Arantor

The thing about fake members is that most people can tell when someone is posting to themselves - because most people aren’t actually convincing enough to pretend to be other people, not even (perhaps especially) if they try to hold opposing or deliberately combative opinions.

Paul seems thrilled to have 'won' but given that it seems Tyson got paid more the longer the fight went on, he had every reason not to just beat the tar out of the upstart in the first round. But also consider what Paul is bragging about here: going into a fight with a person easily old enough to be his father, and being proud that he won. Dear boy, when you have an advantage like a couple of decades of youth, you are reasonably expected to win by default. The fact you didn't take Tyson outright is demonstrative in itself.

Nepotism is favouring primarily family in the workplace (root from nepotismo, Italian for nephew); cronyism is the broader form of favouring friends. Banning something you don't personally like on your forum isn't either of these things. Whether such things will fly or be tolerated by the memberbase also varies: barring political discussion is a safe bet on most forums because an unhealthily-large minority cannot be trusted not to be disruptive with it and it doesn't even have to be a personally motivated decision.

I do remain amused at the appropriation of some of the country domains for things never ever intended for that. Literally none of the 2 letter domains were intended for anything other than country use. .tv of course for television (Tuvalu), .ai is making bank with the AI hype train (Anguilla), .io lured the techbros (British Indian Ocean Territory), I also remember the heady days of .to (go.to, browse.to, etc) as an early URL shortener (Tonga), and .gg did get some traction in gaming though it's fairly niche outside that (the Bailiwick of Guernsey doesn't mind the revenue so much though) I do find it interesting that we have sort of gone off track a little. The original question was really a stealth re-asking of 'I have the .org and .net, but since I can't get the .com am I wasting time with even considering the name because I can't get the .com?'

This is not in Automattic’s interests when it’s busy trying to compete with Wix and pushing the core product in that direction to suit its financial agenda.

Well, those were the original intents behind those three TLDs but in the last 25 years the rules have become so lax they’re allowed for basically anything now.

Weird Al also asked Paul McCartney about covering Live And Let Die, but McCartney said no. The reason? The parody was going to be called “Chicken Pot Pie” and McCartney is famously a vegetarian.

I have a domain - well, I have more than one - where I own .org and .net but not the .com. Certainly the traditional wisdom is that you needed the .com for maximum visibility but I'm no longer sure that's actually true given how many people just mash the brand name into Google and hit whatever comes first. In this particular case I'm certain I can SEO-outperform the current .com with zero trouble. In which case the only decision I have is whether I make the .org or the .net the primary. It wasn't that long ago that I had a Harry Potter adjacent site called Floo Network, on floo.network where I was (heavily) outperforming a popular Minecraft mod of the same name as the site (and I wasn't even trying to be competitive) so I'm not entirely sure the old wisdom is true, as long as I don't go down a rabbit hole of using a fancy esoteric name that no-one will think is legitimate. Is this experience unique? Do people not care about .com as much as they used to? (The last few years of my professional life has been building sites that don't have to worry about SEO so much)

Weird Al Yankovic always gets permission for his covers. When he decided to cover Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing, as the Beverly Hillbillies/Money For Nothing, Mark Knopfler agreed, but with a caveat. He insisted that he play the guitars, and in particular the iconic guitar solo the song is famous for.

Discord divides things into servers, which you have to join, and each server has channels in it. It's actually not so different from IRC in that respect. Matrix thinks of itself as modern IRC, in that it is also decentralised (unlike Discord and Slack which are not)

I’m that guy who bought licences for IPB, vB and XF not to actually use them but as market research for what they have to offer, so, uh, yeah. I tend to build my own stuff rather than getting plugins and themes, so the most expensive part for me tends to be the hosting in practice.

I want to reclaim what is mine: I've spent the last couple of years not really building anything for myself, after a pretty big explosion of my previous hobby project for complicated reasons, followed by one of the biggest hits of burnout I've ever professionally experienced which has taken months of taking it easy to try to recuperate from, and I'm hoping that 2025 sees that baggage gone. I've got several ideas brewing that might actually get somewhere meaningful if I can keep up the momentum on them - some have had to go back to the drawing board for one reason or another but there's a couple that might mature into something meaningful and I'd like that to be in 2025. [mention=1]Cedric[/mention] sorry to hear about your mother-in-law. Life really is too short.

I used to be a highly active IRC user but I got bored having to have bots stay logged in to be able to have the conversation that was there when I wasn’t. Discord solves that nicely I feel. (So does Slack and Matrix.)

As a rule, politics, religion, adult content and illegal content are always things I want to avoid, just to have some boundaries and prevent things getting oddly polarised.

So, do you have an SPF record currently? If not you will need to add a TXT record to your domain that says the following: v=spf1 ip4:a.b.c.d -all a.b.c.d should be the server’s IP address (real IP address because email going out will be the server connecting out rather than in. The -all part indicates that any email for your domain not sent by the a.b.c.d IP address is fake. (You can say ~all instead for “this is probably spam but don’t just delete it outright”) If you are using Gmail for sending email (e.g. you have domain.com and you are using [email protected] in emails) you will want to add include:_spf.google.com after the ip4 bit to also say that Gmail is allowed to send emails from your domain legitimately. DKIM is another battle entirely. Your host probably needs to get involved in that situation since that’s getting into configuring a signature in DNS and then a variant of the same signature to actually sign emails before they go out. How this is done depends on whether the host is using sendmail, exim, postfix etc.

Too many ideas, I can't work on them all at once.

I don't think I'm doing it right. [ATTACH type=full" size="1040x475]403[/ATTACH]

Lunch from the store down the street: a sub roll for me, salmon and cream cheese for my wife, and donuts to share.

Would those be the same servers that Automattic whines are expensive to run, but wouldn’t be an issue if they weren’t directly hardcoded in WP?

I always hate “improvements” like this because they almost always end up confusing my customers who get used to how it works and then it changes on them, and none of this offers any benefits to us.

Back in the late 90s it was the only place to find out information on Amiga emulation (which was just getting going then), and Reddit/social media didn’t exist to ask around and share ideas and thoughts. Later I got into running a forum for a piece of software we were developing (because GitHub didn’t exist yet and SourceForge had a lot of odd restrictions at the time), and the rest is, as they say, history.

I’ve always preferred the smaller community. The world is big and increasingly sterile and faceless, and anything that can be done to preserve the humanity in it is worth doing.

Then your pricing seems appropriate for the work on offer.