Arantor

Yeah, I'm hard to get rid of, like that bad penny that keeps coming up.

Remember kids, don't build your for-profit website using WordPress. (The fact it's private-equity backed isn't relevant - Automattic is also PE backed, and was previously a direct investor in WPE for a number of years, which just goes to show this isn't about the trademark usage but the fact that Automattic isn't getting its pound of flesh, and everything here is in service to that.)

I first started running a proper forum in 2006.

I tended to archive the churn stuff - you know, the off topic stuff that is years old, isn't going anywhere, isn't likely to bring in new people, but I'd generally not delete it, as opposed to make a separate board with lower focus than the main boards for such things.

I think that's a huge part of it though: a number of their 'positive' outcomes are potentially less positive depending on where you look. For example, Chrome is now effectively a monopoly in the browser stakes in the way IE was back in the day, and for all the reasons that's a bad thing, and the big push to add functionality (for Chromebook reasons) is equally anticompetitive (because it makes it harder to compete), whilst also raising the security stakes of the browser. And that's before we talk about the literal hundreds of products in the Google Graveyard. I'm really not sure I see Google as a positive force and it hasn't been in many years, since before the time they quietly dropped 'do no evil' as a mantra...

I probably should consolidate; I have some stuff on 1&1 (well, Ionos now) and some on Namecheap, pretty sure Namecheap's prices are lower at this point. I do also own a few .ly domains which you're pretty much only getting from register.ly.

Only because it benefitted their bottom line.

The hardest part is keeping going, just generally, but additionally in the face of adversity. Everything else is fixable.

I build websites and applications. Sometimes WordPress, sometimes Laravel, sometimes both at once, sometimes something else.

If it's an extension of BIMI, that's not only a business-is-legit marker but business-is-serious-enough-to-have-a-trademark which is a different strata entirely.

The only time I 'take over' a member's account like that is if the member has passed away and I'm making sure that the account can't be logged into, while passing on any message from the family, if there is one. Doesn't come up often, mind, but always sad when it has.

Until the hosting bill stops being paid, anyway... (I have a co-admin who can do most of the things that would be needed, and they would be able to escalate to the other stuff, but since they live in my house, any incident that befell me would probably befall them too...)

For the small niche community I currently run, I've experimented with both news/announcement topics and talking about it in the Discord - it's a small group, the latter works better, because more people engage with it in practice.

This or some variant of this has long been either rule 1 or rule 2 on any site I've run. (The other rule, either 2 or 1, is some variant of 'Admin is god. For any questions please reread.' because it's important to set out that while admins can be reasoned with, admins are the final authority, it's their house, their space, their rules.)

First I used as a non-admin? I have no idea what that would have been back in 199x, first I ran as an admin was a short-lived phpBB instance for a few friends in 2003, first proper community in 2006 on PunBB then moving to SMF. I have tried many of the platforms out there, and for the longest time I kept coming back to SMF but I suspect the next iteration of my journey is something else entirely.

As a developer with an agency that does a fair amount of WP sites, I am of course paying attention to this. It's been a few weeks since it kicked off and there's no sign of stopping yet. The injunction from WPE against Automattic has some very dark details about how this campaign has been going, and while it's trivially easy to feel all Chicken Little (The Sky Is Falling) about it, I think we're potentially seeing a volcano about to erupt. I don't think that's even a bad thing for the ecosystem as a whole because it would goad WP into actually figuring out where their priorities are at, who their customers are, who their advocates are and who can really be trusted in this situation.

I'm only bothered by the software a site uses if it makes people have to jump through hoops to do things. I'm bored of having to fight with decade-plus old forum software conventions. That said I'm still not a huge fan of Discourse - though I won't go out of my way to avoid it - it doesn't seem to have radically moved since 2014 or so when it was foisted upon me on a site I was a member of, but I really hope it's upped its game in terms of reliability on dodgy networks, because it was terrible for the first couple of years at coping with spotty mobile connections. The fact that Jeff Atwood and I butted heads several times in conversation has never entirely sat right with me, but history does appear to have demonstrated that the things I argued with him about, I was right about at the time.

I'm sure it was at least 637384860 times, but it worked! :)

I'm Arantor, I've been doing forum stuff for many years, and it's about time I crashed this party :) How are you all doing?

I'm not convinced that 'live topics' are actually that interesting. I think they're an interesting tool to have in the toolbox - but they're not a replacement for long form discussion; indeed, trying to have a conversation or discussion in that format is cumbersome (just as it is trying to have much of a conversation of substance on Discord, and for the same reason) The real question is how discoverable and archivable that content is after the fact. How much it is useful for reference material, looking up things (and then referencing that in conversations) For me, though, a lot of the things I think that would be really interesting to have are ways to connect topics together. I also wonder if there's interesting space to bring in something like Meilisearch rather than ElasticSearch; so that instead of doing 'similar topics' based on the words matching, something closer to sentiment matching, matching on meaning. (It's not AI, it's certainly not ChatGPT, but some of the underlying ML concepts are relatable) I think it's also interesting to explore alternative ways of tagging and categorising topics and being able to surface them. What other information about topics do we have (either by default, or that we can optionally start collecting when creating) that would make it useful or interesting to surface? I know we sort of end up doing this by way of prefixes as a first route but I feel there may be others.

Here's the thing, there's a whole huge set of rose-tinted glasses that we conveniently overlook, mostly because it's easier to forget it and just blame social media and Discord for eating forums' lunch. Back in the day there were a lot of things that probably shouldn't have been forums but were forums anyway because it was the best tool we had at the time. And that's OK, but it also hugely distorts the perception of 'forums are dying' by misrepresenting how big they were originally. Now, this is not to say there isn't a decline but I think we overegg how big that decline was, in a market-correction fashion.

We've been using Discord for chat, for 1:1 discussions that ultimately turn into content, and in the shared space that all members hang out in, we have notifications from the site to Discord which allows for encouraging people to write more. (It's a small, niche community. This is expected and normal.)