Future Direction of the Forums?

[IanB]

Serra's letter is an interesting coincidence. And I hope you'll allow me to comment as a long-time mostly-lurker who hasn't earned his stripes by volt-modding everything or playing with LN2...

As a more general user rather than an Xtreme one, I do come here to find information and occasionally post in my limited area of interest/experience (storage). I think that probably makes me fairly representative of a large number of users that are on the fringe of Xtreme, following and enjoying the circus but dipping our toes in carefully. Yeah, I've done some water-cooling and I built my own case from scratch. But I'm not a gamer so I don't really follow the hyper-active fanboy discussions on GPU releases, which represent another very distinct large group of users you have here. My overall reaction to Serra's points is that they are mostly good, and would make sense for a general browser of the site rather than an Xtremely committed one who is usually active in very particular areas. For expanding general userbase and improving forum health, that seems to be a good direction.

My concern as a general user would be the idea of non-mods having ban powers of ANY kind. Given the level of passion raised by some subjects (Intel/AMD, AMD/nVidia, Apple vs everyone else) that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Clear hierarchies of trust and responsibility are necessary for a reason. I'm the owner of my own forum, but I don't expect to be able to police this one as a mere user, and I would find it utterly unacceptable to be subject to the whims of a non-mod given ban powers. That's not the social contract I signed up for with this site. But I do recognise the difficulty of recruiting and keeping enough good mods to police a forum of this size and activity. As long as there are buttons to refer posts of concern to the mods, and these reports are actively checked, I don't see that there is an issue.

Over the years the forum structure has definitely evolved some very strange and now apparently useless appendages that could be culled. However, I'd be loathe to see any loss of the Storage area as a distinct subsection, since that is my area of particular interest, and I feel it is important enough that it should not be pushed into "general hardware". It's an area that's fast changing and contains some essential reference information, and is often cited on Anandtech for the the long-term SSD durability testing that's been done by users there, which is certainly Xtreme! It certainly shouldn't be any less prominent in the listings than cases and case mods! But there does need to be some work done there to consolidate and fix the database - the Storage section under general hardware supposedly has 3922 threads in the listing, but only 9 are showing. Something is very wrong there. Whether or not there really are only 9 threads left, then moving them all to the main Xtreme Storage subforum would seem to be sensible.

Given the size and visibility of this forum, you can't avoid being a target for spammers. But writing your own captcha mod is really the best way to block bots. Relying on third-party implementations means you are subject to any weaknesses or exploits there (and the whims of their server) - and issues outside your control when they do updates, such as the change to one common captcha system that had to be rolled back a year or so ago because the images were impossible to read, so no-one could get through it. A widely-used captcha system is a focus for attack, for the same reasons Windows has traditionally been a focus for virus authors. Writing your own means someone has to write their own bot hack against it from scratch, which is time-consuming and likely not worth the effort. (That was what I offered to do for you before and was ignored.) It's also relatively easy to mod the verification routines to check for (and dump) particular patterns of email addresses, sign-up names etc. that you detect as being likely spam sources. But this does take some willingness to mod your code, which affects the ease of updating the board afterwards.

Serra is right, though - forcing payment to join simply as a substitute for a good captcha to protect join-ups is crazy... I'd never have joined if that had been in operation when I did.

Thanks for listening.