The forum, its present and its future

Chalky

Bridgehouse said:

Chalky said:

Roland said:

Handsome_Chris said:

@Chalky has a point.  

No he hasn’t. He’s just mis-portraying what @digitalscream has said. We all make mistakes at times, for which there is a path back. However people who intentionally cause trouble may find that path somewhat longer.

I was just light-heartedly pointing out that the Law of Unintended Consequences will intervene to bite yer bum   So whilst the objective may be to tighten the rules, the Unintended Consequence is that folks now have a measure of how Olympic Gold Medal-level Dickish they can act and still be 'not as dickish as Drew'.

Or, we could all look forward and stop debating how dickish x or y is compared to z, and actually talk about guitars, making music and sharing a common passion, no?

Forgive me for having an opinion but this thread is in the Off Topic section.  Surely if we followed your advice we wouldn't be reading this thread in the first place?  So why are you reading this thread at all if you want to "talk about guitars, making music and sharing a common passion?  Physician heal thyself

Handsome_Chris

@Bridgehouse you can't have a go at people for having an opinion.   Of course if they have that stupid opinion and can't keep it to theirselves, have at it!

Bridgehouse

Chalky said:

Forgive me for having an opinion but this thread is in the Off Topic section.  Surely if we followed your advice we wouldn't be reading this thread in the first place?  So why are you reading this thread at all if you want to "talk about guitars, making music and sharing a common passion?  Physician heal thyself

Au contraire, Blackadder. Yes of course you can have an opinion, and I’m stating mine in response to it. 

Following my advice has very little to do with whether you read this thread or not - and more to do with the fact that my own personal opinion is that saying that the rules change about banning and permanent banning will mean everyone now has a measure of how dickish they can be and still be “not as dickish as Drew” is neither correct nor helpful. 

Like I said earlier - only those who run this forum and put the graft in should be able to determine who retains the right to post here or not. Comparisons don’t help. Similarly I’m a firm believer in judging every poster on their current activity, their current input, and how they act going forward. 

Evilmags

I must confess I've never found Drew to be dickish nasty or any of that shit. Shame you can't upgrade a sense of humour in the same way as an operating system....

Bridgehouse

Evilmags said:

I must confess I've never found Drew to be dickish nasty or any of that shit. Shame you can't upgrade a sense of humour in the same way as an operating system....

There’s some members here that could do with their sense of humour software being rewritten from scratch...

Handsome_Chris

Bridgehouse said:

Evilmags said:

I must confess I've never found Drew to be dickish nasty or any of that shit. Shame you can't upgrade a sense of humour in the same way as an operating system....

There’s some members here that could do with their sense of humour software being rewritten from scratch...

Well that's just mad!

Bridgehouse

Handsome_Chris said:

Bridgehouse said:

Evilmags said:

I must confess I've never found Drew to be dickish nasty or any of that shit. Shame you can't upgrade a sense of humour in the same way as an operating system....

There’s some members here that could do with their sense of humour software being rewritten from scratch...

Well that's just mad!

It’s a job way beyond my capabilities..

Wazmeister

Well, I’ve been here from the start, and I truly love this place...

Ive spent way too much time (and money) on here I guess, but it remains my no.1 internet ‘home’.

I love to see, hear and joust with some of the characters on here; some are knobs and narcissistic in every way, others pretend they have great knowledge, still others add so much wisdom.

But they are all characters and, in a uniform world, where we try to globalise everything, those such characters are warmly welcomed in my book.

Welcome back Drew.

Good luck Lee.

Im here to help in any way possible

digitalscream

Chalky said:

Bridgehouse said:

Chalky said:

Roland said:

Handsome_Chris said:

@Chalky has a point.  

No he hasn’t. He’s just mis-portraying what @digitalscream has said. We all make mistakes at times, for which there is a path back. However people who intentionally cause trouble may find that path somewhat longer.

I was just light-heartedly pointing out that the Law of Unintended Consequences will intervene to bite yer bum   So whilst the objective may be to tighten the rules, the Unintended Consequence is that folks now have a measure of how Olympic Gold Medal-level Dickish they can act and still be 'not as dickish as Drew'.

Or, we could all look forward and stop debating how dickish x or y is compared to z, and actually talk about guitars, making music and sharing a common passion, no?

Forgive me for having an opinion but this thread is in the Off Topic section.  Surely if we followed your advice we wouldn't be reading this thread in the first place?  So why are you reading this thread at all if you want to "talk about guitars, making music and sharing a common passion?  Physician heal thyself

Except I haven't said that we're tightening or relaxing the rules. We're simply making an unofficial policy part of the rules themselves. Your comments read as though as though you saw the headline and reacted without actually reading the detail. A common thing on big social media sites these days, but not something I expected on here...

So yes - if people are willing to have 12 months where they can't post or contribute in any way, and then roll the dice as to whether they've upset the modmins enough that they don't get to come back, they can be as dickish as they like.

Emp_Fab

So, @digitalscream - what happens if you suddenly die ?  Or have a stroke ?  Or your arms fall off unexpectedly ?  What happens to us then ?  If you're the only one with the keys to this bespoke-built Matrix, we're all screwed aren't we ?  Are you going to become the Ruth Bader-Ginsberg of the forum ?

Bridgehouse

Emp_Fab said:

So, @digitalscream - what happens if you suddenly die ?  Or have a stroke ?  Or your arms fall off unexpectedly ?  What happens to us then ?  If you're the only one with the keys to this bespoke-built Matrix, we're all screwed aren't we ?  Are you going to become the Ruth Bader-Ginsberg of the forum ?

I suspect if all of those things happened to him the forum would be quite a long way down his priority list...

digitalscream

Emp_Fab said:

So, @digitalscream - what happens if you suddenly die ?  Or have a stroke ?  Or your arms fall off unexpectedly ?  What happens to us then ?  If you're the only one with the keys to this bespoke-built Matrix, we're all screwed aren't we ?  Are you going to become the Ruth Bader-Ginsberg of the forum ?

Yep, I need to come up with a plan for that. It's not massively more necessary than it always has been - we never actually planned for it in the first place!

The code will be publicly available, and - in theory - well-documented with comments so that anybody who has a vague understanding of Rails (which isn't that hard) can just pick it up and run with it. That's another advantage of this - Vanilla (and most of the other forums out there) uses its own home-grown framework which (inexplicably) they seem to have thought would grow up and have uses outside of the main codebase, whereas this will use a well-documented, incredibly popular one. I probably won't need to use any esoteric metaprogramming, so I'd estimate that if the torch was wrenched out of my hands by a vertically-incoming piano, it'd take somebody who's already got programming knowledge about two or three days to get to grips with the whole thing.

As for server access... @monquixote has the credentials for the server (although he's probably forgotten that he has them by now...), so that's an unofficial solution to the bus problem. Anybody who has direct access to the database will trivially be able to upgrade an account to admin, so that's easy enough too. That's been true since the beginning, and will be true with the new solution too.

Handsome_Chris

Wow @digitalscream , it's almost as if you've put a lot of thought in to this.  Also it seams that you know what you're talking about, that's not going to fly around these parts.

Emp_Fab

Glad to hear you've considered us if an anvil were to drop from the sky.  In the meantime, please can you consider increasing  the default 'time to automatically save drafts' setting here, if that's possible ?  If I take more than a few moments to think about something, it saves a draft, and half the time, I change my mind and decide not to post, so I end up with loads of drafts.  Plus, if you're typing on a phone, it's PITA with 'Draft saved at.....' message popping up all the time !

digitalscream

Emp_Fab said:

Glad to hear you've considered us if an anvil were to drop from the sky.  In the meantime, please can you consider increasing  the default 'time to automatically save drafts' setting here, if that's possible ?  If I take more than a few moments to think about something, it saves a draft, and half the time, I change my mind and decide not to post, so I end up with loads of drafts.  Plus, if you're typing on a phone, it's PITA with 'Draft saved at.....' message popping up all the time !

If I'm honest, I'm probably not going to bother with auto-saving drafts. There will be a button to do it if you want to leave an epic and come back to it later, but I don't see it as critical functionality.

Wolfetone

WiresDreamDisasters said:

Hey up you lot. Drew here. 

I've done the old clemency song and dance before; the one that goes along the lines of me trying to convince people that they've got me wrong, or trying to counter their embitterment with humour and cheekiness, or simply trying to slip in quietly hoping nobody would notice. I'm not gonna do that again.

I'm also not going to do the back and forth responding in this thread; where we all just beat the horse to death - nay, to glue! Let's all just save the energy.

As I see it, I'm here to do a job of sorts. Which will be to help Lee get tFB onto Youtube, hopefully create content for the channel, and to help facilitate some of the plans we've been discussing in the background. Others will hopefully get involved too. I want to help build something here. Something that will really enrich the community and maybe even give it a renewed focus.

I'll keep it brief. Let's avoid the drama. Clean slate time. If some people can't handle that, well that's not on me.

Yep, me and you had a number of run-ins when I was known by another monicker. I did the whole clean sheet thing myself about three or four years ago and it worked out just fine.

I'm sure it'll work out for you too fella. Good luck!

Jimbro66

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Bridgehouse

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Because we are all so used to getting something for nothing on the internet these days that when we do get something genuinely for nothing (because people give their time freely to enable it) we actually seem to think it’s acceptable to criticise those freely giving.

bingefeller

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Maybe all the naysayers can do it better from their armchairs.  

monquixote

digitalscream said:

Emp_Fab said:

So, @digitalscream - what happens if you suddenly die ?  Or have a stroke ?  Or your arms fall off unexpectedly ?  What happens to us then ?  If you're the only one with the keys to this bespoke-built Matrix, we're all screwed aren't we ?  Are you going to become the Ruth Bader-Ginsberg of the forum ?

Yep, I need to come up with a plan for that. It's not massively more necessary than it always has been - we never actually planned for it in the first place!

The code will be publicly available, and - in theory - well-documented with comments so that anybody who has a vague understanding of Rails (which isn't that hard) can just pick it up and run with it. That's another advantage of this - Vanilla (and most of the other forums out there) uses its own home-grown framework which (inexplicably) they seem to have thought would grow up and have uses outside of the main codebase, whereas this will use a well-documented, incredibly popular one. I probably won't need to use any esoteric metaprogramming, so I'd estimate that if the torch was wrenched out of my hands by a vertically-incoming piano, it'd take somebody who's already got programming knowledge about two or three days to get to grips with the whole thing.

As for server access... @monquixote has the credentials for the server (although he's probably forgotten that he has them by now...), so that's an unofficial solution to the bus problem. Anybody who has direct access to the database will trivially be able to upgrade an account to admin, so that's easy enough too. That's been true since the beginning, and will be true with the new solution too.

Yep with the current solution I could migrate the site if Lee exploded.

Only problem would be the domain so maybe that needs to be addressed.