Is there anyone alive around here?

[The Green Groyper]

This really isn’t a forum as much as it’s a hangout for a certain class of Zoomer online right winger.

Only about 5-6 people are ever on the site maximum at any one time. Not including guests.

Most activity is in the shoutbox.

It’s not a dead site but it’s a lot more relaxed and sleepy than some people would expect given the demographic and content.

[The Green Groyper]

This really isn’t a forum as much as it’s a hangout for a certain class of Zoomer online right winger.

Only about 5-6 people are ever on the site maximum at any one time. Not including guests.

Most activity is in the shoutbox.

It’s not a dead site but it’s a lot more relaxed and sleepy than some people would expect given the demographic and content.

I have a related question for you, meant in good faith.

Why do you not post exclusively with the TBC? I don't understand this for posters like yourself, and conservatives of a similar type, who appear to be more common than I would have thought here.

Tunis Bay Club? Just haven’t really wanted to I guess. I thought about joining Salo but never worked up the courage to make an account. Then I saw Salo had gone down. 

I may sign up at some point. 

I’m honestly not the most social person, so when I say courage I genuinely mean it takes a deal of willful effort to engage in these sorts of things. Call it autistic introversion or whatever. 

But I hope I answered your question.

[Guest]

anthony should just start a blog or something. i basically just use this 'forum' to read his posts.

[august]

Most activity is in the shoutbox.

Shoutbox gets abused for shit that many threads already exist for. So we have a flood of low-effort 'discussions' (autistic spasms) where neither interlocutor is even digesting what the other is saying to them. If people stopped using it as a soapbox with days-long filibusters then the so-called 'dead forum' issue would exist no longer and they may even be able to walk away from a thread discussion feeling like they learned something new. Maybe.

[Nasu]

I’m disappointed that the religion/supernatural thread doesn’t get more activity because that seems like it would be the most fun.

It is extremely easy for religious discussion to become boring and stale very quickly. I don't believe that there is really much to say that hasn't already been said, so if you're a bad writer or lack creativity, there's not much fun in the discussion. Take the Christianity thread, for example. As you can see, and much to my disappointment, most of the tens of thousands of characters put forward there have derailed the conversation into 'In Defense of der Jude'. Gemaric fist-shaking isn't all that deeply appealing to many people, myself included.

There simply aren't that many religious people on the forum as far as I'm aware. There's a few Christians and pagans here and there, but this faction or sphere of the online right has fewer faithful people than most others. As someone who is largely a materialist and an empiricist, I've always liked that about "Amarnites." Most attempts to synthesize Christianity with political views that are in favor of genociding large portions of the population come off as insincere on the side of faith, and the Evolian/pagan stuff is too stupid to take seriously in my opinion (monotheism seems more logical than polytheism). There are some people who might have interests in religion while lacking faith, but such people rarely have the energy to engage in lengthy debates about a topic that, in the end, they have few if any normative commitments riding on.

[The Green Groyper]

"The Green Groyper–Striped_Pyjama_Boy_Nietzschean Debating Chamber"

I'll bring the booze, you bring the popcorn and we've got a deal.

[T. L.]

I blame myself. I've been really tired, and have been trying to jolt myself back up by going to some other places online for novel stimulation. Written a few textwalls on another forum with a different class of userbase with mildly interesting results. Really I should just be pushing myself to do my own thing. We'll see if that gets happening. Can make threads here shortly maybe. Also I need to write about undertale.

Where have you been posting? Besides tunis bay club.

I may reveal that shortly. Might be some stuff of interest there to some of you.

So, are you going to do that? I am interested.

[anthony]

I blame myself. I've been really tired, and have been trying to jolt myself back up by going to some other places online for novel stimulation. Written a few textwalls on another forum with a different class of userbase with mildly interesting results. Really I should just be pushing myself to do my own thing. We'll see if that gets happening. Can make threads here shortly maybe. Also I need to write about undertale.

Where have you been posting? Besides tunis bay club.

I may reveal that shortly. Might be some stuff of interest there to some of you.

So, are you going to do that? I am interested.

Guess I'll share now, I posted on Agora Road for a while. My posts there won't be too hard to find and some may be of interest to some of you. A few big Anthonyposts went there rather than here for a while. Had some fun exploring the site. It probably incentivised a bunch of comments about the state of this place and inspired the visual update.

I was going to do some more interesting stuff too but kind of fell down another hole and did nothing for a while. Feeling a bit better now. Might try again soon.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

(Excuse the rant, it's not directed at you and I expect you may feel similarly but I wanted to give my thoughts). Just as many of Agora Road's members insist they are women when they are in fact men with XY chromosomes wearing women's clothing, Agora Road insists it is a return to the old web when it is in fact a Xenforo instance wearing CSS effects and banner gifs.

Many of these users probably aren't old enough to have genuine nostalgia for this era of the internet, but those that are misunderstand what made it better than what we have now. The oldtroons (literal) think they miss flashy glitter banner gifs, but they actually miss the non-existence of centralized social media platforms, and when websites used to utilize pure server-side rendering with minimal Javascript. These people love to focus on visual aesthetics that always sucked; distracting eye-melting animations were always objectively bad. Combining kitschy 2000s internet aesthetics with modern forum software that exists in a modern online context results in the worst of both worlds.

The forum's design also has blatant flaws that generally suggest a superficial commitment to its principles, including a pixel font used at unsupported sizes causing ugly rendering, various layout bugs, as well as the default Xenforo Javascript bloat. I don't recall any old forums that actually had this much visual clutter outside of user signatures (notably, moderators often placed restrictions here to limit obnoxiousness), this exaggerated expression again prompts a comparison with the gender identity of the userbase.

A webring serves little purpose in the age of search engines, the 240x60 banners are only clicked while idly surfing around the page for the first time. This is exacerbated by how most webring sites are a narcissistic statement of the author's awful aesthetic tastes with no interesting or interactive content that would actually make a user want to visit them. Creating useless webrings and pretending people use them to navigate the web will not kill search engines and make the network healthy again.

I can sympathize with the sentiment that leads to the creation of these sites, but by repackaging old aesthetics as fake nostalgia and ends-in-themselves, they are unwittingly empowering the refinement culture they hope to escape. The correct aesthetic IMO is to combine the minimalism of modern soy web design with the responsiveness, efficient screen usage, and respect for power-users of old web design.

[Guest]

I broadly agree with your statement, but I think what you’re doing here is similar to those you hate; pretending as if the entirety of old website design was bad. 4chan is still quite possibly the most brilliantly designed website ever made, and ABSOLUTE TERROR FIELD 2 is the most beautiful.

[anthony]

4chan is still quite possibly the most brilliantly designed website ever made

Shame it's all Mexicans now.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

I broadly agree with your statement, but I think what you’re doing here is similar  to those you hate; pretending as if the entirety of old website design was bad.

That's not what I said, it's just sparkly Geocities messes that are not worth preserving. phpBB is great software for example compared to Xenforo or Discourse.

[obscurefish]

I broadly agree with your statement, but I think what you’re doing here is similar  to those you hate; pretending as if the entirety of old website design was bad.

That's not what I said, it's just sparkly Geocities messes that are not worth preserving. phpBB is great software for example compared to Xenforo or Discourse.

What are the advantages? As a user I prefer Xenforo.

[Guest]

>Agora road
I didn't think it was possible for a forum to get more essential transcore than this place.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

I broadly agree with your statement, but I think what you’re doing here is similar  to those you hate; pretending as if the entirety of old website design was bad.

That's not what I said, it's just sparkly Geocities messes that are not worth preserving. phpBB is great software for example compared to Xenforo or Discourse.

What are the advantages? As a user I prefer Xenforo.

Xenforo:
- Has annoying popup Javascript features when you hover a person's profile or select text (this is inherently less responsive than designing a site based around HTML templates and forms, and it's made worse by animations that feel really bad)
- Has emoji reactions (discordian circlejerk bloat)
- Has user profiles where messages can be posted (facebookian circlejerk bloat)
- Wastes screen space compared to phpBB with greater font size and padding (though if you compare Xenforo to even more modern sites, it's hardly that bad, but phpBB is still better)

phpBB uses space efficiently while providing all the features a forum needs, new forum software has only decreased how much information is shown on the screen at once and/or added unnecessary features.

[obscurefish]

Xenforo:
- Has annoying popup Javascript features when you hover a person's profile or select text (this is inherently less responsive than designing a site based around HTML templates and forms, and it's made worse by animations that feel really bad)
- Has emoji reactions (discordian circlejerk bloat)
- Has user profiles where messages can be posted (facebookian circlejerk bloat)
- Wastes screen space compared to phpBB with greater font size and padding (though if you compare Xenforo to even more modern sites, it's hardly that bad, but phpBB is still better)

phpBB uses space efficiently while providing all the features a forum needs, new forum software has only decreased how much information is shown on the screen at once and/or added unnecessary features.

Does it matter which database you use with phpBB?

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

I've never installed phpBB myself so I don't know for sure, but it probably doesn't matter too much. I'd suggest Postgres is probably best, or SQLite if you prefer something easy to set up that won't scale quite as well.

[Guest]

4chan is still quite possibly the most brilliantly designed website ever made

Shame it's all Mexicans now.

[The Green Groyper]

I never actually used 4chan. Guess I came of age after it had already begun to decline.

[Guest]

I never actually used 4chan. Guess I came of age after it had already begun to decline.

Nobody cares, nigger. Stop posting.