Arantor

Ah the DDOS is back again. -sigh-

Only if it’s in America. Heroel land is not party to HIPAA therefore it’s fine!

The weekend was too short, as ever.

Looks like a great start! And you do have to start somewhere - getting the core stuff working, then getting it pretty is usually a winning combination.

I’ve forked entire applications before. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

RP used to have resource hubs - more places like RPG Directory - but many of these have closed now in favour of Discord which is practically a given requirement now. I will agree navigating Tumblr is a nightmare but it’s only a few Tumblrs you’d want to reply on (often anonymously) A list of Discords that might be useful: [MEDIA=tumblr]did=da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709;id=744145982834524160;key=0ktuvegvjsfM2aFBLP_wfQ;name=rpcpositivitea[/MEDIA] The avatar switcher is an interesting case - I remember having fun supporting this myself though I made it harder for myself by including a resize/crop widget during the setup (I let people set up 5 avatars per sub account)

You don’t even need to present them as separate sites, nothing stopping you presenting them as blogs from the community. Sort of like Invision does and XF half-heartedly does (think the HYS board), but even that isn’t widely done as far as I can tell.

Good thing blogging software typically makes this at least as easy as doing this in forums, and often considerably easier because blogging tools tend to focus on such things as part of the content creation stage. It's one of the subtle differences between being given a WYSIWYG-ish type editor (a la forums) and being given something vastly more extensive like WordPress's Gutenberg (though you can return it to being just a WYSIWYG editor with a plugin) So why do more sites not do this?

Think of a typical blog as closer to a forum board than an entire forum. As for paragraph splits, most forum software does not bother to break this up to paragraphs meaning that when you read nicely split forum posts, chances are you're reading someone's content that has been consciously formatted.

I can relate to that experience. [ATTACH type=full" size="710x97]514[/ATTACH] I suspect one route for further advertising would be to look at the RP scene and maybe hit up some of the advertising Tumblrs and/or Discords where such things also get advertised. I sadly don't have any links to hand but that would be one place to investigate.

Well, the first version of Ikonboard debuted in 1999 and I think Matt was already in his early 20s by that point (though Ikonboard was written in Perl not PHP, though the security implications are no different in practice), with Invision's first version debuting in 2002.

Going where your customers are is where to advertise. In jCodes' case this is going to be advertising on Jcink's main community, plus where the Jcink folks hang around (so, places like rpg-directory) rather than places like here.

You're forking, that's immediately a given no matter what you fork and no matter how perfect it is (or isn't) before you start.

Consider that IPS wasn't even Matt M's first attempt at writing a forum software at that point in time. Ikonboard predated Invision.

There is a huge difference between the workings of the thing and the optics of the thing. Mechanically, yes, a forum is very much a redress of what mechanics a blog needs, and I have certainly dabbled in various creative abuses of boards in forums as blogs with limited posting rights before now. But in a pure forum, the author of a topic is not especially prominent because in a forum setting, no individual is more important than any other by default. Even if some individuals are by dint of permissions or reputation (whether tracked and measured or not), the software inevitably treats them the same. Whatever meaning or special behaviours there are, are standard features applied specifically; it is meaning given form after the fact. It is one of the things that irks me, and continues to irk me, how badly XF uses its own site to sell its software. It should be showcasing these features loud and proud because a “blog” adjunct to a forum is important - it’s one of the ways to add additional content, especially that “authoritative content” that the search engines like. And it feels so underbaked and left to add-on authors to fix, It is also one of my criticisms of AMS and co that it feels disjointed for how it handles articles vs comments (not AMS’s fault as much as XF’s for failing to set out a sensible design language to convey the distinction)

Sort of. The main deal with a blog vs a forum is that you have a few publishing content with everyone else having more or less ability to reply to it, while in a forum typically everyone can post. The result is that in the latter case, no-one is special, while in the former, the author is more important than usual; the dynamic of publisher to commentator is different. Presentation plays a key - e.g. XF's article threads vs regular threads, where the author gets a more concrete byline than you'd normally see on a forum precisely because it's not just about the content but about the author presenting the content - who says it can be as important as what's being said, a distinction very often lost in a forum because the presentation of a forum is intentionally neutral like that.

Pretty much. The only real difference is presentation of that; blogs are a few-to-many publishing method, forums are a many-to-many publishing method. Blogs came along at a point when forums couldn’t sustain the posting of thought leaders within a community vs the regular populace.

Any fetish with any commonality already has places to discuss it, assuming it's legal; if not it will have other places to discuss it where it might not necessarily be a forum for the sake of privacy and internal security. Any fetish not so popular might not have the support to sustain a forum - because some are just that niche that you might never find another person who feels even remotely the same way. It's quite self-selecting in that respect.

That's the thing, 2004 was already well into the era of articles and documentation and have-a-go-heroes. In many ways that period is peak bad PHP practices being written out as guides.

ClassicPress did - and that's a clear demonstration of why you shouldn't. Forking was always the last point of refuge as a check and balance against a BDFL gone rogue, or other members of the community taking fundamental umbridge with the direction of the project and its leadership - and it immediately puts you at several disadvantages that are in no way immediately obvious. I don't envisage that there will be a successful WP fork. The ecosystem is too big, the project too mature; where does a radical new fork even go? Any major changes of any value immediately break the ecosystem to some degree, and my view has long been: if you are going to fork, you need to not just subtly break the ABI but fundamentally break it and rebuild it back better for your purposes.

And a higher percentage of those are bots than in the past, no doubt.

The pizza that eats you back!

o.O document.cookie could access the password hash? WHY? WHY WOULD YOU EVER DO THAT HttpOnly was a sensible addition but it also didn't exist back in 2004 so had to be a later addition. And yes, doHTML is entirely a bad idea unless you load it up with something like HtmlPurifier but that will break all the shonky non-standard codes people add to their posts etc.

Everyone adding forums is not surprising, forums absolutely have a place. The real question is how long Tumblr's runway is because Tumblr is owned by Automattic, and there's a very real chance that Automattic is going to get their butt handed to them in the spring.

Betting on pre-game results or whatever fantasy events you want wasn't new - vBookie comes to mind - but the live integration? That's a twist I haven't come across before, and I personally would have been very wary of playing that game for being awfully close to actual gambling law (at least in the UK)