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New forum? Really?

Deleted User

So, we were told we would have a 'new' forum and were given surveys to provide feedback on what we would like in a new platform:

 Upgrading the online community to a new and much improved platform 

 Survey about upgrading the online community 

What we have is the old forum with some functions working again (not all, I note, as I took all my notifications off, then put some back on, but the ones I put back on don't work).

Is it just me that this is bothering?

What was the use of the survey and any communications really, if all we get is what we had before but less broken?

This is another area where a bit of communication would have been nice, at least telling us why we didn't actually get what we were told we would.

Parents

  • 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.  

  • in reply to martintheactor

    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.

Reply
  • in reply to martintheactor

    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.

Children
  • in reply to Deleted User

    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.