Arantor

I thought it was an interesting concept but I could see it needing careful moderation. I’m not above writing my own plugins for either platform (not like this is particularly hard in the scheme of things) but there’s a lot of questions about how much forum and how much non-forum this project turns out to be and how much I care about the article experience over other things. I have some ideas for features that give me an edge which will need custom dev in any circumstance (and incidentally some of those features could have been made into unexpected.ly’s original purpose, but would sit better part of something more cohesive)

My big question is how much customisation that involves. If the customisation is “we’ll install mods and themes for you” and the odd tweak, the rates are reasonable (e.g. compared to XF Cloud) but if that is expected to cover much more than occasional and very light theme tweaks it risks being taken advantage of.

That project is a niche all of its own and has requirements I’m not even fully able to document at this point because I’m not sure how to explain them. Lots of very specific “vibes” involved. I even spoke to the designer in my team (as we build a lot of stuff together) and even she’s like “I can’t even envisage what you’re thinking of” which is telling in itself since we are normally very in sync. At this point I think I’m actually putting that one on hold until I can actually make sense of my own requirements.

I started watching the 70s Columbo series, but they’re in a weird not-quite-TV place at 70 plus minutes an episode. Before that, I was rewatching Lucifer and Person of Interest.

You didn’t say how big the items could be, so I’m going with a fully equipped and provisioned yacht, and a very large food hamper for the days when the normal provisions on the yacht aren’t interesting enough.

It’s overdue in some respects. It’s still a lot fuzzy in my head as I think about the different elements I want to bring into it (or not, I have very extensive notes but some are less relevant than others now), but it’s about writing. I’m thinking about resources for writers, reviews/comparisons of writing software (there’s quite a lot out there in fact) I am of course thinking about all my tech choices - I have licences for XF and IPS I could use for this without any trouble but I am of course trying to weigh up if I need to bring in AMS or something else if I go XF. Trying to not get bogged down in the technical fluff though. There’s plenty of other things to do in content first, and I’m in that period where I’m full of ideas but it’s not clear which of them will survive or become something else.

I have on the odd occasion but never won anything significant. That said, when I worked at one job, though, it was in a small village, and I’d go into the one shop in town and buy scratch cards - because small village, it had a predictable turnover of the scratch cards such that I could have a feeling about when was a good time to buy. For cards whose win rate was just better than 1 in 4 (1 in 3.92 on average), I had a win rate of 3/4, and found myself several hundred pounds up ever after buying dozens of cards.

Heaven help me, I’m actually considering spinning up a new forum, and not a weird RP one (it’s been a while…)

There are already some topics in this board like that, but the whole thing feels underwhelming to me - not a criticism of how Administrata has or has not done things, but the offering from XF and the lead it sets taken by others. I am wondering now if I want to provide articles if I need to make my own, but I’ve been wondering that for a while since I don’t especially want to write articles in the XF editor. I’d almost prefer Gutenberg for some of the things it offers but that’s a different proposition entirely.

I was looking at story.bb at the time, yeah ;)

.bb is the country domain for Barbados, in case you were wondering. Realistically though I think there’s a multi-year timeline ahead of any movement on .io and as I said I think there’s enough money in it to convince the powers that be to not kill it off. If it were a less heavily used TLD going away (like the aforementioned .bb should Barbados ever merge with someone else for example), I suspect such affordances wouldn’t be granted.

This is ultimately down to IANA, the body that oversees this. Al’s article hits a lot of the key points - no one wants another su/ru debate, though we don’t talk about the other country that has two ccTLDs. Because Britain is just a little bit extra (it’s always the Brits somewhere along the line), we have both .gb and .uk though officially .gb is deprecated (but it still has several registered domains that can’t just go away) So there’s plenty of precedent for a country having multiple TLDs, or IANA could relax the “gTLDs must have 3+ characters” rule since that was always the deal, 2 characters for country domain space, 3+ for everything else. Personally I think some way will be found because there’s enough money circulating that it won’t be allowed to disappear. I expect Mauritius will lobby to be allowed to run it as a business (the way normal TLDs do) for that reason. It’s a similar situation in some ways to countries like Anguilla (.ai) and Libya (.ly) that both have popular TLDs that would be hugely disruptive if they ever decided to restrict them to country use (as some countries do require a local presence). I did at one time want to buy a .bb domain but balked at the cost seeing that they require a local presence and while I did find a company that would deal with this for me, £350/yr was more than I wanted to pay!

What I believe you were trying to say is… While it’s an improvement here, I have serious reservations with it philosophically being “native” in XF, and it actually undermines the strategy for building out more than just a forum on XF.

Fun fact: IO isn’t a new TLD. It’s actually a country specific one for what is currently called the British Indian Ocean Territory. It’s also potentially going to be discontinued once the treaty returning that island to Mauritius is ratified (since only country code TLDs can be 2 characters, it can’t currently be turned into a gTLD)

And this is why I won’t use AMS because despite “working like native”, the “native” experience is actually poor. Even article threads treat this better, though not wildly.

What’s the difference? (I know what the difference is because I allude to it in OP, but on a wider scale, what is the difference between these two things, to the point you need two sets of discussion about a thing?)

You’re using AMS for the articles, right? Why on Earth does it have discussion (= a real topic) but also comments (under the article, not reusing the topic)? This continues to baffle me and every time I see it, I feel like this shows a flaw in thinking because it creates two places for comments about the same thing, and I find the way it handles the discussion thread part of it to be really clunky, because going into the articles board and then clicking on the title doesn’t take me to the article, but to its description. The XF hardcore fans insist that this is “native” to XF but it feels inelegant to me. Thoughts?

Guides tend to happen organically if and when people write them - no need to expand until there’s supply, rather than demand.

True that, though it’d be nice if people hired me to do more interesting things than the same old stuff I already did…

Interestingly, questforstory.org wasn’t for an RPG but a blog about Sierra (and other) adventure games, in particular it’s a play on Quest for Glory, a series from Sierra, and I wanted to focus on the storytelling etc. Monolith Forever started out as a semi-joke on a forum I used to visit until they turned an uncomfortable level of political I don’t want to deal with (you can ignore an amount of it when it’s not everywhere on the forum), where a lot of movement recently has been about going serverless and microservices, rather than building a single master app (a monolith) which I’m firmly in favour of. Since I’m not in favour of microservices for most apps, I remain #monolithforever. I’ve thought about whether it might be some kind of blog talking about app design and engineering but I think I’d run out of content since most of what’s actually interesting that I’ve built over the years is under NDA. wordowl.com used to be a search engine for online comics (e.g. xkcd) I don’t even remember how I ended up buying Enchanted Tofu any more, but I loved the name so I’ve kept it in case I ever have another idea for it.

I am in this post and I do not like it much :P

When I'm doing a site with active dev, I usually have three instances: my local where dev happens, a test/staging environment to eliminate weirdness from my machine (avoiding the 'works on my machine' syndrome, but also eliminates oddities from my test data during dev), and then production.

During that era I owned over 200 domains. Now it's less than 40... I may be kicking the habit! You're actually the second person to suggest this to me but honestly I don't think I can do the concept justice because partially we're living in a world now where it's increasingly hard to tell satire from serious (because we've passed the point of unserious), and partially because that's not really my writing style. Some interesting domains in the list, hope to see some of them turn into real sites one day!

Indeed, Cedric is the reason I'm here. Unrelated side fact, in a Discord I'm in, for long complicated reasons, whenever anyone mentions 'the C word', they mean Cedric. Not our Cedric, mind, but definitely a particular Cedric...

Yeah, I like this idea because there is more to admining a site than the community side. Especially for example in the one case where I have a site that is a forum, a wiki and a Discord, and I spend about as much time in the Wiki as I do in the forum... (but I'm the only wiki author)