Upgrades

I read your swan-song article at ST this morning just before going out. I tried to login to ST and could not. Have you already put a fork in it?

I'm trying out a "Recent Threads" plugin (which you can see to the right of the home page). It's sort of like the "recent comments" feature of ST. It's ugly and seems to show up only on the home page. But let's give it a try and see what you think. Regarding tech stuff, be as ruthless and pedantic as you want.

One thing I'll note is that (so far) this forum software is "snappy." One of the ancillary reasons for ditching StubbornThings was that performance had been spotty for months. I was getting recurring outages and such. It might last for only 2 minutes but it was happening several times a day.

It was just time to ditch the Dreamhost hosting service, if nothing else. We'll see how this works out here. At some point ads will appear at the bottom and the top of the forum. They're not particularly intrusive (from samples I've seen at other sites). I can live with them. But I will still take donations if (when the time comes) anyone wants to remove them (or pay to add things like more storage for attachments and stuff, although we're nowhere near reaching the limit).

I went online to the back end this morning, Mr Kung. I went to cancel it and it (of course) said it needed more money. (I thought I was ahead of the next billing date but it wanted another 20 bucks.)

So I paid the twenty bucks which I thought might then keep it active through July 16 or so. But it didn't and it's no great loss. Excluding things such as comments, I had backed up the entire site last night. And because of the caching software in use, hundreds of the pages are archived with comments as well.

But none of the old forum posts are accessible. So we shall start again doing whatever we want. Any and all photos that we posted are easily accessible in case there is one we want to post again. But that's not something I'm going to routinely do. And I won't be doing it at the request of anyone else unless they can convince me it's worth doing.

The search function hadn't been working until I tested it just now. It's my understanding that it takes a while for new forums to be indexed by whatever automated mechanism exists. But you can you search now.

And I added a plugin that highlight the found search times. That's neat and is really the way it should work by default. It shouldn't require a third-party plugin. But the plugin is very nice to have a major kudos to the author of it.

Great! I noticed that. It always take some time to gain familiarity. I've got that problem times about 10 due to the behind-the-scenes buttons and levers. But it's not too bad. Forum software seems to be somewhat the same. And I'd say they've mostly made the various settings easy to get to. But I still often lose my way and think "How the hell did I change that before?" I need a breadcrumb trail.

I'm sure somewhere in the fine print the billing date was today or something. But last time I checked, the annual stuff was always billed on the 16th. Maybe different dates for different services. But I'd certainly not recommend Dreamhost. Surely one can find something better.

And if what you need are forums, you can pay Proboards for versions that allow you to have your own domain name. And you have the ability to take your entire board with you if you want. That could be an option in the future. But I suspect their free version will due for quite some time.

With a little money freed up, who knows, I might subscribe to HBO. I'm certainly going to take advantage of their free trial in order to watch Chernobyl. Whether Steve migrates to these boards or not, I doubt it. We never saw him in the forums back at ST. But all are welcome.

Cool if it is.

I'm still looking through what plugins are available, Timothy. Pickings are pretty thin and a lot of the plugins are made for 13-year-old girls. If you want pink ribbons and dissolving cat photos, I can do that.

But the site does offer many things ST didn't have. You get that "Last Post" column which shows the last post in a forum (if on the forum level) or on each thread (if inside a forum). It also shows how long ago ago that post was made.

However, I want to stress that I am no longer the father-figure here. You guys need to take some initiative and figure this stuff out for yourself....the same as I'm doing. I have no special powers. I'm starting from scratch just like you guys. Google for "Proboard notifications". I did. I found this page which shows that there are ways to be notified (on the boards or via email) for new posts and other things: Proboard Notifications.

Whether these notifications are workable or not is another thing. I haven't tried them yet. Feel free to delve in.