Diggy Forums official launch!

[digdeeper]

- Why the move? Lemmy sucked, did not work properly in Pale Moon, and required JS to do anything. Here, JS-less posting works, though some side functionality might not. The amount of features is also very little aside from federation which we've been mostly Hitlered away from.
- Why not Shadow Forums? It never gathered the attraction that I expect, even when I became active there. I hope this is different here. It also went down a lot and obviously does not have the giant amount of features that phpBB does. Even moving topics, posts, etc. does not exist in asmBB. Of course, Shadow Forums will keep being linked on the main page in case anyone wants to use it.
- For people who had Lemmy accounts, posts have been ported and you can login with your previous username and password. Lemmy will, likely, soon be killed.
- How to register? Go to the main page of forum and click "Register". Email has to be given, but can be nonexistent and is not confirmed. XMPP address is optional.
- At registration, everyone is added to "new members" group which has to have their first 3 posts approved by a moderator. But if they are not spam / malicious, they will be. This is the cleanest way I've come up with to prevent the forum from being shitted up. If you want to bypass this requirement, and I know you, message me on XMPP with your username.
- pyCode and Ame themes should be functional. Prosilver is the official, and surely works but is ugly so is not the default. subsilver2 should also be fine. pyCode is based on the old Ghost website theme, and Ame on the Ame theme that used to be default for a bit. I will make (port) more themes at some point.
- Quick Reply has been enabled for people used to MUCs.

Anyway, feel free to complain, suggest improvements, and so on. This is really what I always wanted and I hope it to be our "home" now. I should have done this a lot earlier, but better now than never, I guess. For a long time I did not self host at all, so this was impossible. Then MUCs kind of distracted me, but weren't measuring up in the end.

Thanks to pjoter who helped heavily with this project.

[laki]

This is pretty cool and definately better than the previous MUC(s). I remember talking of a wiki or something of that sort, which would still be useful to have in conjunction with this forum so that we can organise ideas, but this is a far better implementation compared to the lemmy. I feel like real conversation is actually possible here unlike the MUC. So congrats!

Re the wiki, I think it would be a good idea because:

• It would be far easier to organise notes on a specific topic. Looking at this forum, you can have real discussion, but obviously every time you want to update an idea/note you have to make a post on that, whereas on a wiki you can just edit that page. We could discuss wiki pages on here and update them with the newest ideas when done.
• For example, if we were to make a page on the effects of music on brain function, a wiki would be able to organise that a lot better. You could make the article, then whenever you want to add something new, just edit it. That is something you couldn't do on this forum.

[malformed_jill]

is there going to be an alternative onion link for this forum?

[digdeeper]

is there going to be an alternative onion link for this forum?

Yes I'll add it soon. Was busy with a lot of other technical stuff.

[Theundercoverman_]

I wonder how long this will last. I like this. Forums are way better than XMPP or any instant messaging.

I tried registering on the lemmy before it was shut down but it kept giving me errors and never let me activate my account.

I will be updating my old site soon.

[digdeeper]

I wonder how long this will last. I like this. Forums are way better than XMPP or any instant messaging.

I tried registering on the lemmy before it was shut down but it kept giving me errors and never let me activate my account.

I will be updating my old site soon.

Wow, I'm glad the forum brought you out of the grave /s.
Well I intend to keep it up, so it just depends on everyone else's activity.

[digdeeper]

Onion up http://danj3tfcicjkzz4gj66efqfydhu4txji ... n/ddforum/

[moeloli]

Good that you axed the Lemmy fairly early before it (theoretically) got bigger and axing it would cause some community dispersion like with the MUCs, but I don't know if it would ever gain substantial traction in the first place.
Just curious, but was there a reason why you initially chose to make a Lemmy instance instead of a forum in the first place? A traditional forum format is obviously much better, so I assume you tried Lemmy more out of curiosity.

By the way, can you give me a quick rundown on the "Shadow Forums" thing and how it differed in goals from this forum?

Onion up http://danj3tfcicjkzz4gj66efqfydhu4txji ... n/ddforum/

Nice, but I just tried it, and it redirected me to the clearnet domain when I logged in.

[digdeeper]

Good that you axed the Lemmy fairly early before it (theoretically) got bigger and axing it would cause some community dispersion like with the MUCs, but I don't know if it would ever gain substantial traction in the first place.
Just curious, but was there a reason why you initially chose to make a Lemmy instance instead of a forum in the first place? A traditional forum format is obviously much better, so I assume you tried Lemmy more out of curiosity.

pjoter chose it and volunteered to set it up. And I needed something to give to people before killing the MUC that I was already eyeing to kill for months. But in the end it didn't stack up (which I figured would be the case) so I had to dirty my own hands and set this up.

By the way, can you give me a quick rundown on the "Shadow Forums" thing and how it differed in goals from this forum?

It was a forum made in 2020 (?) that was attached to the Shadow Wiki site. I only collaborated with it later (late 2022 or early 2023 or so) once I realize MUCs suck. But, not many people wanted to post in there for some reason. Maybe because the "dig deeper" name wasn't attached to it "officially", only as a side note. Maybe because of the lack of features. Maybe because it was slow. Maybe because registration actually didn't work for a long time. And even though (some) features were added later and registration got fixed, I guess people's perception remained. The main difference was that the admin of Shadow Forums didn't want a "bloated" software like phpBB, but I don't mind that much since it gives so much in return.

Nice, but I just tried it, and it redirected me to the clearnet domain when I logged in.

Hmm. I guess onion will be readonly until I figure out the problem.

[digdeeper]

Sadly the onion thing appears to be impossible. There used to be an extension called "th23 domain" which allowed to use the same forum through two different domains, but it appears incompatible with the newest phpBB versions. Nothing else comes up.

[LoadingXML]

AM BAAAAAAAAAAAAACK !, I can see, you didn't MISS ME !

[moeloli]

I don't want to create a new thread for this, but there's a bug ("feature"?) on this forum, at least on my end, where sometimes I'm logged out even when I click "Remember Me" and don't close the browser or clear cookies. It often happens if I middle-click a bunch of links at the same time, and sometimes it happens completely randomly.

[moeloli]

What's up with the thread view counts? Some of them are really high, like my age verification thread for instance, which has 127k supposed views as of writing. Indian bots?
Edit: It says that there are 713 guests online right now. Just who or what are all those "lurkers"?

[sirfessor]

What's up with the thread view counts? Some of them are really high, like my age verification thread for instance, which has 127k supposed views as of writing. Indian bots?
Edit: It says that there are 713 guests online right now. Just who or what are all those "lurkers"?

I noticed that as well. Does this site have protection against them?

[malformed_jill]

What's up with the thread view counts? Some of them are really high, like my age verification thread for instance, which has 127k supposed views as of writing. Indian bots?
Edit: It says that there are 713 guests online right now. Just who or what are all those "lurkers"?

i've noticed that since a month ago, didn't assume if it was bots (until it went over a thousand) since i feel like guests in the hundreds are a common amount of traffic considering the site this is linked to
all i wonder is where the traffic is coming from, i assume some shithole forum like cyberix or some chan variant

[digdeeper]

It's almost all bots. I don't do anything to block them aside from one particularly bad set that was wasting all the server resources.

[malformed_jill]

should probably say that i feel like some of the members should be cleared out. there's apparently two account attempts of mine (requiem_malformed, requirem4themalformed) back from lemmy when it still had that bullshit and meticulous approval process.
there are also usernames in there named "javascript_enabled" lol

[digdeeper]

OK I trashed those two. Half of the members here are bots TBH. They are easy to detect because if you go to their profiles, they have bullshit in the XMPP fields, Fediverse fields, etc. It's kinda hard to delete users here because you can only do it one by one and need to type their username (or I haven't found a more efficient way).

[digdeeper]

Functional onion added at http://forum.danj3tfcicjkzz4gj66efqfydhu4txjibwkvrylvjytsfjlv3eu47nqd.onion/

Each profile field can now be configured to be displayed only to forum friends (these you have to add manually), members, or even no one at all. User Control Panel » Profile » Edit profile privacy setting.

Admins will always see though.

[digdeeper]

I made it so that clicking the poster's name on "ame" theme actually leads to his profile. No need to click the "profile" icon at the bottom anymore. Was very annoying to me since forums I was used to, had that functionality.

[malformed_jill]

i haven't realized that this forum had themes until that message. how cool.