Eighteen years of Pirate-Community

[Hunchman801]

What's a bit sad about the shift from forums to social media and real-time conversations is that you're now dependent on the platforms that host your community, and content inevitably gets lost as pages and servers get closed and there's no backups to transfer them somewhere else. But there's nothing we can do about those trends, so we must adapt regardless!

[Steo]

Yeah it's a problem of course when things can't be properly archived and a lot of stuff can be lost. Forums are good for keeping things well organised.

[Hunchman801]

Well, lots of forums have been lost as well, but this one has stood the test of time, and should anything happen to it, the community would be dedicated enough to revive it from backups, I'm sure.

[PluMGMK]

The reliance on centralized platforms is pretty insane when you think about it. It's also kinda the opposite of how the internet was originally envisaged

[Hunchman801]

It is! And should they shut down, your data is lost forever. While it's unlikely that those "too big to fail" platforms will disappear anytime soon, the fact remains that you don't own your data. Will independent communities eventually disappear, then? Only time will tell.

[PluMGMK]

I don't think they'll ever disappear, but they might come to be regarded with suspicion by the mainstream public (possibly with the help of well-placed FUD by the giants), which might be even worse

[Hunchman801]

On the other hand, the user experience is usually so much better on some of those platforms than on the open source software typically used by independent communities that one could argue we're just asking for it. Nowadays people call the likes of phpBB "old school forums", and a lot of them really struggle to use them. It's not like there's great alternatives out there, though.

[PluMGMK]

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm happiest with a UX that doesn't enable doomscrolling, and where if I refresh the page I can rely on stuff not to randomly change based on some dark algorithm. Though I'll admit that more seamless image uploading couldn't hurt

[Hunchman801]

I couldn't agree more about doomscrolling, standard pagination is just so much better. Even platforms with an overall pretty good UX such as Discord are absolutely terrible at managing scrolling and letting you navigate to mentions, or any specific messages for that matter.

As for phphBB, it is in dire need of a visual editor (with proper image uploading like you said, something intuitive that would allow copy-pasting and drag-and-drop), support for user mentions, a better mobile theme (I feel that it displays way too much secondary information while hiding more important stuff), AJAX everywhere, SEO-friendly URLs, and probably so much more, but what's the point in listing them all when we're not getting any?

[PluMGMK]

Careful, with the delirium of the Record (and the fact that Limerick just won the All-Ireland! ), I might just start making more ridiculous commitments!

[Hunchman801]

I can only look forward to that.

[PluMGMK]

Hmm, maybe not! Or maybe I'll just write my own forum software

But yeah, the mobile interface is ridiculous. You can't even sort the memberlist by postcount!

[Hunchman801]

A modern forum software that is not built on some exotic tech stack is one of my wildest dreams.

[PluMGMK]

So then I shouldn't write it in Perl?

[Hunchman801]

So much of the web is in LAMP that any other tech stack will make it a pain in the ass to link the forum with other software such as MediaWiki.

[PluMGMK]

Ah well, count me out then (even if the P in LAMP could theoretically also stand for Perl or Python )

[dr_st]

The reliance on centralized platforms is pretty insane when you think about it. It's also kinda the opposite of how the internet was originally envisaged

The thing is, nobody planned the takeover of centralized platforms. It's just that large systems, given time, tend to gravitate to a few very strong actors dominating the scene.

It is! And should they shut down, your data is lost forever. While it's unlikely that those "too big to fail" platforms will disappear anytime soon, the fact remains that you don't own your data.

The threat is not that they will shut down. The threat is that they will shut you down. Right now, things are very bad in the realm of the social platform monopolies - they enjoy the full privileges of immunity from prosecution due to any user-posted content, they are not responsible for anything, yet they hold complete control over "community rules" and have the ability to shut down, ban, and remove all content from any number of users and communities at the snap of their fingers.

It's already happening in the space of political discussions. One may think that as long as one stays away from those "heated" topics, then one is safe, however - it's an illusion. For all we know, the media magnates may decide some day that they don't want any discussions of unauthorized distribution, modding, "hacking" or "improving" of any of their content, and exercise their ability to control and steer the social platforms to shut that type of activity down. Then suddenly even simple fun communities like RPC may be threatened.

As for phphBB, it is in dire need of a visual editor (with proper image uploading like you said, something intuitive that would allow copy-pasting and drag-and-drop), support for user mentions, a better mobile theme (I feel that it displays way too much secondary information while hiding more important stuff), AJAX everywhere, SEO-friendly URLs, and probably so much more, but what's the point in listing them all when we're not getting any?

There are other kinds of forum software, like vBulletin, and Proboards, that have some of those things you mention. However, they have other disadvantages. Overall I almost always prefer the simplicity of phpBB, and most of my favorite forums use that. It's also noticeably less resource-intensive, and therefore - faster.

[Hunchman801]

The threat is not that they will shut down. The threat is that they will shut you down. Right now, things are very bad in the realm of the social platform monopolies - they enjoy the full privileges of immunity from prosecution due to any user-posted content, they are not responsible for anything, yet they hold complete control over "community rules" and have the ability to shut down, ban, and remove all content from any number of users and communities at the snap of their fingers.

It's already happening in the space of political discussions. One may think that as long as one stays away from those "heated" topics, then one is safe, however - it's an illusion. For all we know, the media magnates may decide some day that they don't want any discussions of unauthorized distribution, modding, "hacking" or "improving" of any of their content, and exercise their ability to control and steer the social platforms to shut that type of activity down. Then suddenly even simple fun communities like RPC may be threatened.

That's very true, and since you don't even own the data, like I said, you'll lose everything in one click should they decide to shut you down.

There are other kinds of forum software, like vBulletin, and Proboards, that have some of those things you mention. However, they have other disadvantages. Overall I almost always prefer the simplicity of phpBB, and most of my favorite forums use that. It's also noticeably less resource-intensive, and therefore - faster.

Yeah, phpBB does have its perks, it's just that it could be so much better with the things I listed. And for stuff like the visual editor, there could always be a setting to disable it for those who prefer the simplicity of a basic text box.

[PluMGMK]

I think I need to read Animal Farm…

And yes, for the visual editor, I think MediaWiki has a good model there. Where would we old-timers be without fiddly bbcode?

[Hunchman801]

In the light of that comparison, it's true that I only ever use wikicode when editing on MediaWiki.