Arantor

When did you last use SMF? 2.0 is definitely out of date, but good thing 2.1 was released a couple of years ago. Primarily modernisation of the internals. Much of SMF's internal code hails from 2004 just as Jcink's does (since much of Jcink is really Invision Power Boards 1.3 from 2004). 3.0 roadmap: https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=587334.0

I’ve been trying out Woltlab on my new community. It’s nice but the content side of it isn’t quite what I’m looking for - what I’d ideally like is the ability to run multiple sets of articles rather than just “articles” in categories, on the basis that I also want to run reviews of things which aren’t really articles, but I’d like to collect them together in a way that isn’t pages. Guess it might be an Invision job after all, though that doesn’t feel quite right either. I’ve been trying to figure out if actually I want to drive interaction through the content rather than the forum itself. Hmmm. (I am aware I am procrastinating. I have been unwell this week which really has knocked me off my stride in terms of setup and content creation. It took me half an hour to make my hosting work with CloudFlare to get HTTPS going. Which given that that server already has half a dozen other sites of mine on it, really took 28 minutes too many.)

With confusion. For example suggesting that they’re an active contributor to the critical locality of dioxygenated carbon, their basic carbohydrate alkane quotient is a new record and that I simply would never have had the ideas they have. (Critical mass of carbon dioxide = full of hot air, the most basic alkane is CH4 better known as methane and a significant byproduct of bovine fecal matter, and I wouldn’t have the ideas they had because they were too dumb to occur to me in the first place.)

Welcome :)

-sigh- I used to like Future Publishing, but this... this is a sad new low for them.

I did originally try to leave this as a profile comment under your link but it was too long (hah) so I will leave it here. Thoughts based on looking at the repos you linked me to. I get that you’re going for Mezzio’s views philosophically but for me that’s not actually a great DX. I don’t particularly care that every module is swappable because I’ll go with whatever everyone else goes with - because it’s convenient and means others will find it familiar (which is a key requirement for me). As I get older I find I care less about the intellectual purity and correctness standpoints in favour of “I need to do this very typical thing like all the other things, what’s the quickest and easiest way to do that” because often my clients want it done affordably, it’s not about the “perfect” but being good enough I don’t need to worry about it. Laravel lets me get going, stays out of my way with a consistent approach for the stuff I don’t generally need to change, and lets me easily change the stuff I might (but rarely do in practice), and means I can hand it over to someone else to maintain without explaining how the framework works. It’s like the discussion that happened ages ago on SMF about making it hot-swappable to use Silex/Slim/Symfony and others, and my point is that while that’s technically cool, it doesn’t actually solve the real world problems, while engaging in a lot of effort for the sake of it - yes, modular is great, yes letting devs pick and choose is cool, but only if it doesn’t get in the way of the users. Such an SMF for example front loads the conversation with “which one do I use” (as opposed to picking a sensible default that everyone can adopt) and forcing certain cross-combinations of “well I want this because I want to use that and that depends on it, but that then rules out this other thing I wanted to use”, which you’d think shouldn’t be a problem with well-architected interface-driven code but the reality is that virtually everything ends up reverse engineering the interfaces to fit the implementation anyway, so all the good SOLID stuff (esp the L) goes out the window, and you have this multi-headed hydra that is conceptually cool but ultimately frustrating to work with. Bottom line: I think the approach you’re taking has an audience, just an audience who has a different set of concerns to what practically and realistically affect me or what I want to build on. And for that audience it delivers in abundance, it’s just a shame that I don’t really belong to that audience any more.

1) Don’t send to an opt-out unless you have something serious to tell them about. (Worst seem you got data breached and you are required by local law to notify them of such) 2) Digests aren’t particularly interesting, unless it’s curated content they’ve indicated an interest in, e.g, a monthly newsletter of articles from a regular contributing author.

I have a few things I want to do. Some of them are fairly simple - visit every theatre in London’s West End to see a show. I have a list, I’ve done about a third of them so far. Some are what you might call baroque: I want to visit the places on the standard UK Monopoly board, in order, and ‘do something’ at each, if there is something to do there. I have on my travels been to about half the board but doing it in order and not just “I’ve been to this road now” is a little trickier. I also have a few longer term things. There’s things I want to write (both novels and software) that I’m noodling at. Every so often I take another chip away at it. I don’t even care if others read/use the things, it’s primarily for my own satisfaction, but one day…

Worst part of the journey for me.

That’s one heck of a tall order given that Laravel is more than 10 years in, has a massive first party ecosystem that covers dev environments, managed servers, serverless and soon private cloud, and that the code ecosystem includes pre-built auth flows including 2FA, SSO with OAuth, websockets support, Stripe wrapper, first party dashboard components, and so much more. Not saying it can’t be done but don’t underestimate how good the Laravel DX is given how much of an ecosystem it has, and the head-start they have.

I have no memory of what I intended to write there, but it was very definitely not that and I got autocucumbered again. As for the example, again that's a limit of my bad example, though if you have a book with a collection of book authors, you don't want to implicitly convert the book to a string (and if you did, you'd probably want to convert the book's title instead), but you can't overload an array with __toString() which means you're either writing a custom accessor (which is really all the new get/set syntax is) or you're creating a collection class solely for the purpose of being a collection whose default type-cast to string is to iterate over all the members, coerce them to string, and implode the rest. For me such a collection would be oddly specific and I'd probably just roll it up into a function on the book object anyway, but that just leads me back to having a tidier version on the class as a computed property. (I have written custom collection classes, e.g. the one project at work has one, but it's there specifically as a form of optimisation where I need to work on the same collection twice over, doing different things the two times but I don't want to fresh-load the collection in between, so it's really a collection with a specific deep clone function that manages resetting state, and applying specific transforms to every member of the collection)

Now imagine you'd done something wrong and received an infraction with almost-zero feedback (certainly no feedback on the infraction itself)... good stuff.

There are millions of inhabitants in the United Kingdom too. And they're statistically more likely to have more money to spend than the population of Brazil or the Philippines. It might only be a little island but it has 1/5 the population of the US in 1/50th the area, 1/3 the population of Brazil and over half the population of the Philippines.

You say that but there is a number of search engines that people use that rely on Bing data, for example DuckDuckGo relies on Bing's data (albeit anonymising what gets passed on) Yes but people don't trust it because there continue to be many examples of "hallucinations", or as I think of it "random nonsense made by rolling dice to pick words" (which is how ChatGPT works under the hood, it only "knows" anything because enough other people have written about it for there to be statistical correlations between things) We've already seen lawyers filing cases with "references" produced by ChatGPT which look like real references (because it has enough data to come up with something that statistically looks like a reference) but for cases that don't exist (because it doesn't actually know how to look that up)

Get in, get writing content, it doesn’t have to be perfect to be worthwhile.

Welcome :)

Considering what SMF 2.1’s admin home looks like, I’m in no state whatsoever to complain.

Hmmm, been wondering if I should maybe give my Woltlab licence a spin. I’ve been putting off the community I planned to start under an auspice of “organising my articles and other stuff” but I suspect if I don’t start I won’t ever actually get going. It’d be interesting to actually properly try WBB since I only encountered once in the wild and it was such a poor fit for the community in question (not WBB’s fault - going from a heavily customised SMF to a lightly customised WBB was not good for that community)

I admire your capacity to rationalise the cognitive dissonance. Be well.

Nonsense. A 'content creator' is someone who makes content, period. Don't even have to monetise it.

That's an interesting perspective - but it's really the lead-in to the second part of my post that's important.

Which database did you choose? I remember the site I was on for this started on MongoDB and converted to Postgres - but then again they also wrote the conversion layer to actually do that...

Worth noting that you can be a content creator without following the herd - you're just prepared to create on your terms rather than what the 'market' wants.

Let me phrase it slightly differently, then. If these things aren't legal, why would you be interested in acquiring a list of lawbreakers? If you're against the existence of the things, that's a problem for law enforcement rather than yourself; if you are for the existence of the things, having a list of such people puts both them and you at risk. If one is serious about privacy, one wouldn't want to compromise others' privacy for their own gain, surely?