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Post by defiant1 on Jun 14, 2013 18:14:34 GMT -5
Last I saw, you weren't pleased with Proboards 5 and it wasn't looking like you wanted. Have you experimented anymore or are you just going to wait until it's forced on us? df1 Underdog did a very admirable job of making a test site of this site and trying to replicate the way it looked and ran here, unfortunately his efforts seemed futile. The board has a real teenager feel to it and a early 2000's Ford Taurus feel to it. Everything looked curvy instead of sharp corners. They also made this avatar creator with a bunch of Anime looking characters where you could create your own avatar to look like yourself, similar to what Yahoo did years ago when your tried to personalize your Yahoo site. I can't stand it. We tried for a time to tweak it but it became clear rather quickly that to try and get the board looking and running the way this one does is a rather futile effort. The test site still exists but I haven't looked at it in ages. As a side quest, Underdog began work on what the site would look like with just the generic skin and setup. If worse came to worse, I would use it. Considering you never liked my current skin, you might like it more if I just used a generic skin. If I would be forced to use the upgrade tomorrow, I would go the generic route but I would be rather disappointed. I fail to see the benefits of this upgrade. What I am picturing is a bunch of young adults in the 18 - 25 year old range who get off on making program code for message boards and the only thing I see it benefits is other geeks like themselves who get into such things like playing with code to manipulate their boards. They have streamlined their interface, but it's all cartoony and corny looking on every level. To be honest, it is more flash than substance. The way Proboards runs currently is all I could ask for. I know how to use it and manipulate it. Going forward, I won't want to play with it.I would think the purpose of an upgrade would be to benefit the end user. I don't feel the end user benefits at all. It strictly is for other geeks who get jollies messing with messageboards. They are the only ones who I could see benefiting from this. I am subscribed to Proboards News Feed on Facebook and as the rave about it, I see posters complaining that they think it sucks. Instead of responding to it, they ignore it like nothing was ever said and continue to act like version 5 is glorious. As a side note, I decided not to post to see how long it would take for someone to post without my input. It took 1 month for you to post here. I guess my board is at an all-time low. Anytime I put work into it, it goes unrewarded. You might be the only one who even posts themselves. All other users have abandoned me. Even those I would call best friends. I fail to see the reason to put any effort into this. If a mood hit me to post something, I would. But I fail to see a reason to keep trying when no one appreciates what I do. I also get tired of supporting other boards faithfully and giving good content and thoughtful responses only to see them ignore my board. Sometimes supporting a board is a 2 way street. I've lost interest in posting on boards who don't support mine when they could have very easily. I don't care that my board is dead. I believe in momentum and contributions. I don't want to contribute to others if they don't want to contribute to me. So in retrospect, I guess the upgrade can happen and I likely just won't care. Because no one else does. I think Proboards wants to just show they are staying modern with their code. They want content that can update dynamically rather than a static page that loads. I WANT static web pages. I don't want stuff changing while I'm reading it. There are structural advantages for them, but I find that it's more annoying for the end user. Your Taurus analogy is good. When the car industry shifted to that bubble car look, it was promoted as being more fuel efficient. In the end all cars started looking alike and the gas savings wasn't enough for consumers to care. I knew what you were doing with your board. I don't have answers for you. I invested a lot of time into generating content for people to read and my board is dead too. I think messageboards in general are dying. People still lurk because I post info that interests them occasionally. Overall, I haven't really cared in a long time. You almost have to kiss people's ass to get them to post on a slow board and I don't do that. I think I'm the reason Mike doesn't post here. I think your anger at Cyberstrike pretty much killed him from coming back. Brother J is more interested in raw data about things he likes. He doesn't get involved with the emotional side of collecting. You can't set a goal of having 5 or 6 good posters. If one goaes on vacation, it might be the one that inspired others to post and they get silent. If too many get silent, you have what you have here. Look at the VCS messageboard sometime. It's a ghost town. Several messageboards that were near death... STL, Comic Corral, VCS... all died a lot more when my posts weren't there. At least when I was there people weren't talking to themselves. Even the fact we agree so much about the state of the hobby is a problem. When you post something, it's pretty thorough, so all I can say is "I agree." That isn't a discussion. If someone else like Cyberstrike or Mike has a differing opinion, he's already outnumbered in the debate and will easily feel bullied. df1
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Post by G on Jun 14, 2013 20:16:54 GMT -5
Where do I start? I feel a long reply coming so forgive me. Remember, typing is easy for me. I think it, it comes out on my fingers just as fast as I think it.
We both have mentioned that the message board lifestyle is going the way of the dinosaur and I think that is really a shame. The world we live in today is about quick content in 140 characters or less. Less is more. Attention spans have never been shorter. People have never been more anti-social.
I can remember a good 15 years ago if not more being excited about finding people who shared the same hobbies I did. I remember 20 years ago in the days of BBS's having something called SLMR or aka, Silly Little Mail Reader. It allowed you to batch download all the days posts for that day and then view them offline so you didn't have to use up air space trying to see this stuff. It allowed you to read all the messages and then respond to whatever ones you wanted and when you were ready, you would log back on and upload all your responses. It seemed so much fun back then. No pictures, just talking and conversations. Back and forths. I remember talking to Steve Gerber back then and he wanted people to know what he was thinking when he wrote certain works.
Nowadays, people seem jaded. They've seen it all and unless you have an outstanding produced board with a decent budget and staff delivering content constantly, the typical fan message board like myself is just not worth anyone's time. See back when things started, you only had to be a fan. Now you have to be a database of information that is so deep that they can literally get lost in your data.
I obviously didn't start that way. I started this board as a fan and didn't know a thing about running a board. I just thought I could talk and I'd find others like me who wanted to talk and it would just go from there. I've obviously learned a lot since then. I think if I could start all over, I would have been so much better admin now than I was back then. And yet when I first started, I had a decent amount of people here. Part of it was you and some Lyria people. But also Brother J invited the Valiant Fans site over and I can remember being 3 or 4 months in and having about 20 people occasionally stop by. I almost wish it didn't start like that. It would have been easier for me to take when things slowed down. Instead it started with a decent rush and it just kept fading. And at first I got frustrated and openly complained. Which also turned people off and made them leave as well.
One bad move is when I quit Valiant Fans. That wiped out those people from the start. And then as I whined about things slowing down I got told I was a whiner and no one wanted to read it. I spoke with you about things and seen ways I could have been better.
I understand now why some message boards work and others just die. I can easily see why yours does so much better than mine and yet you struggle to a degree too. But I'd gladly trade your traffic. But I understand why you have it. You have checklists and content that people cannot read about elsewhere. Even a few creators might occasionally stop by. Plus you can go into the straight up obscure. Catfish Comics was a side board. Plenty to see.
Like I said, if I had to do it over again, I would do it differently. I see you and your content. Valiant Fans - Valiants. Lyria - Market Values and Speculation. CGC - Naturally would get a lot of readers there.
Sometimes I want to do something like revamp my board and make it into something like a Charlton Appreciation board. Yeah I know, that caters to very few people. And there are currently a few places people can go already. But not a lot out there. Maybe build on something like that. But it seems so late in the game and so much effort would have to go into it. So instead, I just keep with the status quo.....
I'm not bitter at my board. I don't want to look like I'm whining. I got over my frustrated years back in like 2009. I've had a long time to get used to this. I think one great piece of advice you gave me was about 2 years ago when we talked about the same thing and you said basically to treat it like a diary or a blog. That's the way I have been dealing with it. It just exists. And when the feeling hits, I put something up. I think what happens though is when I put a lot of things up, it gets me wishing or hoping things were better. And then I don't like dealing with the disappointment. So I just keep it slow because every other time I posted a lot, nothing good ever came of it.
I used to think a board of 7 or 8 people would be perfect. 7 or 8 regulars. I used to think this when I had 4 or 5. Now I would think 4 or 5 would be great. Heck even a 3rd person would be better than what I have now. Now I feel like you mercy post out of decency. I appreciate it but I realize what is what. I get it . But yeah, 3 or 4 people now would feel good to me. That's why I appreciate every post. Every contribution. Because me doing it by myself doesn't generate anybody. But when 2 or 3 people talk, it might get others to join in. But then again, that's not the 2013 way things go. Now you are correct.....
Now it feels like you got to kiss everyone's ass to make them post. And I guess I ain't into that. And people know when you're on life support so they start treating you like "you need me more than I need you". I think that is what happened with Cyber and Mike. Cyber was someone I had made friends with on Facebook and I think he had a pretty miserable life. It appears he was handicap and would get bent up over anything that dealt with race, religion, sexual preference, politics, etc. He was easily offended. I even went to his Facebook once and sent him emails apologizing. Problem is, the guy seemed to see every admin as someone to fight with. Which is pretty amazing because he had his own Wrestling Message Board. But he would always come here and act like he just got kicked off of this board or that board. He appeared to view admins as someone to try and beat down if they expressed an opinion about something. He finally got bent out of shape for the last time over gay comics discussion. He left and deleted his Facebook friendship. At that point I didn't care. I don't need to kiss his ass.
I remember with Joey, he got into it with you and I made my only rule. Don't flame others. He quit.
Same thing with Azbatx. Someone I would consider a good friend. He flamed, I locked a thread. He quit.
Sometimes I regret the no flame rule. It served me no purpose except to lose people. My board wasn't big enough to have rules. But I did try and have standards. You expect people to realize maybe they should chill. When you have to step in, they think you are breaking bad with them. No.....I'm just trying to keep the peace. Doesn't matter. You stopped me. I'm gone.
People want to control the admin. You need me. I don't need you. That's when I stopped caring. You put something out hopefully having some place people can come and talk and they in turn want to treat you like shit. No, I'd rather you just leave.
Mike (BigW). He just doesn't make time to contribute. If I had a Video Game message board, he would be here. If I had a site like Bleeding Cool, he would be here. Being a friend he collects comics, draws etc. Well it's not good enough. Yeah, he hated you. I tried explaining things to him and get him to come back. He kept promising a return but never enough time. Here is someone I met at a 7-11 at the age of 12 in front of comic books. And that was 34 years ago. And we've been friends and even best friends for years and years afterwards and he doesn't have time for me as a friend. A few months back I deleted him from my Facebook. I don't even think he has even realized it yet. Not liking you is one thing. But you can come here and contribute. And things work itself out. Instead, everyone wants to be in control. You need me more than I need you. No, I just leave my site up. If someone wants to come and post, just like always. I appreciate it. I always have. I always will. But I realize I don't have the content to attract people and make them stay. So, I just leave it up as a personally diary.
The board kind of mirrors my state in life. When things were good. So was I. I was buying books and talking about them. When things were bad, so was I. I've lived hell going on a few years now. In some ways, just like my board kind of just keeps existing, so do I. It's too weak to gain any real ground, but it keeps just existing. If things ever got better for me again, I would think my content would get better. Only time will tell. I'm like a penny stock on the verge of bankruptcy. It keeps existing at 8 cents a share but no one wants to buy. When it jumps to 16 cents a share, it potentially just doubled your money. But it's so weak, no one wants to own it.
A lot of Big stock brokerage firms refuse to own a stock trading under $5 a share. Yet there is literally tens of thousands of stocks trading far below that. I even own a few. One stock I own is Sirius Satellite. A few years ago, I rode it all the way down to 5 cents a share. Man, that was painful. I actually, out of circumstance had to sell a majority of my shares at 12 cents. Extremely painful but done out of necessity. I still have a few hundred shares though and I hold onto them as one of my last chips to play in this game of life. Today it's around $3.30 a share. Still too low for the big brokerages to be all in on them. But considering at one time I held it at 5 cents a share, those same shares have now multiplied times 65. And yet people still avoid because it is below the standard. I am in the same boat. I think I bottomed around August of last year and literally I was worth about 5 cents a share. Today, I am just lucky to be able to type this message when I manage to pay another month of electricity, mortgage and internet. In fact, I just got my internet turned back on after being off about a week here a few days ago. Being I make my living off of ebay, it was critical I got my internet back on. In the big scheme of things. I'm worth about 15 cents a share. Still teetering on the verge of total bankruptcy. But in the scheme of things, I'm about 3 times more valuable than where I was a year ago. But people aren't going to care about my site until I get it up to the $5 range. It's a long, long ways from that. So I just have to think about bigger priorities and just leave the site existing.
The Proboards upgrade is poorly implemented. I think it should be like so many other software upgrades. You wake up the next day and it's been upgraded automatically. Things basically run the same but now you have a few more options you didn't have before. OR....OR you download and installed something and everything you already had was upgrade. No, Proboards was like...if you want your board to be the same, YOU....AND I MEAN YOU....have to MAKE IT the same. They are going to wipe out your work and make you redesign everything you done. I think that is FUCKING PISS POOR! I cannot tell you how awful working on the site was.
I often thing Underdog doesn't stop by because I upset him. He worked tirelessly on my test site trying to make it look and run better and when I would go there. I would just be mortified. I could tell he worked so hard. But it was unlivable.
I currently have a "View last 50 posts" thread link where you can see the last 50 posts on 1 page. It's been replaced with a "recent posts" thread that puts about 5 posts on one page and you have to click to get to older posts. It would now take about 10 pages to go back 50 posts. Worthless! And to make it worse. You cannot reply in it. You can quote and reply with a quote. But you cannot reply without quoting. Useless. It's such a piss poor job. Honestly Proboards version 4 is a dream. Version 5 is a geeks wet dream but as an admin who only wants to run his board the way he always has....it's a piece of shit. When the change comes. I'm going generic. Just leave it up. Treat it as a diary. Anyone want to post. Great. If not....
Oh well. I'll still be here.
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Post by defiant1 on Jun 14, 2013 21:34:40 GMT -5
You said:
"People want to control the admin."
This sums it up. If you thought fans were bad... make a tribute to a comic creator.
You said:
"I currently have a "View last 50 posts" thread link where you can see the last 50 posts on 1 page. It's been replaced with a "recent posts" thread that puts about 5 posts on one page and you have to click to get to older posts. It would now take about 10 pages to go back 50 posts."
For them, the pages load faster and it consumes less server resources. You click "more" and they aren't feeding you the whole page again... just a little chunk more. On the flip side, you click "more", the pages keeps getting bigger. You browser starts doing more work and the memory on your computer starts getting consumed. If you click "more" enough times, I've found that it can crash your computer. I first saw this on Twitter. I've deleted over 800 Twitter posts and if you want to see computer bugs in a Twitter timeline, mine has them. It won't let me delete some of my retweets. It'll hang up on loading older tweets unless you expand a retweet that I can't undo. My latest posts on Twitter don't even show when I load my messageboard page.
Proboards disregarded the user experience and they are probably tightening up security. All these type changes are exactly why people abandoned myspace. Facebook will do more of the same. Just give them time.
Google is no better. When the web started, the search engines truly searched everything. Now your results are filtered down to keep you engaged just enough so they can try and get money out of you. They are exactly the opposite of what I want from a search engine. I can't prove it, but I believe 100% that Google started steering people away from your site when it saw Whetteon's eBay app there. EC traffic was flooding my EC checklist daily. When I added Whetteon's app, all domestic traffic stopped and the overseas searches lingered. I think the US Goofle cache and search algorithm is updated and tweaked more often. My Blujay.com store gets no traffic. Why? Just try doing a search. Unless you type Blujay into the search field, you get none of their pages. Why? Because it would hurt the competitors that try to charge for a service. Google can't make money off ebay if ebay's users are all moving to Blujay for their transaction. There's a good old boy system in place and they are trying to screw each other over secretly.
df1
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Post by starbrand on Jul 13, 2013 19:31:01 GMT -5
I started reading this thread, but got bored and couldn't finish page 1. What's the bottom line on this, G? Your board will remain fine and running despite these changes?
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Post by G on Jul 13, 2013 20:10:28 GMT -5
I started reading this thread, but got bored and couldn't finish page 1. What's the bottom line on this, G? Your board will remain fine and running despite these changes? Good to see you again Starbrand. Dont be such a stranger. As for version 5 of Proboards, to me it is a complete failure. To be honest I feel like it is a bunch of admin code geeks making a toy for other admin code geeks to have something to play with but they couldnt of cared less for those of us already happy with our board and they leave us no way to keep it the same as we have it. its a damn chore to try and keep things the same. when the update finally is.mandatory and overtakes my site, I will just go with the generic stripped down version and let all my years of work here just vanish. I think that is a disgrace. Defiant1 is going to get hit harder than me because his thread areas have been customized. Sucks they did this this way.
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Post by defiant1 on Jul 14, 2013 14:47:49 GMT -5
I started reading this thread, but got bored and couldn't finish page 1. What's the bottom line on this, G? Your board will remain fine and running despite these changes? Good to see you again Starbrand. Dont be such a stranger. As for version 5 of Proboards, to me it is a complete failure. To be honest I feel like it is a bunch of admin code geeks making a toy for other admin code geeks to have something to play with but they couldnt of cared less for those of us already happy with our board and they leave us no way to keep it the same as we have it. its a damn chore to try and keep things the same. when the update finally is.mandatory and overtakes my site, I will just go with the generic stripped down version and let all my years of work here just vanish. I think that is a disgrace. Defiant1 is going to get hit harder than me because his thread areas have been customized. Sucks they did this this way. I will close my eyes and deny anything changed. df1
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Post by defiant1 on Jan 24, 2014 22:12:43 GMT -5
At first when Proboard 5 kicked in, I thought it looked "interesting". I immediately navigated to the Headers and Footers section. I updated the Header and Footers to get the roll out menu to work. No problems. It worked fine. Then I saw all the formatting errors and weird characters popping up. No photobucket images were displaying. My video section looked like shit. The navigation of the admin section is annoying as shit. They want to sell me features. Eventually I thought "FU Probaords". I didn't want the change. The change is annoying. They can shove version 5 up their @.
I see they haven't screwed up your board yet.
df1
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Post by G on Jan 26, 2014 0:05:36 GMT -5
From the first time I seen it I knew version 5 was jacked up. Even at my most optimistic I couldnt shake the feeling that this is completely crap. It reminds me og when myspace updated and there was no longer a reason to keep coming back. Seeing your board updated was terrifying. It looks like the nightmare Ive been looking at for the past year. That was awful. Underdog has valiantly gave me something that looks reasonable but that awful functionality and navigation still remain.. Im dreading the updaye. I feel like it will kill me off.
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Post by defiant1 on Jan 26, 2014 1:46:15 GMT -5
From the first time I seen it I knew version 5 was jacked up. Even at my most optimistic I couldnt shake the feeling that this is completely crap. It reminds me og when myspace updated and there was no longer a reason to keep coming back. Seeing your board updated was terrifying. It looks like the nightmare Ive been looking at for the past year. That was awful. Underdog has valiantly gave me something that looks reasonable but that awful functionality and navigation still remain.. Im dreading the updaye. I feel like it will kill me off. It was stupid. You have to dig down for important settings. but crap I didn't use was instantly accessible. Then you have to wade through crap they want you to buy. I don't sign up for a free service to buy tweaks. It was totally idiotic. df1
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Post by defiant1 on Jan 26, 2014 17:14:13 GMT -5
It looks like sign-ups for new accounts are disabled. I guess they are struggling as a host and I'll have to find a new host eventually. virtualforums.co.uk/signupThere are some features lost as you've noticed, but it's pretty similar to the old proboards. The scripts I've tried using haven't worked as of yet. Can't get the reply button on recent posts menu that we both want. df1
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