fdk

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: 25/25 Posts: 50/50 Formal Threads/Guidelines: No posts in playground of puzzles section. fdk: 13/13 Threads, 25/25 Posts Cory: 12/12 Threads, 25/25 Posts Estimated Completion Date: We expect your package to be fully completed by February 12th, 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

You can check this post of the thread to see your order progress: https://administrata.net/threads/need-threads-created-for-town-forum.555/#post-4238 In brackets next to the package team members' name is usually the username they are using on your forum for that part of the order, I will ask team members who haven't added their usernames to add them when they have a chance so you can track better. I'd guess that anyone who signed up with a @cleburne.net email address is almost definitely a real member, so hopefully the content, while being delivered slightly slower than your expectations, is at least having a positive effect on bringing people in, and hopefully the content continuing until we finish the package will make sure the place is seen to be active.

I don't like having Moderators just for the sake of it personally, I'd rather wait until the forum needed a Moderator or two before hiring one. Whenever I've launched a forum, I've always done it myself. Hiring a Moderator doesn't come for me until there are 100+ posts being made daily on the forum and multiple active members. The biggest forum I run, a football forum, had a significant staff team, consisting of 3 admins (including me), 5 Moderators and then various mini-mods who moderated certain categories or forums. This was at a point where we were getting thousands of posts a day. Up until the point I introduced a new feature which caused an explosion of signups and activity (prior to this point we were probably getting 150-200 posts a day from about 50 active members in total), the forum was managed by myself and my brother who had a Moderator account but probably only logged in twice a week. It was only the sudden explosion of activity (and a few minor associated problems with spammers/general idiots) that led me to hire some additional support staff, and the team did a great job. Rarely would a reported post take more than 2 hours to be reviewed.

I gave up with Facebook many, many years ago. I only use it for work purposes now, on a work account, and I literally only post messages on a group and reply to messages. Don't have a personal Facebook and haven't had one since 2015. The whole platform stinks and Meta is complicit in all sorts of abhorrent crimes because they can't be bothered to forego a portion of their profits to invest in proper safety & moderation features.

I've just filled out my timesheets for the last fortnight, it turns out I've officially worked 136 hours in the last two weeks... that's literally 40% of my life in the last fortnight. :cry: No wonder I've felt so damn drained! The paycheck will certainly be nice in a few days, but I'm definitely glad to have 4 days completely off work now! Party time! :ROFLMAO:

Hi [mention=523]Gophers[/mention] a big welcome to Administrata! Glad you found the place and I hope to see you around the community. We have some great resources and a solid member base here, so it's great to have you join us! :)

What a vocal on the chorus...

AI is a tool to help humans learn. The sooner the majority realise this, the better. AI is currently nowhere near good enough to produce reliable, quality content that would serve any useful purpose on forums, beyond very niche uses like previously mentioned perhaps on a support forum or such. I doubt if AI will be good enough in the next 5-10 years to be able to be used for active participation in forums, that being said I don't rule it out altogether, the advancements in technology even in just the last 20 years have been unbelievable imo.

Rod Wave sampling Ed Sheeran? Sounds mad, but it works!

What is really frustrating to me is the amount of times AI just makes stuff up. The reliability of the information AI provides needs to be significantly improved before I'd ever consider using this mode. AI is great for some things - ChatGPT has helped me find a lot of solutions when I've had problems remembering PHP syntax for example - but I wouldn't trust it to write something factual for me.

Hey krebs, welcome to Administrata! Great to see new people continuing to join, hopefully you enjoy the forum and check-in from time to time. It'd be great to know more about you and any sites you run!

I'm definitely not sad to hear that Reddit is beginning to rank lower in search engine results. Nothing against Reddit itself, but I've always found it a complicated platform to use. Not to mention, anytime I've tried signing up and making a post/adding a comment anywhere, my post/comment always seems to get auto-deleted and marked as spam or something, so I guess I must just seem like a bot to whatever AI horror patrols Reddit.

Hi Thomas, welcome to Administrata! I hope you enjoy exploring and seeing everything this great little site has to offer. :)

Merges aren't a new thing, but I certainly agree that there seems to have been a bit of an explosion of them lately. As long as they're being done for the right reasons, which in my view would be to build a more long-lasting and larger community base with more resources/features/activity than each individual site offers, I don't have a problem with them. Not quite sure how I feel at this time about the whole "one login, many forums" idea I've read about... I remember something sort of similar being tried back in the early 2010s, and if I recall correctly it ended promptly when one malicious forum owner decided to add what was essentially a keylogger to his forum's login page to harvest logins to access other user's accounts on other forums... and I'm not quite sure I'm aware of a technological solution, short of mandatory activation of 2FA (which will put off a lot of forum users) that could counter this at the current time. I think that's somewhat unfair. There can be many reasons for a merge to happen - not necessarily someone "not seeing it through". Sometimes it's a good thing for two similar communities to join forces and work towards "breaking through" a bit. I certainly don't laugh at admins who want to take that step to potentially elevate their community to the next level. That being said, I take on board what I think might have been your point - there have been a few very small forums lately being merged into others, and I personally find the practice of merging old/inactive forums into newer ones just to bump up the stats a bit off-putting. What an entertaining read that link was, thank you. :ROFLMAO:

I've never had to "dismiss" a moderator as such, so never really had to consider this issue. I once asked a Moderator to step down as he had become fairly inactive, to which he agreed, and I once just removed a Moderator who I hadn't heard from for a few weeks. Had that person reapplied and provided a reason as to why they'd suddenly dipped, I'd have certainly considered taking them back on. As for "troublesome" mods... I think it's very important to have a screening process in place to try and avoid hiring these types of people in the first place. Of course, it's always possible to make a bad decision, and very occasionally somebody can just have a meltdown and do something completely unexpected, but these things should be rare. If a moderator had to be removed for a reason like this, it'd absolutely be a no-go for me on considering re-hiring that person in the future.

fdk submitted a new resource: [plain]How to Choose The Perfect Domain Without Losing Your Sanity![/plain] - [plain]Choosing a domain name that's right for your website[/plain] Read more about this resource...

Great work [mention=48]Nomad[/mention] thanks! To other [uSERGROUP=6]@Content Team[/uSERGROUP] members who are available - please take at least a position or two on this order if you haven't already, and prioritise this order! If you need help setting up an account or want one registered ready for you, just PM [mention=1]Cedric[/mention] or myself and we'll get the account setup and details sent to you via PM as quickly as we can. I myself will do some more work on this order tonight and tomorrow, I've been away for a few days due to a very busy irl schedule so apologies for that.

That's great! It sounds like we're a very similar age - I too first started on forums around the same time as you, on a forum dedicated to a website I used when I was a kid called "SwapItShop" - that was essentially a version of eBay for kids to "sell" items for swapits (credits) that they could then use to "buy" other things. The whole system was rather complicated and involved sending things to swapitshop headquarters where they'd check, repackage and re-send the items onto the buyer. I and a friend eventually created a rival forum as we were terribly behaved kids and would regularly get banned from the main forum, eventually our forum became just as popular although was still generally a small niche site. So glad I joined Swapitshop and ended up finding that forum as I think it's rather unlikely I'd have continued on to find and participate in other forums had I not! Anyhow, I've digressed a bit, but I do have another question for you though - what's the biggest forum (or website) that you've run so far, and is it still running?

Oh man, it was a long drive for sure! It was well worth it though - it was a great game, we won 4-0 (expected really!) and I met some great people up at the stadium and in the pubs afterwards. :) It's not for everyone, that's for sure. That being said, I think it's important for people to realise that a "criminal" is just another person, like you or me. We could be, or could become, "criminals" very easily. Some "criminal" offences don't even require "intent", they are what's called "strict liability" offences (at least in the UK), so theoretically, although it doesn't happen often, you could commit a crime without even knowing it. Even when it comes to actual "criminals", lots of people are just regular guys/girls who make a stupid heat of the moment mistake. Yes, there are career criminals and people who have a record longer than your arm, but they are most definitely not the majority. For example, over 12 million people in the UK have a criminal record, yet 11 million (and a few more) of these people will never have been to prison... the crimes are generally minor. When it comes to victims, that part is definitely difficult, especially if they have no prior experience of the criminal justice system. The rules and procedures of courts and the criminal justice system in general are not exactly user-friendly or easy to understand, and sometimes people can become very distressed or upset just out of pure confusion or anxiety about the process. Those kinds of cases can be challenging and sometimes even rather mentally tough to deal with.

How is everyone, plans for the weekend guys? I've had a super busy week, starting off at work and then the last two days getting the house in order a bit, looking forward to going to watch Liverpool play Accrington Stanley in the FA Cup tomorrow (we're driving up overnight, about a six hour journey!)... I'm not looking forward so much to the journey back as it's not likely I'll get home before 9pm, and considering we're leaving at 3am... it's going to be a long one! :oops:

Yes, in case you're wondering, I do listen to the same 4-5 YouTube videos on repeat... :ROFLMAO:

We're a charity that offers support, advice & information to people in the UK who have some sort of involvement with the criminal justice system (whether as a victim, perpetrator or witness). Our justice system is at breaking point right now, so we're particularly busy in recent times.

I'm attempting to learn to play this song on the guitar, so...

If I could get footballforum.com or footballforum.co.uk I'd likely strongly consider starting another football (soccer) forum. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I ran a very successfull football forum in my teenage years, which I built from the ground up with no brand or anything. It was so much hard work and I don't think I'd be able to dedicate that much work again, although I'd love to run a forum like that again. So realistically, to consider even starting one up again, I'd want access to something (ie a really good domain!) to jump-start my chances of success and building a fast-growing community.

The problem in this is simple: trust. It is almost always in the interests of similar forums to "merge" and become one community - increased activity on the one site is better than fragmented activity across two sites. When forums are in the same niche, you'll generally tend to find that most active members are on both sites anyway, but there'll likely be a few on both sites that haven't discovered the other, so concentrating them in one place makes sense. It also makes sense because the more active a single forum is, the much more likely a guest randomly chancing upon the forum through an internet search or advert posted elsewhere will sign up and begin to engage and start the process of becoming a part of the core community. The issue is simply trust. As admins, we all like to retain some sense of control over our forums. In order for "mergers" and team ups like this to work, all the admins/parties involved in the project need to be secure in the knowledge that their "ownership" or stake in the site is secure. With most web hosting setups, and the fact that admins are frequently not just in different cities or countries but frequently different Continents, makes the whole trust issue difficult for most. There are solutions - legal contracts can be drawn up to protect each party, or cryptographic keys can be used to manage "ownership" over critical functions for each person, but these solutions can sometimes present their own problems, including managing failsafes and inevitably, the cost involved with such solutions. The idea is a great one and if the details could be worked out I'm sure it'd be a very successful project, I'm just skeptical on how eager people would be to get on board without some form of security involved.