think tank forum

ttf is roughly down to phi_, bluet, nestor, carpetsmoker, and myself.

what's the next move?
(a) fix and open registration, get fresh blood
(b) ride it out with this crew
(c) fade out
(d) shut down

I think that no matter what we plan a combination of (b) followed by (c) will happen... In fact, (c) is already in progress, I think, with just several posts every week (and even quite a few weeks without any posts at all).

Facebook is where most people moved to, I guess ... Most forums I frequent(ed) are dead or dying it seems.

ride it out! facebook will never take me!

yeah, i think there is a place for long-form discussion like this. facebook isn't a good place for it. reddit seems to stay relevant.

but yeah, it may never be popular again. unless web 1.0 becomes hip again...

web 1.0! i can't believe i'm yelling at kids on my lawn already, i'm not even 30

do you think web 1.0 will come back around?

static website generators are pretty hot right now, and these could be considered a web 1.0 technology, based on wikipedia's guidelines (ref). i've been wanting to work on one myself. kinda reminds me of a flat-file guestbook coded in perl, which i fondly remember coding back around 1997.

wouldn't it be pretty hip to have a copy of Creating Killer Web Sites on one's bookshelf? i never had that book. but i remember loving and writing extensively in the margins of my copy of Web Design in a Nutshell. i'm trying to figure out what book on CGI/Perl i liked. i had a copy of Learning Perl, but it was pretty difficult for me to grasp.

are you yelling at kids already? :]

don't forget, i have no technical skills, i just happened to buy a thinkpad ten years ago :)

Re: web 1.0, Last year I actually went to some effort to make my website as "Web 1.0" as I could make; it will embed all the CSS on every page (not that much of it though). If you save one page and access it without internet it'll look exactly the same (well, almost, since I do load a webfont since I rather like the Baskerville font).

I don't have a Facebook account any longer. So unless we exchange phone numbers I'm in the wind, so to speak. I vote open registration back up and see what happens. Even if it fades out with us, who cares? It was always kind of about us plus a few people we've lost anyway. And a working example of the platform I guess, but it was still us regardless. Things end, and I'd be sad to see ttf go, but might as well have fun with it while we can.

Or you can transition any development into making it as private and secure as possible.... Thinktankforum.onion, yo

> If you save one page and access it without internet it'll look exactly the same

i think that's pretty cool. and that we treasure stuff like this is what kinda makes us similar

i've minimized my use of google technology, which is occasionally difficult, as my girlfriend uses google for everything. she doesn't understand why i avoid it and it just seems to annoy her.

--

yeah, i'll try to figure out some captcha shit and open up registration someday. i don't really want to shut it down either

it seems you've accidentally implemented the current best practice, too, Carpetsmoker: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/InlineCSS

i thought the bots that registered were kinda interesting

can't we open registration, without captcha, and just close it again if it gets too botty?

yeah, i think that's reasonable. i'd just want to be able to manage/delete threads before opening registration.

that's an easier goal to work towards. i'll do that!

Just adding an input with "please enter the number 42 here to prevent spam" works pretty well, in my experience.

Hi,

um this kinda means a lot to me. Its a kind of slow going continuous living nostalgia thing.

If it went away I would be really sad. I wish I participated more. I'm sorry.

I understand if there is a financial burden to operating the site.

But if there isn't, please don't kill this.

***

As for the web 1.0 vs the rest. For me the whole world changed around 2013. I think the proliferation of mobile changed how people were interacting on the web, thus removing the importance of websites. I know for me it became more and more difficult for me to read words on my laptop. I expected everything to be audio and visually stimulating.

I first made the transition away from using my mobile device in public some time near the end of 2015/16 I had quit my job and didn't want to pay Canadian mobile phone data usage rates. Shortly after stopping mobile, I phased out facebook. I remember having a conversation with someone who I was Facebook friends with, and when I had my back turned the person I had the conversation with asked someone else who I was. I kinda felt like what was the point of social media if it didn't translate to RL.

Obviously I have never met any of you in real life, so maybe I am missing a beat with my logic, but I feel like with web 1.0 it was obvious you were all on the internet and not a friend of a friend.

Anyways, now I kinda feel out of touch with mobile and the social web and highly doubt there would be a killer app or experience to engage me. Consequently, I am returning to web 1.0 sites and experiences more frequently. exceptions include youtube and twitter, but I feel both are super spammy and I have a hard time managing the experience as I desire.

so I welcome a web 1.0 come back. I've even started blogging again! jwvarner.wordpress.com

I vote to ride it out. I'd probably keep coming back to ttf for a bit. I like a place to post/brain dump stuff longer than tweets and with a cool group of people who I randomly know on the internet. part of me wants web 1.0 to come back around but a lot of it is probably just nostalgia and tbh I can't imagine spending as much time as I did ten years ago on aim/jabber/irc/forums (this is like all I did with my time) anymore. but part of me does miss the experience. I only really post on twitter and instagram sometimes now, otherwise am kinda offline/just rely on texting + signal + email to keep in touch with folks.

well, i'm down to keep going. i'm getting off all the web 2+ social media. ttf is nice.

i'm hesitant about releasing any personal data, including ttf posts/activity. but whatever. it's much more innocuous than the personal data collected by social media giants.

as for all users' ttf data publicly available online, i don't see any need to remove any of it. i assume that once it has been made public on the internet, it has been captured and archived elsewhere. so removing it from the public internet just skews data availability from those without much money/value toward all the orgs that scare me.

riding it out ftw! I just came back to search for threads related to films so I could find the names of some movies I should download. I just started renaming/organizing movie files to work with plex and am going wild with torrents of tv series/movies at the moment.

i like this place. it's fun with even just a couple other people here!

im still here!

:D

how are you doing, nestor?

I'm kinda still here lol. was just talking about livejournal and old internet forums and stuff, and while it slight weirds me out that there are posts from me from like 10+ years ago on here, I'm really grateful that I could reminisce with another friend about the penis pump video I posted in this thread (https://www.thinktankforum.com/thread.php?thread_id=1708#post-43944), and am really grateful that people posted quotes from it since the video is lost lol.

thanks for sticking with it, lucas :).

Ride it out. Gatz is back ...

although lately I've been going by another handle.

never stop riding