CTS

I can honestly admit my Article writing skills are not as good as they should be. Maybe it's creativity or something. I dunno. I have read a few threads here on the subject and I really like the tools suggested to perfect your writing styles, etc. But I am curious, aside from whatever niche, how do you guys and gals get to the creative aspects. I never felt comfortable with my abilities and as such, I am curious how you get past writers block or creativity of the Article content. How much is too much, too little. How do you source your original ideas. I think you get my curiosity on this. I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts. (Mods, please move this to the appropriate forum if missplaced. Tnx.)

I can understand that. But personally I prefer to go thru ten websites than to be fooled by AI that is maybe 60% accurate. I have been playing around with Google AI on search queries. It takes a query properly stringed together, and one more click on that very tiny icon to get to see three search results, and then you get to click on one of them. And none of them seem to be near what I am asking. OR... I prefer to review a page or two to see the likelihood of one of the websites attracting me to it. If I don't, I reform my query and try again. But that's just me. I hate the way AI uses your data, and then obfuscates the links that you have to go find. Just give me the danged SERPS, and quit feeding me non-attributed content that is scraped from who knows where. (yes, I have a personal issue with all that lol)

I don't recognize you by name as you have been in it longer than me, but dang, 20 years aint bad ! I hope I last that long.

I don't know. Its kind of up in the air at the moment.

I'm just a simple Sketchers kinda person. I like them. They fit my flappers well. I do have an old pair of Air Jordons I got for Christmas one year, but they are bright red so I don't like them and so they are buried in the closet lol.

Two words I keep,... guard rails. Just don't cross over them. But I would always give fair warning.

I don't know where I qualify, but I wouldn't mind throwing my tin-foil hat in.

So the question then begs: Do we go black behind a login wall? or just sit tight.

Forgot to add, the cloud is also scaleable to your increasing bandwidth needs.

Oh geez, I was only going by the xf copyright in the footer lol. My bad assumption and apology.

I have two staff, myself and a member that pops in part time now and then as a mod. But I really don't have the traffic to be considering building a team yet.

Trying my best to avoid all of that. Right now I charge FREE for everything and I don't ask for donations and never an ad. I cant justify it at all. I imagine that if bandwidth needs increase substantially, then I will have to (carefully) figure something out that wont be off putting to my members or guests.

I used to host a few forums, but I have toned it down to just one. And that's good for me.

I use xf cloud. With that and having self hosted many times, I am in love with the xf cloud. Your points: 1 - almost a year 2 - the only limitations is a custom server setup for some reason. Yes it loads most all xf sponsored addons. I have even been able to create and install addons as if properly created will just upload off your hard drive anyway, just like xf hosted addons. 3 - My latest small site with addons is very fast as I have made comparables. 4 - I just go with the basic package 5 - unless your site consists of sidecar programs like wordpress etc and you are only just using the xf suite, it is perfect. My best response is, I have my site on a server that is specifically tuned and maintained by xf for their software. I have absolutely no server maintenance issues or concerns. Uptime is consistent. I doubt I will ever go back to self hosting. It just saves me a ton of time not dealing with the server side. Yeah, you do lose control. But you have to ask yourself exactly why you need that control. It is likely already setup. You wont need ftp, especially for system files. And they get updated by xf when needed. You have full ownership of your database, but you dont get phpmyadmin or anything like that. Quite honestly I wish I had discovered it a lot sooner. I have not had a negative for me yet. (aside from the required copyright notice in the footer.) Feel free to visit as a guest on my site to experience its operation. (see siggy) Or even on Administrata. 😉 edit to add [mention=2]Al[/mention] : you are an admin here 🫣

I think when google starts seeing their advertising revenue from legitimate websites drop proportionately to the ai scraped results increasing, they my be changing their tune. Why pay for keywords when the only visitor will be Google AI pre-answering client queries. And why pay for ad impressions that show up on websites from Google when nobody see's them anymore.

I dont wish to poo poo on software that some people still use today. It's just that the framework of it is pretty old school.

Well, it seems the Doge teen geniuses haven't figured out how to secure their databases yet, and is even reflected in their online edits on federal websites. Musk is the one that draws the attention of the bad actors. X very much IS a dangerous place now for your identity to be secure. If not by the bad actors, or even Musk himself, have turned the place designated for "truth" to someplace where not only are you being manipulated but also your data security is under serious question. I have no love lost. (I also will never log into X.) And they think a complete rewrite of the federal financial codes away from COBOL into "modern" software standards will be wonderful. Till all the federally protected personal data (including ss, taxes, and other proprietary info) ends up on a hacker website. We used to be reasonably protected. But we have to trust in the Doge teen geniuses who cant even protect their own silly little social platform.

Flipping websites is no different than flipping real estate. It works well when the market is good. But when the market turns it gets ugly as suddenly nobody is interested. And that's where you find out the original owner is asking way more than it's worth. I can name a dozen websites and forums that had high traffic, high revenues, and high visibility, that when it came time to sell, it ended up in a fire sale for a lot less than originally marketed. Just because the market wasn't there anymore. If you want to do something like this then you have to stay on top of the market to know when to buy and when to sell. Putting some new lipstick on a stale site doesn't always work if you don't time it on both sides of the deal.

I fully believe in the 4 basic colors for websites that convey professionalism. Red Blue Yellow Green Each one conveys a feeling. Blue hints are perfect for this site as it reflects professionalism imho which is why I switched over to the new default theme here. And I like how purple hues are used expressing a bit of easy friendliness. There is a science to color schemes on the web, and the colors can entice, turn off, or make it easy to feel good. Nice job! Looks great!

[mention=62]Ravenfreak[/mention] Think about it this way... 1 - AI creates art, its a man-made machine designed to follow our requests to produce an image based on our inputs. 2 - A camera is a man-made machine that follows our request to reproduce as an image something you are looking at. Tell me what the difference is. I can copyright a digital image. Even one I may have altered. The difference to me is just in the way the human interfaces and instructs the machine to produce something from my inputs. I feel if you pick up a mechanical pencil, you are using a machine to convey your thoughts. The art should be copyright protected. I would appeal that decision.

Something I just remembered that Steve Jobs said once... If something is free for you to use on the internet, then you are the product. The customers are the ad networks.

I have used ads, and ad blockers. I have set it up before, where once logged in, no ads. But guests are mostly blind to ads. They rarely click on them unless you do something funky to make them accidentally (or otherwise) click on them. My site is small, bandwidth needs even smaller. So financially it hasn't burdened me (yet). But when I get to a point where revenues are needed I will find a way to fund it. But I hate ads. As a webmaster, as a guest visitor, I hate ads. And websites that have more ads than content repel me. I dunno, maybe I will open a OF account. But I suspect ads would be more fruitful lol.

I dont reddit much. So i don't really have a feel for the place. But I really don't like the idea of a nag looking over my posts before I post. I like to speak my mind and I know better than to post something awful. But I don't want naggy Nelly telling me, no you don't want to say that, no that might violate rule number 256, no that isn't acceptable. I know most people don't really moderate themselves, but it feels like they (reddit) wants to dictate the rules up front, which to me is kinda a turnoff.

I have used crummy software before. I think I would just go back to pen and paper and write out my texts to people and mail it.

This opens up a stinky can of worms. Art ai created- cant be copyrighted Text ai created- copyright able Software ai created- copyright able Hardware ai created- patent able They can't have it both ways. Either we have copyrights or we don't.