The truth about the new forum

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Octavious
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#21 Post by Octavious » Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:36 am

You will note here a fine example of diplomatic lessons that the forum used to teach on a regular basis. Wusti has made a post about "bagging some idiot" and with beautiful comic irony managed to misspell the word "their" in the same sentence. To a lot of people the urge to make an issue of this in a back and forth would be overwhelming, yet the experienced diplomacy forumite and player of the game knows this will be seen as petty, and so chooses not to.
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rdrivera2005
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#22 Post by rdrivera2005 » Sun Feb 09, 2020 1:30 pm

I think you all are missing the point that jmo clearly stated. This site is a diplomacy site with a forum as a good extra feature. When the forum started to make the site unstable there were three options:
a)close the forum;
b)rebuild the forum, which cost money and other resources that are better used on other things;
c)migrate to a stable and scalable new forum.


The obvious choice on the site admin perspective is c, as any other approach is just nostalgy. Get over it.
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Octavious
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#23 Post by Octavious » Sun Feb 09, 2020 2:42 pm

I can accept the argument that the old forum was causing problems to the site mechanics and had to be brought to an end. Although that argument is perhaps weakened by the fact that the old forum is still up and running (but rather hard to find) and I am currently winning the last person to post wins thread which is alive and well in exile.

What is perhaps harder to accept is the design of the new forum, which is a poor copy of Playdip's with fewer features. What has been difficult to accept are the rules that have lowered the quality and range of debate. What has been a constant irritation has been the removal of the politics thread to the forum broom cupboard, which was a blatant and largely successful attempt to kill off even civil forms of lively debate.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#24 Post by flash2015 » Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:43 pm

GalahadIII wrote:
Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:38 am
I've always found it difficult to post things. Generally, words, though flowing freely, are a kind of weapon and must be weighed with care. Debates are challenging because it has always felt to me that people rarely change. And when they do, it is in such a small way, that progress it often snapped backwards to less than ideal behavior. And when I debate someone and I fail to get them to move, it someone feels although I have failed the concept of "reason." That I used such careful words, and yet it wasn't enough. Despite how strange that might sound. My first Facebook "debate" was between a *cough* idiot (a joke perhaps) and myself and rather made me far more reticent over the internet. Yet I am here, perhaps a changin', perhaps a regressin'. Like I was when dealing with the recent Honesty vs Deception discussion. Yet a true debater must prove himself capable of taking a side that he personally despises.
If you go into any internet debate assuming you can change someone's mind, you are just going to disappoint yourself. Trying hard to "win" a debate often just hardens peoples opinions rather than changing them. I personally see debates as an opportunity for me to learn something or at the very least better understand where someone's opinion comes from, even if I don't agree.

In reality few people are really interested in debate because as you have said it takes work! Making a well thought out argument is time consuming. What of course we are arguing about losing here isn't really debate. It is missing drama and trolling, people getting upset and saying silly things and people throwing insults at each other (when you start throwing insults it usually means you have no rational argument). There are of course plenty of places on the internet when you can go trolling. I personally think the site is better for it that this stuff is largely gone.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#25 Post by e.m.c^42 » Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:15 pm

Man, regardless of whether bb believe what he posts or not, he's decently effective at getting other people to talk lol
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#26 Post by e.m.c^42 » Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:24 pm

flash2015 wrote:
Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:43 pm
It is missing drama and trolling, people getting upset and saying silly things and people throwing insults at each other (when you start throwing insults it usually means you have no rational argument).
People miss that delicious, delicious ::popcorn:: of watching idiots, and the eventual, highly satisfying banhammer smashdown.

Which is a sensation that can't necessarily be disagreed with :v
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#27 Post by brainbomb » Sun Feb 09, 2020 7:22 pm

point is, jmo admitted vdip forum can sustain 35 more years of staying the same. So what hes saying is, webdip jumped the gun, we couldve just told vdip to shove it, and hand over their forum. Then we couldve forced vdip to use this ugly pcp forum.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#28 Post by brainbomb » Sun Feb 09, 2020 7:23 pm

but no, instead we gotta use the uggo forum and vdip gets to keep status quo just because theyre all prim and proper folk who only discuss variants and game outcomes.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#29 Post by Donny Dude » Sun Feb 09, 2020 7:44 pm

No, Brainbomb that is not how math or coding works, I think. Also, more traffic means a different manner must be used.
Did you expect this website to never change and just remain how you like it?
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#30 Post by flash2015 » Sun Feb 09, 2020 7:58 pm

e.m.c^42 wrote:
Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:24 pm
flash2015 wrote:
Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:43 pm
It is missing drama and trolling, people getting upset and saying silly things and people throwing insults at each other (when you start throwing insults it usually means you have no rational argument).
People miss that delicious, delicious ::popcorn:: of watching idiots, and the eventual, highly satisfying banhammer smashdown.

Which is a sensation that can't necessarily be disagreed with :v
I think it is a big like junk food though...superficially appealing but ultimately unsatisfying and downright harmful longer term.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#32 Post by bo_sox48 » Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:40 pm

Octavious wrote:
Sun Feb 09, 2020 2:42 pm
I can accept the argument that the old forum was causing problems to the site mechanics and had to be brought to an end. Although that argument is perhaps weakened by the fact that the old forum is still up and running (but rather hard to find) and I am currently winning the last person to post wins thread which is alive and well in exile.
From a software standpoint, that doesn't change the facts at all. You just have to understand the software in order to understand why it was necessary. The old forum simply running is not the issue. The capacity at which it runs is the issue. There is a certain point where the load the forum places on the site is too much, and that load increases as more is posted. That's why we had to wipe a bunch of the old stuff off the old forum. The more that gets posted on the old forum, the closer we theoretically become to having to go down that road again, but it's gonna be awhile. It wasn't designed to handle what we pushed to it over time, and rebuilding it was not feasible with our resources.
Octavious wrote:
Sun Feb 09, 2020 2:42 pm
What is perhaps harder to accept is the design of the new forum, which is a poor copy of Playdip's with fewer features.
I'm always down for having a conversation about what can make it work better. I used Playdip as a model for our forum architecture, trying to determine what worked for them and what didn't, but I also took a look at a couple dozen other forums that use what we use for this one to see how much is too much, too little, doesn't get used, etc. I don't have any attachment to what we have now, so if you have better ideas, let's talk about it.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#33 Post by Wusti » Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:13 am

Octavious wrote:
Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:36 am
You will note here a fine example of diplomatic lessons that the forum used to teach on a regular basis. Wusti has made a post about "bagging some idiot" and with beautiful comic irony managed to misspell the word "their" in the same sentence. To a lot of people the urge to make an issue of this in a back and forth would be overwhelming, yet the experienced diplomacy forumite and player of the game knows this will be seen as petty, and so chooses not to.
The newfound sense of discipline is somewhat disappointing.

Aside from the planted "nether-region of empire" difficulty with the English there, their and they're (to give a decent surface area for returning effective banter), your response was shadow of the former vitriol you used to evidence.

One can only hope that an intentful return to hosing down the self-importance of so many of the usual suspects on this forum will decrease BB's disappointment.

I suspect however, that my posting enthusiasm will wane very quickly, when the banality of most of the content on this forum reasserts itself.

One thread does not a forum make.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#34 Post by MajorMitchell » Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:41 am

I adamantly disagree with the proposition that the new Forum with more Decorum is significantly "less fun" than the old Forum.
Look at this thread, beloved Dipbro Brainbomb renamed Octavious as Octopus and got away with it.
Good old Octavious our Oracular Octopus.
I think there's a lot of reminiscing with rose tinted glasses going on.

Nothing unusual in that, as I hear the delicately​ strident and amourously bellicose commands emanating from my Adorable Fire Breathing MemSahib Her Serene Imperiousness Indoors lounging on a sofa eating cakes I fondly reminisce upon those halcyon days of the 1960's and construct an image of my Adorable Fire Breathing MemSahib that has similarly undergone a fair degree of revisionism.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#35 Post by Wusti » Mon Feb 10, 2020 7:04 am

You're confusing your colonies MM. We're from the Anitpodes, not the Jewel in the Crown.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#36 Post by MajorMitchell » Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:42 am

Well our own (WebDiplomacy) Xi Jinping recently declared that he was taking over the Forum "effective immediately" & that's turned out to be an insipid coup d'etat.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#37 Post by TheMadMonarch » Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:21 pm

RoganJosh wrote:
Sat Feb 08, 2020 6:08 am
The most exciting thing that happened on vDip's forum last week was that someone realized that the v in vDip stands for "variant."
And I was very proud of that realization!
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#38 Post by stefanodangello » Thu Feb 13, 2020 4:30 pm

Throwing my two cents in, I do remember there were many instances of the forum being far from welcoming, and people being rude, especially towards women. Issues that should have been addressed and, well, in a way, were addressed.

I have no clue about the reasons for the overall change in how it works (not the decorum thing, manners I can understand), as I'm not exactly and expert on tech. Yet, I do feel this new format is less inviting and less natural to use.

Even if I seldom wrote things, I usually kept track of major debates, and often got to know news from Europe/US through the forum. It was always thriving with new posts/comments, which, being shown to my left, were so visible and near that I often read threads instead of answering press. I liked that, and the way it was organized.

I'm sure there are many reasons for the change, but I certainly liked its previous structure better.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#39 Post by alexintour » Fri Feb 14, 2020 12:38 pm

New Forum is a great thing! That's all everyone needs to know.
brainbomb wrote:
Sat Feb 08, 2020 1:53 am
you can buy more storage space pretty dirt cheap on just about any web hosting service. its like 400 bucks a year for 1 billion forum posts worth of data on some providers.
I don't see a donor star of whatever color in the profile of the poster.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#40 Post by Octavious » Fri Feb 14, 2020 1:29 pm

alexintour wrote:
Fri Feb 14, 2020 12:38 pm
I don't see a donor star of whatever color in the profile of the poster.
Members should be aware that it is perfectly possible to donate without choosing to display a star badge. It is therefore probably a good idea not to make a big issue of who does and who doesn't have a badge, as you may end up looking rather foolish.
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