Arantor

Their algorithm is working as designed. It was just never designed for our benefit.

On an even modestly-busy forum this can be a chore to find the thread(s) you were previously in, unless you had a way to get back to them directly... With the exception that nearly all the old school forums implement email alerts, for that exact reason: so you had a way to get back to them directly. The move to having an in-app alerts system came partially because that's what social media did but more significantly because email providers started treating such notifications as spam because they're all very similar (and few systems ever bothered implementing reply-by-email which would have been infinitely more convenient in many cases while also solving the spam problem) It's had 15 years to implement this off the back of just XF. It's also had slightly longer to get a mobile-friendly theme in the core (given that the iPhone debuted in 2007). There is a very real danger of it being just left behind entirely.

And that's the thing, you can invest a significant amount of DIY time and arrive at something... vaguely approaching what you get out of XF out of the box. The question becomes whether your time is worth the $195 price to get started or not.

Definitely video game and general chat - in spite of the latter being eaten mostly by social media. Surprising amount of sports forums out there, too. But this is a genre I have zero interest in personally so my view on it might be distorted in terms of how popular it seems.

Then there is literally no way to take the above Reddit as good news, because it isn’t.

If this is any good, it means I can start recommending it in favour of GA4 which means I can dump the cookies nonsense - one less reason to have a cookie banner.

When we say “maximising traffic” what is the desired outcome? More people who will potentially see the content or more people who will interact with the content? These two are not the same.

I get the sentiment but I would not be so quick to wish ill on the people this will really affect, which is a much larger and much more numerous group than you might realise. First up, WP’s demise would affect every user who just wants a small site to work, who does nothing more than install a theme and a couple of plugins and gets on with their day. They don’t care how the software works, they just want a simple and good enough solution - and the competition, hilariously, fails to understand what makes WP compelling to users. It doesn’t matter if it’s the CMS in Woltlab, or it’s Drupal, Silverstripe, CraftCMS, etc, they all fail at getting the user in and creating content easily. Oh, don’t get me wrong, these platforms are powerful but to a first time user they’re flat out daunting, in a way WP never was. (The fact WP does less, overtly, out of the box is relevant here.) I rather suspect a number of people in this boat would just give up rather than try to go through the hassle of finding an alternative. Which, like it or not, would be a loss to the world - the great joy of WP is that it gave just about anyone an on-ramp into making their own space to have their say. But the road to alternatives is an interesting one. WooCommerce users will likely enrich Shopify first and foremost because Drupal Commerce is no competition. Those who truly, desperately, want their own self-hosted storefront will likely end up gravitating to Magento and, frankly, I’m not sure that’s better for the world. It’s certainly not safer, and it won’t be an improvement for their sanity assuming they even get it installed. The road to a mature WP replacement that people will actually use is not 6 months away, not with any framework that currently exists (short of treating something like Craft as a framework), because it’s not just about the CMS core, it’s about the ecosystem. It’s about having a CMS that can do the things, whether core or plug-in, it’s about having the rich functionality achievable with WordPress today. It’s also about having the buy-in from people that the platform isn’t going away overnight, or that there won’t be another better one on 6 months. It’s about that there’s people having the willingness to invest in the platform and prove it is suitable for sites. WP, for better or worse, powers not only the hobbyist who just wants a little blog, it powers things like the official site of the US White House, it powers parts of the US gov’s online estate. These people are not going to trust an upstart any time soon. The lead time for that sort of crowd to adopt a new platform is at minimum 5 years. That’s 5 years of runway a platform has to build to prove it’ll stand the test of time. Minimum. And that’s before we even talk about the reputational damage being done here. Putting aside Matt’s ego, this whole drama damages all of us in the open source space. Because now this has happened, any project with any serious plans for adoption not only needs to prove itself in terms of legitimacy (which for corporate use has always been a tricky one as corps like to have someone they can beat over the head with respect to liability), but now they have to prove the project leadership won’t pull a Matt and screw around the user base. And it isn’t even going to be a case of “well we never did before”, Matt’s actions have spotlighted the shortcomings of the BDFL model that I’ve always seen as the only viable way for open source to function. (Anything beyond a BDFL or small team of decision makers inevitably descends into design by committee hell.) Unless projects can actively demonstrate a leadership team and model that instils confidence, they have a problem with widespread adoption. You may be of the opinion that “so what if companies don’t use the product” - but a CMS more than any needs to demonstrate a willingness for users to use it. To be taken seriously it needs to be able to be suitable for enterprise use on some level even if not marketed to that user base. Worse, Matt’s actions have demonstrated the risks of using commercialised GPL, in stealing and republishing a paid plugin. This has always been on the table as a risk - always - but Matt had always demonstrated before that he was willing to let the ecosystem exist because it was good for WP to have a premium ecosystem. It demonstrates that people are willing to invest in the platform, and to a point where they have skin in the game. This, however, will make people think twice. It doesn’t matter about the nuance of the licence, being MIT or BSD to GPL, though: the entire “open source” movement is now tainted, and while it will recover, it’s not clear what damage this is going to be in the fullness of time.

The board is effectively him, but when this gets going, it’s really going to get cooking because the dealings of the Foundation have been implied to be Matt verging on lying to the IRS. Remember: Joker will happily go after anyone in Gotham, just to get Bats’ attention, but even he by his own admission isn’t crazy enough to taunt the IRS.

I offer a light and a dark - if you're going to be spending long periods of time on a site, reading and writing, having something that works for you to discourage eye-strain and/or headaches can be important.

It's essentially a standard approach to delivering negative feedback - to also soften the blow by finding something good to talk about, and lets you frame the negative in a route-to-improvement way rather than just straight negativity.

Merry Christmas - or whatever you may celebrate at this time of year !

I find the worst criticism is the stuff that is just bashing for the sake of bashing, and then retroactively claimed or tried to justify itself as “constructive”. If it’s constructive criticism, it will include something actionable - something you can actually do - to improve it.

Oh Matt, you really are the gift that keeps on giving. So earlier in the week he called a shutdown on parts of wordpress.org - no new plugin reviews, no new theme reviews, limited support etc. citing that the maintainers deserve a holiday break. But this also came with an ominous note about hoping he finds the energy to continue in 2025, prompting some to debate if in fact he's not going to reopen things fully in 2025. And then, Yes, this is Matt - either actually him, or his Reddit account has been hacked, but this isn't likely - flat out suggesting he's going to cause drama in 2025. This is how empires fall, people.

No-one is suggesting that bad moderation/bad administration won't kill forums - it absolutely will. And I'm absolutely certain that some niches and forums will benefit from shoutboxes/chatboxes/etc, but I haven't seen anything to suggest this is common. I've seen far more anecdotal evidence that it will detract from activity across the board than it helps - but nothing ever exists in absolute.

Themes get updated from time to time, for one. For two, not all themes will play nicely with add-ons. This varies depending on what platform you do this on and what add-ons you have; it's less bad on XF than on other platforms.

I don’t think it necessarily relies on divine intervention (I refuse to believe in such), but I will certainly go along with the notion that a vision can come along at the wrong time, or can be stymied by other factors outside of the visionary’s control. I would suggest that some of my missteps along the way stem from poor business decisions rather than the vision as such being misplaced, one can bring a great product to the market but if the market demand is no longer there it doesn’t matter. I will also go along with the notion of needing a bit of luck for success. I will say, though, that it’s entirely possible to have faith in something, even too much faith, and the project still fails in spite of that.

I used to be this, but too many attempts and too many failures to reach even modest success are somewhat disheartening.

The jobs no one else wants to do, banning, systems admin, etc.

The only downside to more themes is that it’s a higher maintenance burden - and likely as not your members will just use whatever the default is. This shouldn’t stop you, of course, just you should be informed to make appropriate resourcing decisions.

The recent debates over the new XF editor and the debates over Markdown in particular also illustrate a few pain points, I think: 1) the fact that some people need to have more comprehensive control over content creation than others, and trying to homogenise to a single platform wide editor is actually counterproductive (but so is trying to force consistency through everything being a forum topic). Maybe focus on adaptive tooling to suit the problem domain. 2) that people want to be able to do formatting easily without tripping up others over the magic incantations - easy to say personal preference but you still have to lead people to where they can set that preference and what the ramifications of it are - people inevitably do not want to have to care, especially as social media largely doesn’t permit formatting (and this is why). 3) limited account for the people who write content in a separate tool for whatever reason and then migrate that across (with more or fewer problems depending on the richness of that import)

And they arrived today. [ATTACH]1021[/ATTACH]

Sites I've owned - at one point I had a search engine for online comics that I designed and built from scratch, but it took far too much effort to maintain because of how detailed the transcriptions were (with permission, I might add). Other highlights include the travel blog me and my buddy did on our 7200 mile road trip, the tech demo we did for a browser-based MMO game back in 2010 when this was an interesting technical challenge (we ran into gameplay design issues rather than technical ones), and at one time a storefront for a paid SMF gallery mod (later made the thing free). I also have a gallery of SMF themes through the ages as a design/inspiration reference. Sites I've managed is a different and actually far more interesting question. I have managed some cool things over the years - white label SaaS apps that had logos and domains with things like Microsoft, Adobe and Xerox in them. (Good fun arguing with the registry when you're registering a domain name with the word Adobe and you end up having to provide documentary evidence that you are legitimately doing this on behalf of Adobe for example) I've also managed LMSes - learning management systems - for some of the largest UK universities as well as one of the agencies of the United Nations. I've even presented at conferences based on the things I learned and built for them. I've also recently finished up the dev cycle on a business marketplace in the UK that is not only the recommended go-to for its kind, but is quite possibly likely to be the only one of its kind for the entire market in the country, up to and including being recommended by the government department overseeing the legislation that necessitated its creation, owing to the fact the government made legislation and only discovered at the eleventh hour how difficult it was to actually comply. I'd give more details but that would open out a lot more personal information about me than I really want to give here.

I’ll go first. It irks me no end that XF doesn't ship “ignore this node” out of the box. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a forum I read by scanning the list of boards, or by what’s new - I guarantee there are boards in there I don’t care about, and would appreciate filtering out by default from these views pushing them.

Complete lack of surprise. The platform itself is in development hell - 10 years is a long time, and there’s been limited significant movement in the core meaning plug-in devs will have moved on. We saw exactly the same thing in SMF - a good many of the plug-in authors and theme makers that were around in 2012-14 have moved on, maybe because they’re not running forums, maybe they changed software, but we know from asking the SMF folks that a significant number moved on assuming SMF wasn’t moving forward. SMF got a significant release out - MyBB getting 1.9 out would revitalise that, to a point. But only to a point - like it’s stablemate it’s not doing a fat lot to attract the next generation of plug-in devs to the party.