Forums and whether we keep them going forward

As the subject implies, we've discussed the use of these forums and, given the amount of usage,  whether it's of a benefit to have them any longer.

The first thing I will say is... DON'T WORRY!

Comments on stories can still be left in the comments section attached to each story so feedback will not go away.

And secondly, Kristin spends a lot of time and effort keeping spammers out of these forums each month.

With Discord we can still handle the interactions, and Discord has threads which can help focus a discussion much like a forum topic, so we can still get the talk but in a way that more people have been preferring lately.

So, what do you think?

Astrodragon wrote:

FAR too easily. Can we ban
images and videos in a thread?

I think so... but I'm unsure how we could make it so that they could then post them in OTHER channels

null0trooper wrote:

Also, how easily are Discord threads archived, and does the archive format lend itself to reading the content as anything other than disconected chat fragments?

I've been looking into that and, while it looks like an easy thing, for some reason it's not being done/offered.

A couple other considerations and why this is in discussion:

1. Server costs vs donation amounts - with lower site and forums usage, our donations are lower than they were when things were much more active. Donations currently only cover about 80% of the costs of the monthly fees. That doesn't include domain costs or any software extensions needed to provide the features that people want. Admittedly, part of the problem is that I haven't closed down the old whateleyacademy.net site yet... doing so would allow us to bring costs down some. But this also doesn't account for the fact that legally, I'm also responsible for paying income taxes on the donations... so we automatically lose 30% or so of the donations now that content creators are required to treat donations as taxable income... in our case, it isn't... but legally, there's no way to distinguish that. There are ways to separate that... by turning whateley into an LLC or something similar, but that also comes with costs and legal issues... all of which take time, which is something I rarely have enough of as it is.

2. Joomla (the software we are using for our content management) is a big beasty.. and while it was a good CMS to choose when I first started migrating us to it in 2015... it has moved into a very different class, now focusing on storefronts and news sites, big on graphics and having a controlling entity behind the scenes that doesn't allow easy contributing from the front end. It's also constantly updating. I delayed for a good while before moving us over to this version of the site, hoping that Joomla 4 would release before the old site crashed down around us... but we had to move before it came out, because some aspects of the site were failing. But what that means now... is that we're still on a Joomla 3 build and while security updates continued for a while, we are about to enter into the 'no longer supported' phase. Going to Joomla 4 requires upgrading the server to a newer version of PHP. Some of our extensions may become unsupported (meaning things like backups or paid extensions may cease to work). So... we're looking at migrating... and one of the aspects there is... do we want to move to WordPress or another move 'writing' based CMS?


With my access to the stats, I can assure you that the amount of posts... is very low for an 'active' forum. comments / feedback on stories is about the only real use it's getting. Is it worth the literally thousands (more than five, less than ten) fake registrations and spam posts I have to navigate every month just to manage a Joomla based forums attached to the site? A lot of that is because so many Joomla sites are used for stores... and that means account / financial data. We have none of that... but automated systems looking for data don't know that... so moving to WordPress makes sense. And are we losing all that much if we just have a well moderated comments section instead of a full on forums? I don't know. But it's a possibility that has enough weight to it that we've been discussing it... and evidently Dan likes it enough that he wants to know your opinions.