291–300 of 307 posts
I would love to hear some recommendations for ways to build communities and discussion forums that are a bit more robust. Been seeing a minor resurgence of phpBB sites, as a reaction to the problems inherent in Discord and Reddit. When I research forum software, it seems like the space has more or less stagnated over the past 20 years, except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month). Some of t…
No? Discourse is free like phpBB.
Edit: Wow, they have really hidden the possibility for self-hosting from their website. It's still here, though - https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
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Yes, but for those purposes it doesn't matter if the email features are left to die, such as the monospace fonts that don't render or the message read/unread status that's flaky.
I find it surprising that people use the groups webapp as a way to read the email. Isn't your email client more convenient? Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, but never beem responsible for anything close to Groups.
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> I don't remember many people being upset about Google stepping in I don't remember any former/active usenet user not being upset! Specifically because Deja had a full archive and robust search, and it was expected that the service would be Googlified into oblivion. Which happened, and even faster than the biggest doomsayers predicted.
In 2001? "Googlified"??? Do you even realize this was Google's first acquisition ? Either you're making things up, or you are rewriting history as GP said.
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Can you link to research behind that? I'm really curious how this defines the "discussion" market.
https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/forum-software
As someone who uses a "real" usenet site and reader, cannot wait until google groups is gone. One of the many issues is "comp.lang.c++" items from google is being sent to "comp.lang.c" because a change google made cannot handle the "++". The sad thing is we may loose the history that came from dejanews, I was one of the many people who were very upset when dejanews was bought by google. No surprise it morphed into th…
Usenet still exists and is actually getting better with time. There's not much spam and the only people there left are geeks that care about the topic. The eternal september is over and it's time to start again. You can get text only access for your usenet client (or use a web interface) at https://www.eternal-september.org/ . I post on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk every now and then and get decent conversations. I…
[0] https://www.eternal-september.org/
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221220194002/http://news.aioe....
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/10m9n22/aioe_gone/
[3] https://groups.google.com/g/eternal-september.support/c/Elen...
[4] https://usenet.blueworldhosting.com/
[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Usenet_Providers_and...
Google Groups has survived 22 years. How many self-hosted Discourse forums can say the same? If you're working on a new, small side-project like a new formal evaluator, are you going to want to spend your limited administrative bandwidth onboarding new contributors, responding to feature suggestions, talking to users, etc, or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-hosted forum administration and fig…
The Straight Dope has threads on their forum (which at some point switched to Discourse) from 1999. So given that you consistently have access to your own data I don't see why a dedicated webmaster couldn't keep a forum active for a significantly longer time than you can trust Google to keep any product alive. Is it possible to export data from Google Groups? If not then longevity isn't the right question, they will…
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I mean if you want to say vaccines cause autism, yeah, you're going to get shut down by the moderators. But if you, as an "anyone" who is a railway engineer who's able to write effectively about electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, or are a person living in, say, I don't know, East Palestine, Ohio, or now, Springfield, Ohio, and want to add things to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailme…
Except you can’t. That stuff will often get reverted summarily. There are a group of abusive admins who will defend certain editors no matter how awful they are.
Sure. It's an encyclopedia. It's heavily edited. Sometimes it's conflucted. There are cliques. Etc.
But.. they produce an encyclopedia. It's actually free. It's transparent. It's very high quality.
It's a working system. Whatever the fairness grievances people have with "censorship," on Wikipedia, they are nowhere near as bad as they are on any commery platform.
Yet... whether it's Wikipedia's finances, moderation or anything... Wikipedia attract more need rage than any of them.
Imo, this is the biggest barrier to freedom online. Freedom and transparency make people insanely critical and hostile.
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Except you can’t. That stuff will often get reverted summarily. There are a group of abusive admins who will defend certain editors no matter how awful they are.
Look at the forest. Sure. It's an encyclopedia. It's heavily edited. Sometimes it's conflucted. There are cliques. Etc. But.. they produce an encyclopedia. It's actually free. It's transparent. It's very high quality. It's a working system. Whatever the fairness grievances people have with "censorship," on Wikipedia, they are nowhere near as bad as they are on any commery platform. Yet... whether it's Wikipedia's fin…
