New forum? Really?

I never progressed beyond dabbling in BASIC, got left behind and eventually switched to a MAC. I might have continued if I’d known what I was doing ‍

I actually remember going on holiday with the family to turkey and because I didn't enjoy beaches, sitting on the balcony and handwriting code in a notebook for a hobby game I made. I miss BASIC until I realise how utterly limited it was 

Thanks for explaining. Yes, I feel as if those early days of collaborating through printed hard copies were something that happened in a different life! 

I've been a member here for a while and remember the old forum. I didn't get to use it much really as I was ill at the time but I do remember its buggyness. So far this one seems ok though I do keep getting attacked by a CAPTCHA thing asking me to prove I am human. Lol.

Something good though, I noticed just now replying to a different thread that the emoji bug is now finally gone.

Little disappointed though to see we never got the Reaction buttons they previously mentioned to replace the vote up/down. I like the idea of having a button that means you can like, hug, love a post. Yesterday I wanted to hug a post but voting up would have looked like I was being horrible to her about her post.
Perhaps something you will consider adding in the future Rosie Mod 

I mean, in the early days yes. Facebook was built on php (a programming language) which was the basis for most forums. Twitter was originally designed to work in a similar way to SMS (Text) messaging. That is, according to legend, the reason for the character limits. I've never seen confirmation of this though.

Functionally, if we break it down to its simplest they're all theoretically the same. You've got users who want to post content and interact with other users. It's a bit like asking three engineers to design a bridge. Each engineer is probably going to have similar solutions, but they might all get different results because they take a different approach. Coders are pretty similar in that regard. It's why, way back when, you were taught to both annotate and print hard copies of your code - so that if another coder came in, or you were collaborating it was actually possible to see and understand someone's approach to a problem. [God I feel old...can you even imagine printing off code these days!]

I can only speak to my experience but back around the early 2000s, PHPBB became the most popular type of solution. Unfortunately, that led to bad actors essentially attempting to get their yayas off by hacking, spamming or suchlike. I eventually closed the forum I ran after it fell foul of the type of comment spam that often occurs on poorly secured Wordpress sites. There was some talk around 2005-2010 that PHP as a language was inherently insecure and created vectors for attack by hackers. I think that was largely overblown and like any other coding language PHP was as secure/insecure as any other language. 

My perception was that with Facebook Groups, and other such platforms emerging forums seemed a little too much effort to maintain and moderate. Especially in the face of boards hit hard by spam. Keep in mind that CAPTCHA as a tech was still in its infancy and the average person using an off the shelf forum platform didn't always know how to implement it yet.

As far as I know, solutions like VBulletin and PHPBB still exist. My hosting company even still offers a managed install of phpBB...it does I think look a little dated to modern eyes. Its design is firmly in those pre-web2.0 days. Today, most sites are created with a 'responsive' design - basically the site asks the device what it is, then you are served something that best fits your device's size and type. A lot of forums simply do not handle mobile phones well. Likely another reason why forums fell out of favour. 

Personally, my phone isn't used to browse the internet and never will be, but I'm in the minority there. I could probably ramble more here, but I think that's as many of the factors as I'm aware of at this point. I gave up on my forum when it just became too much work keeping it secure from spam and that was over a decade ago now. It's entirely possible that someone has a better solution out there. I know for example that D&D Beyond has forums that work fairly well. So too do Linus Tech Tips. Both of them are large(ish) companies and yet the forums are trashfires when accessed through tablets or phones.

Perhaps this forum doesn’t work on the same principle as social media sites such as Twitter for example, but didn’t the person who started Twitter attempt to do something similar with Threads? Didn’t Threads have problems with the formatting that couldn’t be rectified easily, even by experts with money? Perhaps I am completely deluded and please tell me if I am. I know nothing of forum design but just wondered if this is the same sort of thing.

That is really helpful to know.  I am very interested to learn more about these matters, because I imagine that the pace of chaotic development in these spaces with non-humans is going to get "mind-bending" soon with the AI hither and thiver....or are we already inevitably going to see AI imitating (convincingly) a human in here at the moment?

I'm not panicked, nor screaming for blood......I'm simply interested on the current realities, and timescales/breadth of change to expect.

Do you know more - in general terms?  I love to learn.

I see the sites going to be shut down again for more "essential maintainance" on the 22nd, at least we've got some notice. I wonder how many people will end up in moderation this time?

martintheactor said:

I don't want to come across as saying that we should just be grateful for the forum without any criticisms at all. I would just like to highlight that forums are extremely susceptible to abuse and bots

Thank you.

I think the problem was that we were consulted, and expected something (see the wording of a thread I linked to - a 'much improved platform' ) - but ended up with nothing.

The faults that have occurred since the upgrade do appear to have driven a lot of members away which saddens me.

Some context first - I was a forum moderator of a few different forums back in the 90's. As time passed I began to run my own forums for the hobby in which I most engaged. As my first self-employed job was in IT and I was pretty good with coding it just made sense. Then HTML5, and 'web 2.0' started to drop. Search engines got better, so did crawlers and the like. Sadly, so too came the age of massive forum spam and bots designed effectively to DDoS forums.

While I certainly understand the frustrations with the limitations of this forum platform - developing both a secure forum, and a feature packed forum is not the easiest of tasks. For a charity with a limited budget to be able to offer a forum at all is, in my eyes, an impressive feat. 

I don't want to come across as saying that we should just be grateful for the forum without any criticisms at all. I would just like to highlight that forums are extremely susceptible to abuse and bots. So for me, when I understand the underlying challenges and limitations of forum platforms anything that bothers me is likely to be accepted as a limitation of forums in general when run by charities and small companies.  

Those members who have joined recently and believe that we need a 'new forum' (per comments in current threads) may be interested to know that we have one, and this is it.

It was 'upgraded' a few months ago.

.

Unknown said:

I'm struggling to see what's changed . It's still  much of a muchness to me.

It's exactly the same but worse.

Well, maybe that means it's not exactly the same.

Lol.

I'm struggling to see what's changed . It's still  much of a muchness to me.

I am just bumping this in case anyone returning hasn't had the opportunity to read it - there are others like it around.

Homebird said:

I have found a positive to the new Forum. I checked all my notifications to get rid of the orange dot and found an initial notification when I joined over two years ago prompting me to introduce myself.

That made me smile.

I think it's more a 'semi positive' as it's rather useless if it's from 2 years ago.

I have found a positive to the new Forum. I checked all my notifications to get rid of the orange dot and found an initial notification when I joined over two years ago prompting me to introduce myself. I don't know where these were on the old Forum. 

Just bumping so there is a chance Lyn might see this message from Sharon.

In the event that you see this, and it doesn't automatically end up in Room 101...

Unknown said:

and the spam filter (used to be Akismet, I don't know if it still is)

As far as I know, it's still Akismet.