STOP KILLING FORUMS - KEEP THE FORUMS ALIVE

[Im_CIA]

@kerdios @Mira @mrglanet@Erasmus Roterodamnsus@Generic-User @Kraken

Dear friends, colleges, and the vast swaths of people I didn't mention here: 

As you may heard from the last video chat, Ross plans to shutter the forums at some point in the near future. 
In this unfortunate scenario, there is a non-zero chance that BTGBullseye will- God forbid- make the last post in the Last Post Wins thread and cement himself in history- and he will be Happy. We cannot allow this man to have any more smug satisfaction, so I think we should all petition for the forums to remain open. 

Additionally, many de facto anonymous people *do* still comment on Video posts, and Game List entries. Or whatever. 
There's also archival work for subtitles and stuff. 

The Temu spammers will die off eventually, and self-hosted forums are a rarity these days. But with how centralized and policed the aggregates are becoming, you never know when this could come back in handy. 
 

[BTGBullseye]

Sadly, forums are in general a dying breed. They aren't addictive enough to draw the crowd from the more common social media sources. Nobody wants to converse anymore, they just want to post 15 second videos and press a button to tell others they like their 15 sec videos.

[Im_CIA]

That's near-sighted as per my last point. Who knows how the internet will unravel. 
Also, where will that depressed Serbian guy go if there are no more forums?

[GordonBleu]

Where will I be able to obtain my temu discount codes without these forums?

[kerdios]

So what you are saying is we should all file a GCRP data deletion request so our data won't be kept at ross's indefinitely after the forum closes. Am I right?

 

Edited Thursday at 04:02 AM by kerdios (see edit history)

[BTGBullseye]

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That's near-sighted as per my last point. Who knows how the internet will unravel.

Not really. Just as Bulletin Boards died out, so to are forums. Note, not all of the old BBs are gone, so to will some forums remain, but as long as the human attention span remains finite, there will never be anywhere near enough draw to keep people on forums in lieu of social media sites. There are only so many hours in the day, and social media gives a much bigger dose of brain happy juices than forums do.

[mrglanet]

I want the forums to stay, at least to be archived or to be used as a place to submit subs.

This place would be a good bulwark against enshittification and platform centralization if there's a way to combat the Temu spam effectively. Where will people go once discord and reddit require you to scan your face or ID to use their sites?

 

Also, what is it with kerdios and BTG being argumentative?

Edited Thursday at 12:39 PM by mrglanet (see edit history)

[Im_CIA]

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Also, what is it with kerdios and BTG being argumentative?

Kerdios is tacitly in league with BTG for Last Post rat race. 
Based on their rhetoric in the "Serious" section, I suspect that they are Mossad assets, and they're probably also getting sponsored by Ubisoft- hence their general ambivalence towards things shutting down.

 

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Not really. Just as Bulletin Boards died out, so to are forums. Note, not all of the old BBs are gone, so to will some forums remain, but as long as the human attention span remains finite, there will never be anywhere near enough draw to keep people on forums in lieu of social media sites. There are only so many hours in the day, and social media gives a much bigger dose of brain happy juices than forums do.

You're instilling uniformity where there is none. BBS had inherent limitations that forums do not. They are not as rewarding as social media, as you say, but there is a niche for them 
 

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So what you are saying is we should all file a GCRP data deletion request so our data won't be kept at ross's indefinitely after the forum closes. Am I right?

You can still do that, King

 

[BTGBullseye]

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Based on their rhetoric in the "Serious" section, I suspect that they are Mossad assets, and they're probably also getting sponsored by Ubisoft- hence their general ambivalence towards things shutting down.

Damn, you figured it out. You weren't supposed to do that. Now we need to gift you a pager that you'll pay a subscription for.

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You're instilling uniformity where there is none.

Nah, just looking at patterns.

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BBS had inherent limitations that forums do not.

And forums have inherent limitations that social media does not.

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but there is a niche for them

I already said that. Just because a few will remain, doesn't mean the vast majority won't die. There are still BBS running today, doesn't mean it's not effectively dead.

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Also, what is it with kerdios and BTG being argumentative?

No hostility intended. (at least from my end) Arguments from opposing views is literally how you find the truth in the middle, and there's no other way to do it within the realm of human experience.

[kerdios]

Oh, I just jumped ship when I saw SKGers not caring about game vending platforms (steam, epic etc...) dropping support for old OSs without allowing a way to download and play the games that don't require going through their platforms (like through the browser instead).

[Im_CIA]

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Oh, I just jumped ship when I saw SKGers not caring about game vending platforms (steam, epic etc...) dropping support for old OSs without allowing a way to download and play the games that don't require going through their platforms (like through the browser instead).

That sounds like something entirely out of scope for SKG... do you even know what SKG is? 
Well, what am I saying- of course nuKerdios doesn't.

"As I expected"

[Im_CIA]

Anyway @TB Forums4Lyfe

[danielsangeo]

The only thing I'm really using the forum for these days is getting subtitles so I can place them on the vids.  If there was a way to do this, perhaps having some kind of official repository (my Google Drive wasn't cutting it) for subs, I'd be happy to migrate to that new way of doing things.

 

As to the forums itself, if there's some kind of end-of-life plan (eh? EH?!) for it, that'd be a good idea, too.

[kerdios]

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That sounds like something entirely out of scope for SKG...

If you refer to some of the first SKG videos Ross uploaded he does actually refer to this issue, but no one else cares so that's that. Game over.

[BTGBullseye]

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If you refer to some of the first SKG videos Ross uploaded he does actually refer to this issue, but no one else cares so that's that. Game over.

Sadly, you have to start small, and build up to the big changes. Political figures right now are vehemently opposed to any form of change, to the point that many of them will oppose any change whatsoever.

 

As far as Steam itself is concerned, they leave the EOL stuff to the devs, and don't interfere. I would be opposed to forcing them to do anything else, because it could very well destroy the platform that is, by far, the best digital distribution platform ever created. They are entirely privately owned, which is a VERY good thing, and reduces the amount of control outside forces can impose upon them. They have proven over time that they are extremely pro-consumer focussed, and forcing them to kill themselves to better fit your particular definition of it, doesn't actually improve things for anyone.

[TB]

Hosting an interactive platform of any kind is becoming increasingly difficult. I'm not sure if this is a happy accident that works in the favour of large corps or some kind of planned consolidation. Between age verification, the possible repeal of Section 230, GDPR, a growing list of expected features, and constantly shifting privacy laws, it becomes harder to defend having forums.

 

On the tech side, I'm not sure which is worse; the hyper-commercialization of CMS vendors or the increasingly complex attacks that necessitate using something with commercial support. Invision Power (the platform this site is built on) is moving towards version 5, which required a total site rewrite. I'm not excited to stay with them as (in my opinion) they have become pushy with their cloud hosted solution, and it feels like they're trying to shove away the smaller customers that built them. I've also rarely had great success with their support. I'm not saying they're "terrible" or "enshittified", please do not bother them, but it's obviously no longer the right platform for this site.

 

For what it's worth, I've finished converting the site to Xenforo. I figured if I had to rewrite the site anyways, it was the perfect opportunity to move to something more future-proof. Xenforo has evolved into a solid platform. This doesn't mean we plan to keep the forums, but we wanted a platform that could support forums should they be needed again in the future.

 

That being said, we're still discussing the future of the forums.

 

On the topic of spam, it would be great if IPB had an Akismet integration option. If we were going to stick with this platform, I would find a way to shoehorn that in. I did implement hCaptcha and set it to the highest difficulty which is stopping 300-500 account creation attempts per day.

[kerdios]

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Sadly, you have to start small, and build up to the big changes.

I meant no one else cares in the SKG community! So still Game Over.