General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

Not nearly enough time. I just had to have a thread from 2016 unlocked so I could post a resolution to it after 10 years of inactivity. This is a common, legitimate need. I've said it a million times now how cumbersome and limiting the settings on this forum are though, so I'll spare everyone more on that.

Off-topic: I was a forum administrator at one point, and my guess is that phpBB doesn't offer a lot of granular, per-subforum specificity as far as the autolocking, so MC did it this way forum-wide because he didn't want old support threads for stuff like issues with the browser bumped that might be years out of date. This type of issue is... why I overpaid for vBulletin 4.x for my own short-lived/ill-fated forum ages ago. Just looked at phpBB, was a bit disappointed in what it could do, thought it wouldn't make people happy, plus the people I wanted to appeal to were used to vBulletin anyway. It's not really on him, IMO, it's just this is the best that can be done with free forum software, and a big project like this does have bigger priorities than a vBulletin license or similar as far as what funds go towards.

Getting back on topic though, I think another problem that's going to make people groan is... we do not have much of a social media presence. Most people don't really engage with forums anymore. In fact, even when I tried to create a new forum as far back as 2012, everyone told me it was a waste of time and I was creating a dead forum, because everything was going towards social media like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. And in a way, they were seemingly right about the shape of things, though older, more established forum communities did tend to survive. It's like, one of those things I know people are aware of deep down already, but no one wants to deal with because people here all kinda hate social media on principle. Everyone wants IRC, not Discord. Everyone wants forums, not social media. We talk about how to get new people interested, but there are always these constraints, these principles that tie us to a world that no longer exists for most people and keep us from reaching them. Not saying those principles are wrong, but it does feel at times like those very principles that a lot of people here hold make it hard to bridge the gap between our world and theirs.