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[Yoink]

If y'all convince Today to change the forum software I'm outta here.
Most forums are pure cancer. The current setup is probably as close to ideal as I've seen.


...We should start a Bay12 Habbo Hotel room.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Many have been here since before DF and by extension these forums were well populated, and will be long after bulletin boards aren't used. Memebers come and go.

There truly is a zen in lurking.

I for one propose we scrap the entire bulletin board system and main usenet chats for all of our communication. These kids and their notifications nowadays.

[Silverthrone]

Confession:

I am an old Escapist refugee, in disguise. Well, it is more in the nature that I decided one day to stop lurking and start 'contributing' to the Bay, a long while after the former playground became uninhabitable.

From this perspective, the Bay looks quite live and healthy. Perhaps not to the degree that it was, but this sort of forum environment, as lovely as it is, is no longer in step with the times. It is all reddits and snap-chats and so forth.
That does not particularly matter. Even if a good old forum is not what it once was, it can be very lovely indeed. The pond might shrink, but for the creatures that prefers such an environment to the modern up-down vote stream, it will still be a good pond.

But let us hope that no one drains it to fill a cistern.

If y'all convince Today to change the forum software I'm outta here.
Most forums are pure cancer. The current setup is probably as close to ideal as I've seen.


...We should start a Bay12 Habbo Hotel room.

Good heavens, imagine a hotel run on Fortress logic. My word... Of course, the absence of magma and wild animals will put a stop to the worst excesses, but one shudders to imagine what could replace them. Well. One shudders in fear, and shivers in delight.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Are there any forums that don't look good when we set the bar at the Escapist forums?

[Strife26]

Anyone else remember the days back before anyone had avatars?

[FallacyofUrist]

The forum doesn't look very dying to me, overall.

In the mafia subforums, not so much. /subtle advertisement

[Flying Dice]

I generally like this format, but I'd kill for a working search function, and threadmarks would be wonderful for forum games. We don't really need thread alerts in the way that SB/SV do (except for community fort threads, they desperately need them), but alerts when you're quoted or addressed by your UN are lovely for continuing conversations and responding to questions. I wouldn't be adverse to Xenforo if it was stripped of the fucking "like" feature and other extraneous crap.

What is this even for

It's for monospaced text.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

As a member for just over 7 years now, I have to say nothing seems out of the ordinary.

[Criptfeind]

* Criptfeind had to look up what threadmarks are.

Looks pretty interesting, their function seems to be served by simply linking to the post in question in most cases. But it couldn't hurt I guess.

The broken search function is the worst though. Come on SMF. Whatcha playing at?

[Baffler]

Yeah, fixing search would be nice. But while threadmarking MIGHT be useful, links in the OP and updating the thread title does the job well enough, and unlike threadmarking it doesn't come packed with a big pile of other cancerous features.

[Arx]

I think it is quieter around here than it used to be, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's dying. There's just been... a sort of generational departure, in a way. People come, people go, some of them post more than others.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, fixing search would be nice. But while threadmarking MIGHT be useful, links in the OP and updating the thread title does the job well enough, and unlike threadmarking it doesn't come packed with a big pile of other cancerous features.

I think it clearly does not. While in principle it works, the difference in effort between clicking "mark post" and doing the whole copy/paste/format rigamarole in the OP is such that I only rarely see people doing it even in fortress threads.

Now, that might be tolerable if not for the goddamn broken search function. It's not uncommon for me to be pulling a reverse mad libs with the search function trying to remember specific words from a post I read months ago which are unique enough to show up on the first page, since all other pages only work when the bones of the oracles say so.

It's been like this for years now. Are you still confident they're going to fix it? Sure, they patched that one catastrophic update that broke a bunch of people's top menus (among other weird shit), but this has gone through more than one new build and remained unresolved. SMF looks to me like a software on the decline, which will not remain in immaculate preservation but only decline further as browsers change and the SMF team's commitment wavers.

I still see corrupted text results in my searches every once in a while.

[Loud Whispers]

I think it is quieter around here than it used to be, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's dying. There's just been... a sort of generational departure, in a way. People come, people go, some of them post more than others.

Pretty much this. The forums still live, the DF boards I feel produce less discussion than they did, but are still pretty lively. General discussion I find is still very lively too, though I don't think there is an unspoken tension, I think that it's mostly just business as usual when it regards politics and the tensions arising from flame wars and stuff.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I don't think the search function is really part of people leaving?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

A person does not search for something, have the search crash, then pull an infomercial and throw their monitor out the window. But what does happen is that people are encouraged to host forum activities elsewhere or just never start them because they can't get useful searches, among other inadequacies in SMF.

People don't stick around to run forum games and create stuff, then other people stop sticking around to partake of those things. Overall attendance drops rapidly as a result. It's the kind of thing that could threaten DF's livelihood if it gets bad enough.