foibles for sure. As long as there is still a healthy amount of discussion of longer form (that never suits a Discord/chat feature), the two can co-exist. But the forum will inevitably be quieter in the off-topic areas for it.

Jeep trip from KY to CA and back, via the Badlands, one of the Great Lakes, Mount Rushmore, Reno, Route 66, the Golden Gate Bridge and Moab. 7200 miles in total.

Sure, on my site that's a valid approach - but all of the things were always built with the intent that the whole thing could be shared and used on other sites.

That's the fundamental problem: author vs reader. Authors want to insist on one thing, readers might want to insist on another - and these don't mesh well.

Exactly, and that's the problem. If I could rely on people to format consistently and correctly, it would be fine - I could deal with brokering between the author's intents and the reader's preferences readily enough, but I can't. And I can't rely on them not trying to format it (and otherwise doing the necessary things) to still preserve that balance the other way without forcing them through a hurdle that is significant enough a barrier to usability that I think it'll be a problem. My current folks have suggested 'just try it, see how it goes' but I fear this will end poorly.

It is one of the most fascinating studies in humanity I've seen. And we firmly steer away from the active 'roleplay' elements or more traditional TTRPG elements, which is why I do lean firmly on 'collaborative storytelling' as a term. Here's another case in point. What to do with someone who isn't gelling with the community? I don't mean a troublemaker, I don't mean someone who is trolling or doing something that would clearly necessitate a quick exit with no questions asked, but someone who arrived and perhaps misjudged the tone or the vibe of the community and eventually fades out but doesn't leave the Discord server. If you're more typical as a community you might play the game of activity checks, which is 'make a post every x days/weeks otherwise your character will be suspended' which is fairly good at encouraging people to leave if they don't really fit (but if they sort of fit, it encourages half-effort posts just ahead of when the next check is because bare minimum is a thing), but we have never done that. So we instead get the occasional hanger-on who doesn't really get the memo that they don't fit. Bringing a character to the party that doesn't fit the community vibe or lore is... sometimes difficult. Practical example: imagine arriving at a site that is all about a vaguely-contemporary setting but with magic, where basically everyone has magic. And where you're told up front that ghosts aren't really a thing but OK, we'll make it work for you. Cue a ghost of a war veteran who was clearly shot in battle with a gun. Now, I get how writing a ghost story could be interesting. There's no end of ways how that could be interesting, even with the war veteran angle in it. But in a setting where magic is prevalent, where the lore is quite clear there haven't been major wars on the entire continent in hundreds of years, a war veteran ghost who died of a gunshot wound is... not consistent. We did try to integrate the character and the writer but it didn't work - and after a couple of months we sat down to have the awkward conversation. And this is where it gets fascinating, because these are really awkward conversations. I'd like to think if I didn't vibe with a place, I'd go up front 'you know what, thanks for having me, but this isn't for me' and if asked, I'd be open and honest about why, with a quite clear 'you don't need to change to suit me, you have your ways and that's fine, they're just not for me'. But that's almost never what actually happens. You get into this weird conversation arc where people who don't vibe with the community, who've made no attempt to talk about it in weeks, then suddenly going 'but what can I do to stay'. Well, um... about that... it's not working out and you made it fairly clear by not engaging whatsoever that you're not interested in what we have to offer unless we cater to your super-specific requirements that, frankly, aren't what we want to do. There's compromise, there's finding a balance and there's 'sorry, this isn't working out'. There are those who take the view that you should always try to integrate regardless of requirements, but frankly, I disagree - part of the value of a group of people writing in a group setting with a shared backdrop is that the integrity of that backdrop is preserved.

I thought about the coloured text thing, but it soon spirals out of control. At a bare minimum you’d likely need two colours - what to use in whatever light variant you have and what to use in whatever dark variant you have (as this is now functionally a requirement, or might as well be so), but if you ever had more themes, that just explodes the permutations further. There also raises the question around whether you offer two colours per theme. Sometimes when writing such a post, you will be writing your character’s dialogue but sometimes the dialogue of a “non playable character”. Imagine a scene set in a cafe where the two principal characters in thread are having coffee (don’t joke this is exceedingly common, the “coffee and cake threads”). If you want to represent the waiter in scene you will likely just write their dialogue in situ, because they’re not a fully fledged, fully developed character but a necessary one-shot entry for the thread at hand. And since the colour is typically a form of expression, I floated the idea of having a second colour for NPC dialogue vs the primary character dialogue. I did originally pitch this as being a pair of bbcodes, q and n, for quotes and NPC quotes respectively but the thing I found is that whether people used it was hit and miss. In fact this is one of the most fascinating side trails in RP: the author vs the reader. Me, personally I find that bolding of dialogue to be annoying to read and write. When reading it breaks my flow, when writing it is a consideration I have to go out of my way to implement, thus I do it - but only for the people that have indicated a specific preference for it, The ideal of course is that the software recognises dialogue automatically and highlights it or not based on the reader preference, not the author preference. That way if the author wants to colour their dialogue in a thousand colours they should be able to, but I should be able to turn that off instantly. And of course vice versa. The problem with doing this is how fiddly it actually is depending on editing experience you want to have. As I alluded to, half the folks that I’ve spoken to don’t use the built in editor, meaning that whatever I do do, I kind of have to do on the server side rather than in the editor. Which is fine in concept - but it means if people screw up the quotes (which incidentally happens more than you’d think especially on mobile) the capacity to auto fix it is limited. I did also think about trying to sanity check on posting and return with an error like Wedge did (if you mismatched bbcode it would tell you and make you fix it rather than guess) but knowing the target audience I feel like this runs the risk of people thinking they’d posted when they hadn’t, and not reading the error message properly. And this says nothing of the people who would still write all the dialogue in bold anyway out of habit and then need to correct it because the software would want to do it for them. And all of that is before we talk about the notion of writing a WYSIWYG editor where there is implicit formatting in the WYSIWYG that isn’t part of the final output, where you have all sorts of weird overlapping tag soup from it… (As for why quotes are hard, consider first that on mobile “ and ” smart quotes are somewhat default, as they are in Word. But it’s all too easy to end up with two lots of “ instead of an opening and closing pair. And that’s before we talk about things like German quotes…)

Many years ago I went travelling around the US with a friend of mine. We made a travel blog using SMF - and a WordPress theme I ported. The reality is that most of the time people just don’t go far from the default because maintenance discourages them from doing so. Not looking like a typical forum isn’t actually that hard, but you do run the risk of maintenance issues. It is one of the interesting asides of Jcink that because it doesn’t move much functionally that people tend to customise it visually more (but then run into maintenance issues with customisations)

There's the different functionality between the two, which is a long and detailed breakdown; functionality that matters to you can be investigated by either platform's free demo. But it's the less obviously tangible things. One must consider the costs of renewals - XF lets you lapse for a bit between renewals, WBB has the ability to lapse the licence and not permit a renewal if lapsed too long. Then there is the small matter of the plugin and theme ecosystem. I don't think anyone is going to suggest that WBB's ecosystem is competitive with XF's on any criteria. It's present, it has a lot of interesting options, but the sheer scale of choice available for XF is simply that much larger. I will point out that WBB comes with a CMS out of the box but you may well find it far more limiting than helpful.

No. Trying to compare XF to WBB is a fair comparison - no blog or gallery by default. But if your only criteria is the price tag, you will surely find yourself disappointed without looking at the entire package and making a decision about the totality of functionality.

Hey :)

Not especially, but I only have my middle name because my mother wanted it as my first name and my dad was firmly against, but it was a suitable compromise to have it as a middle name.

I’m a writer, all my characters are imaginary friends! :D Sometimes they speak awfully loud if I haven’t written them lately.

I can’t plead the 5th, I’m not American or in America, but I will instead follow the UK guidance and note that I do not have to say anything, and that I am aware anything I do say may be given in evidence and that anything I do say could harm my defence if not mentioned during questioning. With that said, it would be unwise to say anything to admit to a criminal act if I had committed one.

Yes, but it’s not why you think it is. Think more along the lines that advertisers don’t want their products advertised near such things because the notion of suicide might be then connected to their product and no one wants that. (This broadly holds true for all the words YouTube demonetises you for.)

Worse, they’ve gotten more complicated for no reason other than so other people can profit off it.

I do not think it is as simple as just looking at the price tag.

Current SMF has this built in as a defence feature. Though it probably needs a tweak or two since I imagine in the decade since I introduced it, it’s now written into the spam bots’ knowledge how to beat it.

I’d reach out to them privately, but also delete the post. It’s clear they need some kind of help and reaching out can be that lifeline, but it does come with “I am not your therapist” boundary attached.

Yeah, that was one of the later DS designs. Not my favourite but I couldn’t tell you why not.

We all did. Time helps us be kinder, even if the world is trying its hardest to make us not.

Copyediting is just good writing hygiene. In particular I find it fascinating how Stephen King talks about it in "On Writing" where he explains that he writes his draft, then on first edit basically attempts to cut 10% or more from it, and often succeeds. I had noticed, and I wondered if that was the catalyst for it. It seems to have really worked out for you, which is awesome.