Arantor

cPanel, DirectAdmin, the Cloudways one, the Kinsta one, the SiteGround one, and whatever we rigged up ourselves between Jenkins, GoCD, AWS and ELK at my previous workplace. Also bare metal sysadmin if it comes down to it.

I’ve done them all, shared, VPS, dedicated, run my own physical server in the office, plus cloud and serverless. Each has a space, each has a valid reason and application, and I’d pair what I’m doing with what makes sense.

But seriously. What you’re talking about is an idea that’s been floated a few times and makes a heckuva lot of sense for certain niches where the fragmentation hurts rather than helps. And then we can start talking about sensibly getting our own take on federation sorted out and making the discovery gap smaller (which is a variation in the mix, that is closer but not as close as a union)

Imagine a group of people who are Very Against AI. Now tell them that the thing they all point to can and presumably will scrape their content to feed AI. (I suspect it’s Not That AI it’s feeding, but the group of people I have in mind don’t exactly generally understand nuance) NB I have a distinct subset of the whole in mind, not the entire “community”.

Userway is the most popular, but if the people who used it ever read the TOS they’d get very angry.

Cedric just levelled up.

This happens regularly enough with or without AI. AI just makes it much faster to do, though often quicker to spot. But the notion that nothing is original unless you’re doing something entirely new is… complicated, because there’s 8 billion people all having thoughts and ideas, and it’s surprisingly common that two or more have the same ideas independently of each other then compete for the rights to profit off it later. I also don’t think the world is that reductive about originality, as much as our corporate overlords would like it to be so.

Having had a few over the years for various reasons (both me personally and my professional clients), the sooner that I and the hosting company have a conversation, the better. Fortunately, CloudFlare soaks most of the damage up these days.

To boost engagement by having things to engage with.

Are the bots paying for the ads, though?

Then who's going to view or click on all the ads?

I checked it out at launch, it was clearly already at 95% bots then.

hate Microsoft Word, but y'all do not need that rant for the myriad reasons why. Just... while plenty of people tolerate Word for writing, we actually have a whole fleet of tools for writing. I know this because for reasons far too convoluted to get in right now, I have a bunch of different tools installed. Between my various devices, I currently have the following tools for writing installed: Scrivener, iA Writer, Writer's Cafe, DramaQueen, Plottr, Papyrus Author, Quoll Writer, Jutoh, OmmWriter, FocusWriter, yWriter, SmartEdit Writer, WordTsar, WordPerfect (yes it's still a thing), and tragically, Word. And this is just the top end of the market; there are others I can think of in the cloud market - Campfire Writing, Atticus, WorldAnvil and others. They all do the writing thing. Many of them do things alongside the writing thing in various interesting ways. One of these days I'll get around to talking about them in a proper venue for such. And the reason we have all these tools that people do use every day to do writing - is because many of them are better at it than Word is. I know people who will use 40-year-old word processing software rather than use Word to write actual books on. The question then becomes: what does this tell us about forum software? They're tools for having discussions, sharing ideas. Some do this better than others. I want to hear why you love one over another. I want to hear what one gives you that you miss in another. I want to know what experiences you have in other software that you miss in forums. ALL of that good stuff. Let's not let word processing users have more variety and fun than we do!

I'm also of the mindset that I'd decouple some authorial control from the posters in favour of doing more e-book style things with presentation. Offering different font types and presentations. For example, while the typical sans-serif font choices are fine (this one certainly is), I have reason to suggest typefaces you wouldn't typically pair with this style of design for those people who find that easier to read. Serif fonts (esp ones like Merryweather and Gentium) are good for readability and the extra serifs can help some people read better - alternatively, I've heard good things about the OpenDyslexic font for people with dyslexia, and I can even believe some of the claims about "bionic reading" (which is in no way what I'd call it if I had to name it) But implementing these is a very different challenge. I've also put time and thought into how better to hint some of the content context to TTS readers because I think that could be interesting too; it's easier in the RP scene where a thread is usually back and forth posts between two parties (so you give each poster a different 'voice' for clarity)

I planned to make 2025 a year I wrote more. I've been writing more on - shock, horror - LinkedIn and I have a few other ideas I want to try.

So instead of 80% of Facebook's users being bots, we're going to get to 95% of them being bots? Awesome.

You know what's really interesting? How many websites out there don't offer light/dark modes. But it's also interesting how many of those websites aren't ones you're going to spend potentially hours engaging with. Also as a side topic, it might be interesting to talk about the next steps in accessibility - offering not just light/dark, but high contrast, grayscale, negative contrast options. Also I'd love to see text sizing come back as an option - no I don't mean zooming. I mean genuinely approaching the problem of 'I want the text to be bigger but not other visual elements' (because zooming will do things like scaling up borders and spacing which isn't the same thing!)

I've not just shared my tips over the years, I've shared my tools too. It's also interesting that people think I'm afraid of being copied; I've literally never worried about this in the forum world. Copying me? Anyone can do that. Being me? Only I can do that, and I can do that many times faster than you can copy what I can do.

Consider that there may be a legitimate, relevant reason for the anger. It is not wise to unilaterally dismiss it without considering if you can learn something actionable from it.

It's always been true that there are 90% lurkers in any given community. Not everyone wants to put their head above the parapet especially if they feel they have nothing to add (or worse, they have something to add but it's controversial) Be careful with trying to force engagement with them though: it used to be a thing that people would offer up downloads or whatever, hidden behind a 'like this post to see the link' or 'reply to this post to see the content' which will absolutely create engagement - just it'll be trash engagement that doesn't convert into anything else useful. There will always be transactionalists who turn up on a forum and don't want to integrate or become a productive member, but simply to ask one question/get one thing and go. And that's OK - a certain amount of footfall is normal and necessary. Especially as people like that do pass on the URL to other people at times. The only strategy I've ever seen work to convert lurkers to usefully engaging, is to give them something to engage with. You may have to reach out and ask what that might be for some people, but be prepared for 'I only come for the free stuff' as an answer - some people aren't ever going to be there to convert.

Ability to ignore topics from what's new type listings should be default in this day and age. Bonus points if there's some admin threshold of 'enough people ignore this topic' to flag it for special attention.

Classic design never goes out of style. Would be interesting to make some of these designs in pure CSS though. Images are so 2008.

Best pizza is 3am post-fight pizza.

It’ll just make it more desirable to be on it. Peer pressure and the forbidden-ness of it will do wonders for quiet adoption. Then we’ll see legislators do something dumb like mandate these services hook up to age-confirmation services, which just hands more data to people who shouldn’t have it.

Jcink let’s you get a backup.