Arantor

I am planning my next move. Playing 4D chess on a 3D board with a 2D landscape is less than ideal.

Depends on your niche. But in general, less likely in my head. Remember, the average person at an admin forum is another forum admin or adjacent. Which means unless there’s a niche overlap, post exchange or similar, or someone just going round posting the same messages everywhere (which, tbf, can easily look like spam for clout), your forum’s audience aren’t there. There is a slightly different take in the roleplay world in that they still have directories and top sites and stuff and so there’s still a healthy amount of cross-pollination.

I solved part of this by not having a cPanel for the most part…

Do also note that Windows 10 doesn’t support dark mode “system default” behaviour but Windows 11 does, so the numbers will under-report. But all the programmer types have long since known that darker screens reduce eye strain - it’s something of a meme that we all gravitate by default to dark looks in editors, but it’s backed up by reality, because we spend so many hours staring at our screens.

Bingo. It turns out that people don't generally want to pay money just to post unless there's some magic reason, but on a regular forum that just doesn't fly.

I have in all seriousness been asked previously about throttling numbers of posts per day - not because of rogue members, but people who want to limit posting per day and demand people pay to post more. Guess how successful this turns out to be…

There was a weekend on simplemachines.org where in support I made 800 posts. No, that’s not a typo. Support forums have weird ebbs and flows.

Hmm. StoryBB is weird in that the features I admire most are so niche that you’d never see them elsewhere. Most useful/valued: ability to create sub accounts with a bunch of avatars per sub account, ability to group a collection of threads together to form a timeline, ability to export that timeline as an e-book, and the automated “topics I need to reply to” list, Discord notifications Least useful: unread posts (this is just not how people interact with content, there’s a lot of browsing by timeline, and a lot of revisiting timelines), email notifications and digests, alerts in general (we use Discord notifications infinitely more) But we are hugely an outlier as a roleplay/collaborative writing group.

I think that’s actually highly subjective and depends a lot on what device you’re using as well as whether your device is set to light/dark and/or you have natural tone shifting enabled or not, and also what time of day you’re visiting. I definitely do not want to be looking at a lighter theme first thing in the morning or late at night.

Any sensible platform lets users optout of such notifications. If not… maybe time to look at a better platform.

Note that 'full root access' of a VPS is only partial root access - you might have near control over your part of it but that isn't full control over the server hypervisor. (e.g. you're not in control of how much resource a given VPS gets on the host) It is worth noting that with full root access it can be possible to entirely brick a VPS and leave it unbootable.

Just hearing that Meta is going to a) cut down on fact checkers and b) promote more political content. I say good: maybe it’ll help people realise they should be getting off Meta!

Since it became utterly normalised to give them a device in their pocket with the internet attached. Especially as we veer towards normalising internet access as a right rather than a privilege. But given how often people try to bend the rules on, say, buying alcohol, what are the odds that this will succeed? Make it unreachable and they’ll just want it more. It’s actually better to not stigmatise it and allow controlled access earlier.

I think this is a “it’s ba-ack!” moment.

Almost certainly bots.

What were they complaining about?

The last WP theme I did cost 10x that, just saying…

The question isn’t whether it’ll help gain members. It’s whether it will bring valid to the members you have. There are plenty of tasks that AI can assist with, meaningfully - categorising if an image might be NSFW, assessing posts that might fall foul of obscenities, toxicity, racism etc rules you have. All that stuff is helpful to moderators by doing a first pass so they don’t have to. Where the problem lies, though, is in the generative stuff. It cannot be trusted to return facts, it cannot be trusted to return or retain information, it does not learn things beyond what its owners teach it. And frankly I think there are few uses of generative AI that are useful for forums - the heart of forums is people talking to each other, and generative AI doesn’t help with that. What value can you bring, in most cases, where you’re producing content that isn’t made by humans for humans? There are some specific edge cases - support forums where you can trust it has been fed things that are useful to you and where it can have a go at a first attempt at helping. I have seen it used for sparring in collaborative storytelling - where you want to write with someone but noone’s around, so you write back and forth with generative AI (though I’d submit this is not only a niche use but the majority of such communities that practice collaborative storytelling actively do not want this) But generative AI has few real uses for a forum. Categorical ones have more uses.

Currently Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene (first album)

I’m in much the same boat, still on that refresh before getting truly back into the swing of things. Onwards, upwards, we’re all good here :)

I’ve never seen anyone sustain the required level of passion for a decade or more without there being some form of recharging going on, even if it’s the community doing a trickle charge. People cannot forever pour their heart and soul in without a top-up, no matter how strong the desire is. If you’re telling me you can, you’d be the first forum owner I ever saw in more than 25 years of participation.

Starbucks, eggnog latte for my wife while they still have them, hot chocolate for me.

Worth noting that even genuine love and passion are not eternal wellsprings. It is entirely possible to love something with all your heart but then need to recharge. My experience has been the strongest forums - and the strongest owners - are the ones who let the community refuel the passion.

I usually get someone to do a design then I’ll implement myself, or at the very least get a paid theme. For me it’s never about the functionality but simply whether it looks nice, because I can do all the dev work myself on it.

For many users I used to recommend Linode but they got bought out. Then I started using Cloudways, then they got bought out. These days I mostly use Kinsta at work and Crocweb/Cloudways/DigitalOcean for home stuff.