fdk

I've said elsewhere previously that Postloop was a big game-changer at the time and really helped promote forum use. Many forget that Postloop was initially designed as an "exchange" platform - not necessarily a "content order" service. Of course, it was primarily used for content ordering rather than exchanging, but that certainly wasn't Ryan's initial idea with it. I was a very active, early contributor to Postloop, as I saw quickly how the revolutionary (at the time) technology being deployed to make it all work (automatic tracking of posts etc) was a big game-changer in the area at the time. I made some decent money from Postloop too. I started to tail off using Postloop in around 2015 and don't really have any knowledge of what happened to it after that, other than that I went back to find it in around 2020 or so (lockdown times) and it was still there but completely dead - all the time I used it it was a pretty bustling hive of activity and I'm sure Ryan made a fair whack out of the site too. I'd be really excited if something similar were to be brought back, and it'd be something I'd definitely be interested in being involved in.

I pay for my hosting monthly, it's only a few bucks and it's on a PayPal recurring payment so I hardly notice it. That being said, I haven't actually actively used any of my hosting services for months now, so it's probably time for me to think about whether it's worth bothering to continue with it.

Some of you may have noticed that I "disappeared" from Administrata for a few weeks - and I wanted to make a post to share a story of why and to raise awareness of the dangers of a sudden cardiac event. So here goes. I was playing football on the 3rd of April, in a team alongside my brother (a year younger), when I suddenly collapsed. I didn't feel particularly unwell beforehand and there was no "trigger" as such - I just lost consciousness. Unfortunately - it was a little more serious - I hadn't simply fainted, but had suffered a sudden unexplained cardiac arrest. My heart had stopped beating and I effectively lay on the pitch dead. Thankfully, my teammates realised within seconds that there was something seriously wrong, and by chance, a player who wasn't due to play that day had turned up and was on our substitutes bench, who happened to be a trainee paramedic. He performed CPR on me for close to 10 minutes, awaiting ambulance arrival, during which time he managed to restart my heart (although it stopped and started again several times). Effectively, this lad saved my life - the medical team at the hospital made it undoubtedly clear that had CPR not began so quickly, my heart would not have been able to restart, due to a rare and strange imbalance of electrolytes in my blood. I spent 18 days in total in hospital, 10 of which were in intensive care, and thankfully through the sheer dedication of the amazing but overstretched National Health Service staff, I was able to pull through and recover. I also underwent tests to try to understand how the electrolytes in my blood had come to be affected in such a way, but the cause of this has not been discovered yet. I have been fitted with a device called an ICD, which is a tiny stopwatch sized device that is inserted just under the collar bone in order to respond to any strange electrical activity detected within the heart. This unfortunately means that for at least the next year, I am unable to play any contact sports whatsoever, which is sad for me, but I have to be grateful at this point for my life! This has been a really hard time for me of course, and also is a real shock and a time in which I've had a real epiphany as such in life - I'm in my late 20s, and although I'm overweight, I'm in otherwise relatively good shape - I'm very physically active, I (did) play a lot of sports and rarely drink alcohol. Imagining that something like this would happen in my life so young was just not on my radar whatsoever. So yeah - I'm running out of words now - still suffering a bit with "brain fog" (some of the effects of the events) and I'm signed off work for the next two weeks, although doctors are keen for me to take longer than that. I'm still not 100%, but am eager to return to work and some form of normality soon - this incident also happened just 2 days after I received a pretty big promotion at work, so whilst they're completely understanding of the situation, it's also had a big effect on the charity that I work for as they're all having to pull together to help out with my work too. I just wanted to make this post firstly to explain my absence for the past few weeks, but secondly and most importantly to raise awareness of sudden cardiac events like this. Please, please, please, check the location of your nearest public defibrillator, and consider whether you could give up some of your time to take a free training course in CPR - you can even learn in as little as 15 mins, online, from the comfort of your own home: https://www.bhf.org.uk/how-you-can-help/how-to-save-a-life/how-to-do-cpr/learn-cpr-in-15-minutes Thank you for reading and I appreciate you all so much! ❤️ fdk

What I wonder when I read this is if Musk had to pay taxes on selling the company to himself? I mean, I'm sure he can afford enough lawyers to wriggle out of any financial obligations with some legalese, but it's the most interesting thing about this story in general to me. :LOL:

I used vBulletin a few times back in the late 2000s and maybe very early 2010s, but overall I personally found the ACP quite complicated, the plugin process not very intuitive and the general customisation options available limited unless you were willing to pay significant extra amounts for further upgrades/plugins/features. As a user, I liked a few vBulletin forums, but I wouldn't say they offered anything amazing specifically that other forum softwares didn't at the time, other than the "Spy" feature (a live account of what was happening on the forum). That was pretty neat and I'm pretty sure they were the first software to offer that specifically.

I use bookmarks all the time at work, but it's more because I tend not to keep tabs open for security reasons and there's several webpages I need frequent access to. On my personal computer, I don't have any bookmarks saved and haven't used them for many years - mainly because Chrome already "remembers" most websites for me if I just type a relevant term into the navigation bar, and I don't frequent enough websites to need a bookmarking system as such.

I've never personally felt the need to implement anything to specifically target Adblockers, even during the era of the internet around 10 years ago when they were probably most prevalent (and most effective). Maybe it's because a basic principled part of me feels like people should be free to choose whether or not they want to see adverts on a website. Yes, a website owner needs income, and advertising is a good way to provide that - but ultimately, internet freedom prevails, and the possibility to choose whether or not to see advertisements should be a fundamental right of internet users - at least that's my opinion. :)

Absolutely hooked on this song right now!

When my forums were smaller communities, I always took the time to welcome new members if they posted an introduction thread, and if they didn't post an introduction thread but I noticed they continued to login, I'd send them a PM asking if they needed any help using the site or if they were unsure about posting for any reason. This led to, I'd say, a good 80% of registered members on my forums at least posting an introduction thread on the forum and led to some who were "lurkers" becoming semi-active contributors to the community. As my largest forum got bigger, it became more and more difficult to continue with this practice unfortunately. I'd still try my best to respond to each introduction thread created with a personal welcome, but doing much more than this, alongside the other duties I had administrating the site, was more difficult. I used to still find some time to check our statistics at this point, and found that our "lurker" count was much higher - we were at about 50% of total registrations making nil posts (but with hundreds of new registrations a month), but it was harder to find ways to encourage more of these to become active. I suspect that in a large part, due to the community becoming that much larger, there was users creating multiple accounts just for "reading" purposes, or other sites/competitors making crawling accounts or something. I'm not exactly sure and never found time to do some more in-depth investigation. Nowadays, a use of social media and online influencers I believe could play a huge part in bringing people back to forums. If somebody can get an influencer or social media bigshot with a significant following involved with promoting their forum, that could help to bring in a whole heap of new (and younger, the kind of generation who "missed out" on forums) to forums and help bring them much more into focus. I especially feel this way with the way a lot of social media is going - those of a younger generation, for example teenagers today, are much less likely to be active on Facebook. They prefer more "direct" social networking, such as that offered by Snapchat. With the way forum software has developed, especially XenForo specifically, there's absolutely everything needed for a XenForo community to run as a "social network" in a sense. We have user profiles, following, direct messaging. The public forum is an equivalent of Facebook's "Threads", or X's "tweet threads", or in some ways could be compared to Snapchat's "Spotlight" feature. It gives you access to a "wider" community, where you can "comment" (post) on other people's "posts" (threads), and you can find new creators, make new friends, discuss making cupcakes, discuss relationships, health, sports, whatever it is you want. This is all happening with the younger generation today on platforms like Snapchat - we as forum owners need to find a way to encourage that generation to want to use a forum instead. One of the biggest encouragements I can see obviously, without needing to do much thinking, is that as a forum, we can offer a permanent, easy to access, easy to navigate "history" of all of these chats, user profiles, comments, posts, threads etc - and we can offer all of this information in an easier to navigate, find, store & access way than Snapchat, for example, can. We need to build on this, build on marketing methods to make this clear, and ultimately, onboard people of this generation who have the ability to influence their peers towards this way of thinking community-wise.

The number one thing you can do for security on WordPress, other than ensuring all admin logins have 2FA enabled, is to change the default login page from /wp-admin.php to another filename and thus make it that bit harder for someone to "find" the page easily and just start trying logins. Of course, you should never have a "default" username or password either, but that should be common sense for any semi-experienced website owner.

Thank you for choosing the Administrata Content Order Service! We’re excited to help you grow and enhance your community. Below is the current progress on your content package: Progress Update: Threads: 10/10 Posts: 40/40 Formal Threads/Guidelines: N/A Scorpion: 3/3 Threads, 14/14 Posts Nomad: 3/3 Threads, 14/14 Posts 1stop: 4/4 Threads, 12/12 Posts Estimated Completion Date: We expect your package to be fully completed by April 5th, 2025. Got Questions? If you have any questions or additional details you'd like to share, feel free to reply to this thread or message our team directly. We’re here to help! We’d Love Your Feedback! Once your order is complete, we’d appreciate it if you could share your experience with our service. Your feedback helps us improve and continue to support admins like you

Your account has been successfully charged! We’ve deducted the Administrata Credits for your order. Thank you for choosing the Administrata Content Bundle Service—we appreciate your trust in us! We’d Love Your Feedback! We hope you’re satisfied with your order! If you have a moment, please share your experience with our service. Your feedback helps us improve and continue supporting admins like you! Got Questions? If you have any questions or concerns about this charge or your order, feel free to reply to this thread or contact our team directly. We’re here to help!

I hope you're okay with me extending the time on this order for an extra week than originally planned [mention=2]Al[/mention] - mainly because I enjoyed the first episode of the podcast which I listened to this morning so much, I want to be able to take the time to listen to some other episodes before completing all of my posts. I have some time over the next few days, but a pretty busy weekend/early next week, so may take a while longer for the best fulfilment and the best content delivery! :)

I've been forced to pay to have my laundry done a few times when my washing machine has broken down and I've had to wait for a replacement to be delivered, and I've needed clothes washed for work etc. I don't have that big of a wardrobe, so in these kinds of occasions, it's a necessity really!

Hello Administrata! I have today off work, so just finished listening to the first episode of a podcast co-created by our very own big [mention=2]Al[/mention]! Now settling down for a smoke and to watch today's PMQs followed by the Chancellor's Spring Statement here in the UK... not quite sure why I'm feeling particularly politically interested today, but hey ho. Hope everyone has a fantastic day! :)

There's absolutely no right answer to this. I've seen posts that are one word that I'd deem completely acceptable, because they are at least adding something to discussion, or answering a direct question, etc. On the other hand, I've seen posts that are paragraphs long but essentially non-sensical drivel that adds nothing of value to the discussion or the forum at whole. I'd say there's one simple rule to follow: if the posts add some value, even if small, to the topic being discussed, post it! If it doesn't - shock horror; don't! :P

Thanks for feeling comfortable enough to share that with us otisbooard, out of a technical interest, can you think of a time when you struggled to use a website or certain feature on a website because of your disability? Could you think of a way that the website could have been adapted or better designed to help you with accessibility?

I just got home from work, but that involves using the internet most of the day, so doesn't really count. I did take a walk around the city centre and go browsing in some shops for an hour before coming home, mainly because I managed to get out of work early and felt like I needed a bit of exercise. Been lazy lately. :LOL:

There has been a huge overreaction on part of some admins to this, more so than I expected. Granted, as I've previously mentioned, the requirements of the Online Safety Act could lead to further changes to the law that will place more responsibilities on website owners in the future, but for the time being, the only thing that was enacted for most was the need to have a risk assessment in place. Yes, a good risk assessment would probably take you a few hours to write, but it's not a huge time investment as a one-time thing, that you just then need to review once a year or if you make a significant change to the way your forum is run.

AI is pissing me off a lot lately. At work we use Microsoft and Copilot is automatically enabled, and I can't seem to turn it off. Everytime I write an email it's trying to suggest/change my words and it tries the same obvious AI-crap things. When responding to client queries, I write a general greeting, something like "Thanks for submitting your enquiry via our website this weekend, I hope this reply finds you well today". Every email I write, I change it up ever so slightly, just for something to do... I get that the AI is trying to suggest a generic greeting for me to help me "be more productive", but it's literally trying to perform a 5-10 second task for me... Jesus Christ, I don't need that level of hand-holding! Doesn't surprise me that some in my generation and the generation below (who are teens now!) need this though!

From time to time I find myself reading through a few threads on Reddit, and some I find quite entertaining. I haven't come across anything particularly violent or anything I thought should be immediately removed, but to be fair, I don't frequent any subreddits where these kind of things would be discussed anyway. The thing that frustrates me most about Reddit is that, as a new account, I seem to be detected as a spammer automatically, and there's nothing I can do about it. Everytime I try to post a comment, it gets auto-removed within a couple minutes and I receive a generic message telling me I violated community standards, even if I literally said one word. It's strange. Tried creating a new account too but get the same result, so I'm forced to lurk Reddit and not participate... strange. :P

I love this theme so much! Whilst I'm excited for Administrata's newly released theme, and I'm sure it will be a big hit and become a success in time, I have temporarily switched back to this theme as I just love it so much and have gotten so used to it. As I've said elsewhere, I'm also not the best at dealing with change, so baby steps! :LOL: