Arantor

Indiana Jones is what happens when George Lucas isn't allowed to make a James Bond film (no, really, he tried to get the rights and the rights holders were like... no)

I bet you most of these have been done at some time or another; there was an era where forums were pretty much the only general site building tool. Though the more specific the niche, the smaller the target demographic.

Truth be told the only reason I even bought an iPhone is because I was in the market for a new job, and I lived in a property at the time that had bad wifi signal, and my old Nokia PureView couldn't do wifi-assist calling.

I don't think it really matters, I think what matters more is number of moderators vs number of active posts - you can have a member base in 6 figures but if you don't have more than 50 posts a day you don't need hundreds of moderators.

There's been a level of 'but he controls WordPress' and no-one ever wanted to push him that far out of fear what he might do because he is a firmly entitled individual. This time, though, he picked on someone who can fight back and whose capacity to fight back actually has teeth. The rocket is firmly lodged at this point, we're just waiting to see how high it's going to go when it actually launches.

I mentioned Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) recently and its descendant, Legend of the Green Dragon - lotgd.net recently.

I've owned 4 phones, total, since 2002. Two dumb phones, two smart phones. I'm coming up on 4 years on my iPhone, and I see zero reason to change it at this point all the time it's still getting security updates.

In other news, Matt is so upset by this court injunction that the community Slack instance for community discussions... he's ragequit it. It was all fine when other people were giving you free labour and you were parasitically exploiting it, of course.

It's been a meme for a number of years now that PHP is dead, no-one's using it, and that you should move to whatever framework is popular this month (this week?) in primarily Node. The fact that Node isn't currently powering either 40+% of the web in the form of WordPress or powering some of the most popular websites in the world (hi Wikipedia, yes, that's almost entirely PHP based) should be a clue that PHP is in fact not dead. If you spend time where techbros are, you will be told that all the mature stable languages are DEAD and it's time to move on to the new hotness (which will be Rust, Zig or Node depending on which flavour of ecosystem you're in) and not languages that people actually want to use because they're stable, mature and proven, and have excellent libraries and tools for a task at hand. I've been hearing that PHP is dead for the last decade, but that hasn't stopped me building multiple new sites this year in it.

The thing is, ClassicPress has admirably demonstrated why forking doesn't work in practical terms, so then you start looking at 'other CMSes' which by definition has to include the full weight of the ecosystem. And that's something a lot of the projects currently going at this haven't understood: WP's strength is not WP, its strength is the sheer scale of its ecosystem which started life 20 years ago when WP started. If you were to actually look at WP today, aside from Gutenberg you'd have to go digging to understand what had changed between 10 years ago and now, because much of where it changed was in subtle ways (e.g. full site editing) - but the size and scale of the ecosystem is why it keeps going. It happened to be in the right place at the right time to make a seismic shift and its ecosystem has propped it up ever since. It's also why Matt going after individual leaders in the ecosystem is such the bad move that it is because it tells other premium plugin authors 'hey, maybe you should think about finding another plugin ecosystem to live in if you want to keep having income'. Yes, you can absolutely replace a WP blog with CraftCMS or Drupal in a small scale of time, but the more plugins you have to replicate, the harder that task is and the more upfront effort that will be required to get there - and for almost anyone, that equates to a cost that has to be borne by someone.

Yes and no. The reality is that in the event of Automattic collapsing, someone will pick up the pieces. Probably someone like WPEngine, maybe a coalition of WPEngine, Kinsta and a few other of the more specialised WP hosts. It's also not like there aren't other CMS options out there. Drupal, Joomla, CraftCMS, Statemic and others.

We shall see what comes next but it’s fair to say that Matt (head of WP) has history for being a petulant man child. Trouble is, he’s a petulant man child with access to a significant amount of money. I expect him to comply with the court’s ruling (he has 72 hours) but give it till just after Christmas and I think he’ll find a whole new way to be petulant. He is still peeved that he was pushed out of owing a stake in WPE by their current investors.

tl:dr; WP want WPE to give them a ton of cash, and did a variety of things that were hurting WPE. The court has now told WP to pack it in and return the access etc to WPE back to how it was before it kicked off. The back and forth has included WP hijacking the popular ACF plug-in (including the paid version) which they’ve always been able to do but tacitly agreed not to. This is unprecedented and has lead to a lot of plug-in devs having second thoughts. Assuming they comply, little now will change until the proper court date unless Matt has another tantrum.

Very few things are genuinely too big to fail, as 2008 proved very conclusively. (Much of what 2008 proved is that there are things that are too big to be allowed to fail, which is a different thing entirely) WordPress's main issues here stem from single points of failure which were fine all the time Matt followed the "benevolent dictator for life" approach as is common in open source. In fact if you look most of the most successful open source projects operate under the BDFL approach because it's the only way to keep things sane. What we have here is a BDFL who isn't so benevolent after all - we've seen examples in the past of him being petty and a nuisance but never anything on this scale. Right now as it stands, WordPress is not, in itself, too big to fail: Matt is a single source of failure in the ecosystem because he, and he alone, controls the primary keys to wordpress.org itself where plugins et al live, and no-one would dispute that WordPress's strength as a platform comes from its add-on ecosystem. You start actively gatekeeping that in a way the community has significant issues with, and that's a problem. The ultimate check and balance for open source has always been the fork - the final 'we do not agree with where you are taking the project' step - but most forks never thrive because most forks fizzle and die and the primary project picks up the slack. ClassicPress is a good example - it's never been able to keep the pace with WP even though it's just WP minus Gutenberg. But in WP's case it isn't just the codebase you'd need to fork - it's the ecosystem, and then bring the ecosystem along for the ride, or try like hell to maintain compatibility otherwise you immediately put yourself on the back foot with it all. Time will tell what happens but when this finally gets to court proper, I hope it ends up that Matt has to hand over the keys to w.org to the Foundation, and that he is forcibly removed from its board for defrauding the government over the state of the Foundation's assets. (Because, yeah, if you weren't paying attention, that's actually part of the drama: Matt is using trademarks as leverage, which he's entitled to do, I guess. The Foundation owns the trademarks, Automattic is the licensee and enforcer, but either way that implies the value of the trademarks is held by the Foundation, which is certainly not declared on the balance sheet as an asset, while he's claiming these trademarks are so valuable they need a multi-million dollar licence.)

A thing no-one wanted, a thing no-one needs but a thing everyone is now stuck with.

The injunction is a pretty comprehensive smackdown of everything Matt has done to this point.

No major issues with ExpressVPN here.

You know it ;)

It's not even that simple, unfortunately. My understanding is that it's actually defaulting to the system preference which depends not only on the browser but also potentially the operating system. For example, I found on Windows 10 that all websites on all browsers would default to light because there isn't really a system-wide concept of 'light' or 'dark' (well, that's not entirely true but I don't want to get into the complexities of what that really means on Win10), while Win11 has this functionality and you can absolutely set it, and browsers will respond to it. As for a solution I tend to default to dark by default irrespective of system, and let people change it up to light if they want, but I'm not currently running XF so any strategies I have aren't really likely to help.

People that can't accept when they're wrong in the face of evidence, and that keep arguing in spite of that, to the point they're just tilting at windmills.

You can't so readily do the status tracking stuff that courses do, but depending on your needs this might not matter. Certainly I'm not convinced it's worth the extra to go to that - if I wanted an LMS at this point I'd integrate Moodle and call it a day, but I recognise I'm an outlier there.

I don't drink coffee. The problem is that the baseline is that much higher because they 1) have people paid to invest time in building it and 2) have a direct financial incentive to keep improving the product. If XF 2.0 to 2.1 had delivered a new theme, limited add-on compatibility, a new editor, alerts (because it didn't have it before) and a few other sundry features, do you think the customers would have stayed paying for 11 years in the meantime? The out of the box experience of XF and IC vs the out of the box experience on any of the free platforms... is night and day difference. You get some cases where there's a hybrid (Discorse, NodeBB, Flarum) where there is a practical and significant hosting component that pays for some development. Much as I hate to give our dear friend Tracy much of a shoutout, one site he participates in uses SMF and there's been a surprising amount of commentary about how much 'it's not XF'. Some of it you can chalk up to a lack of familiarity but far from all, and more galling to admit, I find myself agreeing. The likes of phpBB, MyBB and SMF are - sorry to say - second class citizens at this point, irrespective of how much work one individual site might put in to 'prove it's not true'. And to give you some idea of how much of a stake in this I have made almost 77,000 posts on the official SMF community in my time, released over 100 addons including one used on the official SMF community itself (and two that very nearly ended up becoming official 'Simple Machines' products) as well as tens of thousands of lines of SMF's code. I do not hold this opinion lightly.

I used to believe that. I'm not so sure any more.

I find it hard to imagine general forums flourishing in the current day because I'd long since assumed social media would have eaten them unless already established and thus operating under a certain level of cult of membership. That said I could imagine a space for a quieter general forum in the modern age where the slower pace is a welcome feature rather than being assaulted by the firehoses of social media 'content'. But I think those would be rare and need to come with a group of like-minded souls from the off.

Unless it's a roleplay site in which case Discord is practically mandatory, and the site content is just long-form storytelling that doesn't sit well on Discord because you can't write more than 2000 characters in a single post.