CTS

Great, now visitors are going to question all sites that cater to certain alternative subjects (like Brazilian music and UFO's lol). I explicitly exclude any such involvement in my terms and conditions, but I do expect that inevitable question to come up someday. And yet everyone somehow doesn't think about Facebook, X, YouTube, etc., in the same light?

Let it burn :ROFLMAO:

A new forum with very little traffic (like mine) should not try to monetize anything. To me it is unattractive and off putting and smells like desperation. Ads are like giving away valuable real estate for fractions of pennies. A site I am a member of (QRZ) is extremely popular, based on dated xf, no responsive screens, and has ads literally all over it. But on that site it works very well as the ads are targeted to the subject matter and in of itself, provides value to the members. But their member base is highly dedicated to the hobby. I have to realistically see that that is an outlier as most members of another regular forum would hate that and not return. Unfortunately I feel monetization of most forums are just to offset costs and realistically never do anything other than put off members and guests for pennies. edit to ad: I feel the same for most non-commercial websites, not just forums.

Since I passed the General test right before vacation, come June I will make my second attempt for the Extra license. The first attempt was the same day I passed the General, but I was unprepared for the Extra questions. In a nutshell, I was really weak with antenna theory and receiver particulars. Even though I carried my ARRL manual with me and self tested with the app thinking I would have time on vacation to go in depth, I was having too much fun and didn't really much at all. So I now have two weeks to pour over the info I have weakness in. I am confident. I will be planning my rig station shortly after and start assembling a "beginner" setup.

I met a gentleman that grew up and lived in Roswell and we struck chords with each other. We made plans to keep in touch and he wants to share his info in exchange. I look forward to this.

A tool used as a tool properly applied is good. AI unfortunately has no guard rails in place at this time and the government isn't indicating that they care yet to legislate any guard rails. So the data grab is rampant and unfettered. Everything you indicate to AI and and online content is being taken without any consideration of copyright or personal data. We are being extremely profiled.

We took the QM2 out to the UK and stayed in London and France. I fell in love with London. I think I could live there. We are literally floating into New York as I speak. Home again.

Lol,... just realized we are on the QM2, not the QE2. Whole different ship.

We did. Tnx I was certain that i had all the proper mechanisms in place to block spammers and bad actors. But I always worry. Thanks for checking for me. Stuck using that crappy starlink service. It isn't all that great imo. 5G is better.

We are just returning from the UK and France as we disembark the QE2 tomorrow in NY. Having been gone for a month I have been worried about how my site held up in my absence since the domain name seems blocked by the ships wifi and I have had barely any time to check it while away in london. I should be able to connect 5g tomorrow morning though. Everyone needs a break now and then, and boy howdy did we ever. Good to be back.

Not bored, just been out of the country for a bit. Just needed some downtime.

Well, I'm not pretty enough to use my picture like Al, so an avatar is just fine for the benefit of members. 🫥 As a new site I use a simple "Admin" named account, a website announcement account, and a breaking news account. I do have a few other accounts I setup to do testing and usergroup testing etc that I made while I did build out the site. (I have used them in conversational posts too sometimes untiI i get more activity.) But I really want to end up using more or less a generic user account with a decent alias in the end as I consider my admin account username too generic and boring. I haven't exactly have given that enough thought yet though so it is how it is for now.

I don't have much love for fElon so any pennies he loses I enjoy.

I never really got the Facebook thing. Sure I have read posts on there, but bots, ads, and trolls kinda just made it hard to consider signing up. I just have a hard time justifying signing up to every single social media platform that I come across. (excluding forums run by actual people). Sure I see that limits me in the effort of pushing my site out there, but I just cant do it only for that reason. As a note, I don't use SM to keep in touch with friends and family.

Copyright law (US) provides protection from public works being abused. Copyright law also can also protect works from being published anywhere even if unpublished by the owner. This AI Copyright question must certainly be upheld and not diluted. Otherwise what is the purpose of having a Copyright when AI is the tool taking over and driving answers to queries without a single person scrolling the SERPs. Your public works are being "learned" while your websites suffer and your copyrights abused.

68 in the winter and 70 in the summer is perfect.

Yeah it was late and I just kept on typing forgetting the question lol.

Lmao, China didn't/doesn't capitulate. So the administration decided "ok, we will give you another 75 days". I guess the administration thinks they will suffer enough to cave. We will see. And I hope not.

On my most recent wind-up, I played it by how it felt. 1st, the base settings and perms for member groups. No registrations allowed but public viewable. It was a new unindexed website and domain so I wasn't worried about anyone seeing it. Also setup and tighted my cloudflare instance for the domain. All basic stuff. Then knowing my niche, I added a base set of nodes just to get it to look like a forum. 2nd, I took a hacksaw to stock features. I considered which features were not desirable. XF is awesome with all it can provide for features, but just because they are there doesn't mean I wish to provide them all. Sometimes less is more. 3rd, installed a few add-ons that I felt were mandatory. Digitalpoint, ozzy, andyb, and a few others that provided needed functions. Glam add-ons were not part of this. Operational functions only. 4th, adjust the layout. Stripped out from guest view items that don't provide guest value, and some other things. Arranged navigation and layout for member view. I spent a lot of time hammer testing everything. Probubly spent a month or so to get to here. 5th, start the never ending process of baking in an appropriate theme. Based mine as a child of stock. 6th, did final node considerations, settings, perms. Since then minor tweaks on settings, layout and theme, a few add-ons to assist with layout things or functionality. Some more arranging of things. And of course content. I dont know if I followed a correct or standard procedure, but it seems to be falling together in a way that seems right, after about 4 months of this. Edit to add: yeah I kinda typed my whole process lol. Probubly too much. :geek:

My front page and most other pages are specific as a niche forum. I do feel off-topic areas are equally important and as such I have an area and mechanism that provides that.

Batteries not Included. The big guy has all the right answers.

Since I have been a bad boy against AI training, and after watching the TED video (which I loved), I did a little research on the subject. I found an interesting article with a suggested copyright addition that (should) help against non-attributing content scrapers. https://authorsguild.org/news/practical-tips-for-authors-to-protect-against-ai-use-ai-copyright-notice-and-web-crawlers/ The suggested statement is: I have injected that statement into my terms and rules page for whatever it is worth. Since it is impossible to stop all of them, at least it gives a legal statement of intent. Any thoughts on this?

Thank you much as I have been preaching this for some time. I like that it was on TED.

One word posts are better reflected in emoticons. Hopefully with words too. But I don't feel comfortable requiring minimums (in my niche) as I too have been known to do that myself.

You are going to die someday. Enjoy life to the fullest while you are able. Make your dreams come true no matter what anybody else says. Now go have fun and do something.