Forums and Facebook

[Steve]

Overall if people want to contribute to a community, then they do it on forums like this one. As soon as people get help on FB but information is basically lost and does not help anyone else whatsoever. Just lazy and selfish of people IMHO to be like that.

This. So far I still read Falcon 030 User group but it's getting worse and worse... A 1000th picture of someone acquiring a Falcon.... 1000th comments "I wish I could afford one"... and then it begins... what is NVDI? Why CT60 doesn't use 030 FPU? My Falcon doesn't need clockpatch, it works great!!!!11!!!1!!! PSU recap is pointless! How do I install clock patch? What is clock patch?

Over and over again, I mean, just one google attempt would answer 90% of those question. I remember times when I was full of joy to see a new member of Atari community, these days... I literally pray that the guy isn't a total moron. Sometimes I go as far as blocking such people, I can't look at those stupid questions again and again.

Yeah Facebook represents the epitome of modern day laziness. It's so bad when there are twenty years of answers on AF alone. All they need to do is search.

[mgi]

I don't think FB groups will ever replace proper forums and I don't think they were design for it. I strongly agree with everyone that having all the knowledge well categorised and available when you needed is only possible on a forum with a good structure (like this one). Trying to search for something on FB groups is way too difficult or even impossible. I would much rather look into the unread posts on the forum than scroll through the mass of worthless posts and pictures.

What FB is good for is a local community - there is a local to me group and it works well when people want to get rid of something, looking for local help or support or in a case when somebody lost/found something. This is very helpful and I used this number of times. You don't need to look into the history or search for anything older.

I also managed to buy few computers from local adverts on FB and the experience was better than on eBay.

Horses for courses I guess :)

[coonsgm]

I took down most of my YouTube videos last week. Mostly because they don't get any views and a lot of videos are linked to posts on the forum which are meaningless just as a video on my channel. But even that is like Groundhog Day with people. I don't think people are generally abusive but my videos get very little views or comments anyway.

Sad to see this. I enjoy the educational aspect of your videos and I think that for me, that is the best aspect of youtube (how to's). Are there garbage how-to videos, of course....just like I get garbage advice from some folks. However, as you sort through them, there are plenty of helpful and great tutorials...it's how I taught myself how to solder and perform various troubleshooting techniques on these old computers.

Some folks are trusted sources such as yourself, so it's sad to see you taking them down.

[exxos]

Sad to see this. I enjoy the educational aspect of your videos and I think that for me, that is the best aspect of youtube (how to's). Are there garbage how-to videos, of course....just like I get garbage advice from some folks. However, as you sort through them, there are plenty of helpful and great tutorials...it's how I taught myself how to solder and perform various troubleshooting techniques on these old computers.

Some folks are trusted sources such as yourself, so it's sad to see you taking them down.

A lot of the videos are still linked to the forum posts, just they are not public view on my channel any more. There are of course great soldering videos from likes of Dave Jones anyway.

[alexh]

Making attachments such as photos compulsory to upload to the forum is one of the best things about the Exxos forum. The number of times on EAB, Atari-Forum, stardot etc. that I found a forum thread that explained everything I needed to solve a HW problem... but the pictures were gone because they were hosted elsewhere and now dead. Ultimately it must put extra load on the server but worth it. Kudos to whoever suggested it and for it being enforced.

A lot of people (both users and content providers) that I know have moved away from forums towards Discord. An interesting mix of social media and forums that actually works.

[exxos]

Making attachments such as photos compulsory to upload to the forum is one of the best things about the Exxos forum.

:thumbup:

The number of times on EAB, Atari-Forum, stardot etc. that I found a forum thread that explained everything I needed to solve a HW problem... but the pictures were gone because they were hosted elsewhere and now dead. Ultimately it must put extra load on the server but worth it. Kudos to whoever suggested it and for it being enforced.

That was one of my pet hates across the Internet. So many threads were broken because of missing images it just made the entire content useless. Just one of the many many things which irritates me about stuff. So on here the moderators keep an eye on such things and tell people off or manually fix posts etc. A lot of external sites are blocked by the server firewall as well.

But anyway, Glad someone noticed this ;) There was probably some people grumbling about it at some point no doubt.

We have a lot more bandwidth and CPU power since the server move. But we are not exactly rendering millions of pages every single day to users anyway. Where things may get a little tricky is when I move videos over to the server as well.. But unlikely to be high traffic videos anyway.But that's another topic. Server pretty much runs at idle most of the time. Only time it really uses any CPU power is when doing backups.

Also because the forum has a lot of non-English people, such as French German Polish etc etc all trying to communicate in English here, @derkom Flutters away in the background correcting people's spelling mistakes. Some people complained about this as well. But the thing is, when you have a German talking English, then have typos, and then someone is trying to translate that typo back into the different language like Polish.. It just makes a terrible user experience IMO. It is just one of those many things which is basically "broken" otherwise, like missing images etc.

[derkom]

Also because the forum has a lot of non-English people, such as French German Polish etc etc all trying to communicate in English here, @derkom Flutters away in the background correcting people's spelling mistakes.

To be clear, I barely even do that. I'm not some school marm. :lol: I really only fix up spelling or grammar if there's a risk of misunderstanding, and that's rare. Most of what I do is tidy up formatting, particularly of photos.

[sporniket]

Making attachments such as photos compulsory to upload to the forum is one of the best things about the Exxos forum.

:thumbup:

The number of times on EAB, Atari-Forum, stardot etc. that I found a forum thread that explained everything I needed to solve a HW problem... but the pictures were gone because they were hosted elsewhere and now dead. Ultimately it must put extra load on the server but worth it. Kudos to whoever suggested it and for it being enforced.

That was one of my pet hates across the Internet. So many threads were broken because of missing images it just made the entire content useless. Just one of the many many things which irritates me about stuff. So on here the moderators keep an eye on such things and tell people off or manually fix posts etc. A lot of external sites are blocked by the server firewall as well.

But anyway, Glad someone noticed this ;) There was probably some people grumbling about it at some point no doubt.

We have a lot more bandwidth and CPU power since the server move. But we are not exactly rendering millions of pages every single day to users anyway.

I even posted an awesome tutorial on GIMP (shameless bragging) to get moderately sized pictures to post on the forum

[exxos]

I even posted an awesome tutorial on GIMP (shameless bragging) to get moderately sized pictures to post on the forum

Cool. It should probably go in the images sticky. I think the "thumbnail" is 650px. But the forum resizes any larger images to a max of 1600px. Ito's why I state people uploading motherboard images also upload a zip of them as they all get resized also.