@scottalanmiller said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:

more importantly, it's a mechanism to show others when they look at your posts that other community members have flagged them as unhelpful or misleading or whatever.

sounds like a great way to feed into an echo chamber, the way it's set.

if 2 members get triggered and enter in a loop, like it just happened with me (it was always 2 down votes), then i'm suddenly and quickly "banned".

constructive criticism isn't easy to give, and it's even harder to take. nobody have to adjust or accept it, but i did my best to be constructive in every single post. i'm not spamming or doing anything really negative at all (other than reacting boldly mostly to you). that should be worth more than being moderated away.

funny enough, i think you were the only one to even give me any positive votes, even if out of pity.

@PitaJ said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:

There is no notification for when people downvote your posts. If you'd like that to change you can open an issue on GitHub

lol, nope, thanks. if i ever get to use nodebb for real, i'll see. but my experience here says it'd probably be a bad idea for me.

since my first post, 5 years ago, and the one from 10 days ago, i was trying to do basically 3 things: engage, give lots of feedback for improvement and enjoy the ride. from my perspective, i was just giving my best contribution.

perhaps i got just a bit lost in the way for this last iteration on the past week or so... i certainly got triggered. was it enough to justify my "soft ban"?

so far all i heard was "yes".

if so, why should i bother to continue here?

enjoy your toy. i lost all interest.

@julian on another event, back to the main topic here... i just realized i got -10 reputation now...

without any warnings.

and got moderated out again, lol!

(plus i had to wait 300 seconds to post this, for an added bummer).

more importantly, this tells me i'm really, really not welcomed.

so i'll step away, unless you can convince me otherwise... i feel that nobody else who interacted with me so far could.

cheers!

@gotwf said in Some questions :

Perhaps you may want to invest some energies in reading comprehension. Being able to decode and understand the symbols of a second language does not necessarily equate to comprehending and it seems there may be an issue here.

what do you mean by symbols there?

How then, may one reply intelligently? Just cherry picking out bits here and there? Context can be everything when it comes to comprehension.

When I read your posts, I actually read them. You seem to have a pretty decent vocabulary but I find myself confused as to what seems to be "word play". I do not speak anything other than US English. I am aware that other languages conjugate things differently, but I still find a significant bit of what you write challenging to grok. Hence, I find myself actually reading many of them twice.

funny how you literally accused me of cherry picking, as if it was the most terrible thing to do, and then just did it, while losing my context...

or perhaps my braindump there was too much, but still in the same post i did mention that i actually read most of it. more than twice, some times... and i went ahead to further explain what i meant in my next post, in another thread: my brain is completely tired of too much @scottalanmiller redundancy, and so i have to ignore him. it's just too much. for me.

my english vocabulary is rather poor, or perhaps a bit above some averages, but since i do know words from more than 1 language perspective i even surprise myself with getting deeper meaning right, even after 2 natives thought i got it wrong. i did get it wrong for the common sense (about patronizing, in this instance)... which doesn't help me at all to write more clearly, evidently. freaking ego is too easy to inflate.

in fact, even my childhood friend, close relatives and wife have problems to understand the portuguese words that come out of my mouth, almost always when i get philosophical.

so i'm really not blaming anyone but myself here.

still...

some few people now and then (in both languages) just get me. because they come from similar perspectives and life experience. "context", in this context, is everything! in the sense of synchronicity.

and my hope, as the portuguese saying goes, is the last one to perish (pretty positive there's an english one as well, that slips my mind). i always hope to be understood without needing further future efforts, today. they'll keep coming (my efforts), i'll keep trying to get better to communicate with people, as that is a goal in everyone's life. i just can't jump over there in so fast, for some reason.

anyway...

---

although most of my own writing in the last posts here in this topic are about our misunderstandings, i still wonder above all why nobody said a word about scuttlebutt!

here, i'll even give a video i still haven't fullywatched myself, but first 11 minutes give a nice intro into it https://youtu.be/JSWWkzsHhjk

it's much easier (rather than writing software) to prove you wrong again, @scottalanmiller ... in all your points there, namely the hammer, the bbs and the forums (already did that, all you're doing is playing with names).

but i'll leave even the most of that work (of proving) to the readers imagination (which may include yours, of course), instead of grabbing pictures of hammers (as i might have, if i cared more for this).

picture a hammer as just a piece of wood. that's for sure the first hammer. it couldn't hammer a nail, but it could jam together something.

then a more modern one, with metal. it's the typical hammer.

now a drill, with combustion. much bigger nails, very different.

now an electric hammer, able to be much stronger (than the regular one) and precise (than any hammer before). completely different.

then micro hammers. no idea how those are called, but they can now hammer small needless in a magnetic disk, to create something yet completely different.

you're wrong once again.

hammers went a long way.

i'm probably wrong from your point of view as well. but i'm the one bringing my point of view first and just giving my perspective. you don't need to attack me EVERYTIME you see it wrong. or even if you feel you're not doing it enough times, i'm telling you very clearly now: it's beyond too much.

right now i just wished i had a filter for your name so i wouldn't feel compelled to chime in. since the tool doesn't offer this, i'm conditioning myself to do it.

good luck calling my attention to write to you next time, if that's a deep dark wish of yours.

very bold, right? aggressive even? but at least transparent.

cheers!

@cregox said in Some questions :

but i'll bite. my masochistic self, that is. below is my last play on this topic for the foreseeable future.

i did not foresee this...

@oplik0 said in Some questions :

I now feel really weird because I feel like this discussion is now literally an argument where all sides agree

what i read was "all sides except me, @oplik0" although i think you meant you 3 reps were now agreeing at something. i'm really not sure, because...

@oplik0 said in Some questions :

Did you read my full post?

nope. i didn't. and i'm positive nobody is really understanding each other here (myself above all, of course), although we are all trying to spell every word on our mind while silently reading through, at some level.

in my level, i stopped reading full posts at my previous one.

just wanted to say, in case my first gut had any point to it (about you also feeling misunderstood, the story of my life), that i'm not agreeing with anything here from what i could read and understand so far.

and that i actually read most full posts at the email. not so much in here, with the full context, and not so much trying to understand all details, because the redundancy here is too high for me. +

• (i'm actually trying to improve my own level of writing more redundancy, but i'm still too conditioned by my 20+ years of deep programming perfectionist attempts of removing all redundancy (and failing miserably at following the pace of the job/money most of the time). my fault.)

@oplik0 said in Some questions :

And I'm actually net positive when it comes to spending money on hosting NodeBB, since the one bug bounty I got is still higher than what I spent on hosting NodeBB in total

no idea what you meant here, for instance.

but, probably by chance, you did win my curiosity. perhaps we're a little bit better aligned and i could learn something from you... reason why i'm moving backwards to...

@oplik0 said in Some questions :

I, for one, will agree with @cregox that one could argue that NodeBB isn't free, because you're paying for hosting it.
However, in the same vein, none of the service he mentioned are. On Facebook you're paying with your privacy, by viewing ads AND you're paying for a device capable of running a web browser or a facebook app!

that's not the same vein at all!

[privacy is way overated] (cregox.net/privacy), and so is our monetary value when it comes to "selling it" trough ads or whatever. i actually won 200 eur from a facebook jury case in portugal, and that's money owned in average since facebook inception, decades ago. i still haven't even seen the money, though. and brave, for one instance of paying for users for seeing ads, have only paid me 1 usd in the past year. granted, i don't really use brave. but i do click on every ad it shows me. all very annoying and repeated. i never clicked in more than 5 ads in my lifetime, on facebook. zero on gmail. because they don't interest me (brave one did interest the first time, coincidentally).

the paying for a device is deviously wrong. i got the device to communicate with the world in many different ways. it's not a dedicated device for any free tool. and it will never be.

see? i didn't mention windows, because that's locked down to the price of the device, indeed. it doesn't apply for the rest.

my point is just about the direct money. that's also what most people mean by free when talking about products, tools and services. anything more is too philosophical. and i do go there, but not in a forum. such philosophy is like religion, and we all have our own.

still hoping nodebb could become the first fully free forum somehow. forget hosting. try merging it with scuttlebutt for a true change! now THAT would be awesome!! most of what nodebb is is an interface, the ux. and that's also what scuttlebutt lacks the most.

fantasizing...

if you look at this for long enough, the glasses get removed forever!

too often i also add textual data to things (like my own notes) without enough context and they get confusing... right now, unless i would clear this up and say i'm referring to how @gotwf brought up history without mentioning his point was just a spin off (i got confused there as well @julian), this whole paragraph would already be quite confusing even for my future self!

on another note: to me emails have no such evolution as did forums, at all. forget trying to define differences with revolution...

(we can find patterns in anything we want, and give them names. the fact that we do so and use common words instead of new names is a big reason for the babylonian communication we still live today. probably for good reasons, or else each tribe will of continue to have their own language. thank god for the dictionary attempt!)

i rather use a rating out of my ass, for this.

say since they were invented, emails have added some support for html, 1 point for that, and spam protection gets 2 full points. maintenance (it still works, it's still unique) gets 4 points. what else? i can't see any more meaningful standards. 7 points... not sure out of how many total yet. i'm devising this idea out of another similar system i've done...

as for forums, it's much more complex, because there was never a standardized protocol thought throughout... but that also brought more innovation! or have it? i'm writing out loud my thought process here, with little editing... they have added spam as well. 2p. and better html was more like a need, so zero points, but from that, to bbcode and markdown deserves 2p. maintenance is the same 4p as well. it's already superior at this point... then there was the before mentioned big overhaul of 2013. it is maintenance, but it's upgraded to 2.0, which email never did (and still needs to do). 2 easy p here. 10 points total...

i'm probably forgetting some criteria, so for control shall we think about another communication mean, say messaging... emoji 2p (nothing for improved formatting), spam 2p, still exist 2p (nothing for being so unique, it's way too fragmented)... i would give negative points for killing xmpp in favor of stupid proprietary protocols -2p... then there are audio, video and even recording sometimes, 2p... no points for making groups, as it never reached the gold standard that existed before, irc. and -1p for still having not a single solution that's open source and hassle free multi platform, like forums and emails do... then -2p for being almost impossible today to have a proper working backup out of what people use today (telegram, signal, viber, wechat, sms, and the obvious skype, google, facebook, whatsapp, am i missing something?)... backup only works if it's automated and spread out. like it's easy to do with good forums and any email. lol, 3 points in total... either messaging have changed almost nothing (compared to email and forums) or my criteria sucks balls. but it's the only one with negative points, so it's 8-5, which shows all it happened is it went more backwards than both.

just an over the top of my mind strokes on why i believe forums improved much more than email (and even messaging, apparently).

and, still, i would call scuttlebutt a revolution... really hope it'll adapt so people will catch it sooner than later. not even the mobile development have caught up enough to become compelling, yet.

@julian you mean the CSV thing?

@baris thanks!

this does clear it up a lot.

but it's still from 2016!

no updates since then?!

so fringe...

@scottalanmiller i think my email reply won't come through like it would've on discourse.

their great email integration and proposition of replacing mailing list was a first, for instance. and, it looks like, they're still quite unique about it.

it's a remarkable feature. much more than they themselves give credit for. because people still undervalue the importance of backup.

wait for a covid19 equivalent to hit the internet...

some tools persist because they're useful and nothing really replaces some of their core features (smtp), others because of people inability to move on (whatsapp, myspace, flaming).

but keep in mind that outdated tools are replaced into oblivion all the time (altavista, geocities, 8 ball), even if some of them resurrect later (vynil).

i might have underplayed scuttlebutt quite a bit there, though, when i said nodebb might have the edge on this view...

in any case, thanks for vocalising some opinions there! i'll leave that idea on the "big perhaps" for now.

@scottalanmiller from my memory, discourse was the first of its kind. from googling around 5 or 10 minutes, all i could find was a wikipedia saying discourse was released in 2013 and surprisingly nothing about nodebb there (thus taking me more than the few expected seconds to dig that info) and nowhere else could i find a quick reliable data point... github doesn't make it easy to find the first commit or even release. but using "before:2014" i found many things in 2013 and nothing before that.

it would be a very pleasant surprise to discover discourse wasn't the first!

but i don't care enough to dig deeper right now.

what's more important now, though: why isn't nodebb even on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software or the talk page??

could it be due to the terrible name?

@baris may we know what was the threshold before and what is it now?

@scottalanmiller thanks, it's working now!

except i just got this, lol.

as a new user, you can only post once every 300 second(s) until you have earned 1 reputation - please wait before posting again

Re: Need help about reputation stuff

i was just trying to post a reply on a topic people were taking about me and akismet or something... and got this message that my message would be pending for approval.

i don't quite recall seeing that before, although some of my early posts do mention it was difficult to join the community here... looks like it's also difficult to maintain any acquired trust or status.

then i tried to reply to the first post i've found about "reputation" (linked above) to ask about my situation and understand better what might have happened, but the system asked me to create a new topic instead of necromancing (i never understood why people are so bothered by resurrecting old topics, especially in such a great UX which alerts your very clearly when that happens). so here it is.

no idea if this will need to approved before posting as well, or where to find more information about this. never got notified about anything i did. after this issue, the only thing i could find was my profile with a negative 1 reputation, which must be related, no?

what's more, i also can't find my pending posts anywhere. not even in the CSV export. certainly a system bug, isn't it?

quite interesting to read part of this thread today... i must have bookmarked it 5 years ago!

i still can see some value on forums. in practice. no other written communication platform allows for continued and effective async communication of large groups.

i haven't ever really used slack, but i'm assuming that most of you have, and you're still here, so there must be something more about the forums...

but in theory i can see how a compromise among irc-like slack and telegram, emails and scuttlebutt, and forums can emerge. it's the old holy grail quest, i know... the only reason i bring this idea here is because i think some might understand and either share this view or get some idea out of just thinking about it...

if so, we should probably create a new topic and see if we can further think about it...

perhaps (this is a big perhaps), among every other communication tool project out there today, nodebb is in the best position to give birth for such a thing, with some radical changes on code and roadmap.

which is better? there's no comparison if this is really the case!

@JaredBusch he misread a lot of things...
thanks for catching one!

i would love to know how much things we all misread in this fashion, just plain wrong...

anyway, not only i'm not a dev there, i dropped it as a user because of jeff and all the disco censoring happening there.

it's all documented somewhere under the daily fuck (you must know this guys), and one day i'll write (and edit) more about it. cregox.net/discourse

you really want to play with me, dontcha?

because using words and trying to define them is all this is.

you all must have got my point by now, but perhaps your rational minds can't allow my words to be right, because they don't fit in your (rather poor) definitions. or perhaps you're even consciously seeking some weird form of online satisfaction in literally trolling me.

no matter what i write here, you'll always be able to twist and keep picking on me.

but i'll bite. my masochistic self, that is. below is my last play on this topic for the foreseeable future.

---

here's a good source for defining words: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free

Freedom, generally, is having an ability to change without constraint.

and here's what "nodebb" really is: a brand.

A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.

i don't know (and i barely care) exactly how nodebb is capitalizing the brand (i barely care how any other brand does it, for that matter). but it is doing it in some way. it's selling the brand. for money.

sell it away.

i'm really glad at least you're not censoring this thread... even if you feel threatened by it for some reason.

if i can't use the nodebb service as a brand because i don't know how to host it, or because i don't have the money to pay for a host, then it is not free for me. i have no ability to use nodebb to make a change-without-constraint in my ability to use nodebb.

and that's what happens for at least 90% of people who might want to use nodebb for free. they just can't.

there are similar brands out there, doing similar efforts, and none are free in this way.

until one is.

and then it might become the only one (way back machine). or just the leading one (google). or the pioneer (orkut?).

my one paragraph in my first message which caused so much commotion in this thread was simply stating all this. and the other paragraph was me cheering for nodebb to be a pioneer in this aspect. even though my hopes for that actually happening were actually very low even before all this.

peace!

damn, i feel completely and unreasonably bashed down by 2 community representatives and 1 admin! (plus a few members?)

it's as if @scottalanmiller is really voicing the other 2, that nothing i say makes any sense to you and you all jump into the worst interpretation possible, without even trying to look at it with the benefit of the doubt. so many notifications of answers jumping at me, all attacking... plus negative votes... (and nobody even bothered to give a positive vote to the always undervalued question, even though they're answering it. i personally don't bother to answer things that i think have no value, at least to myself).

anyway, thanks for all the reflections.

@julian said in Some questions :

Indeed! I'd also like to know what @cregox wants from NodeBB that currently isn't free.

is it now clear for you at least?

If he's looking for one-on-one expertise or custom dev, I'm afraid I have some bad news for him, because you'll never get that for free

because i have little clue what you meant here, but i do know one thing: never say never. and paradoxes are all really language bugs.

wow, sounds like an echo chamber there! have i wrote something so wrong?

you don't need to agree with my choice for what freedom means. "free" is very subjective, there's no one definition that "makes it free" from people choosing different ones!

or my definition of forum that i used there.

the op was expecting something else, perhaps i helped him (and other people with the same intent) to answer a bit more of their question.

for sure i bothered you guys, surprisingly. sorry. really didn't mean to.

if it wasn't clear, yes, i meant free for using online as a free service, like those similar tools and a few more, without any expertise or financial investment needed.

there are many amazing free services online, like the ones i've mentioned (why nobody commented on scuttlebutt?), and many different models on how to make it free, like wikipedia and the late github (you know, before microsoft put their dirty hands on it)...

i find it really hard to do any analogies with any kind of offline product. they break too fast.

anyway... i probably should be going to sleep now.

cheers!

wow, sounds like an echo chamber there!

you don't need to agree with my definition of what freedom means. "free" is very subjective.

---

this post deleted, restored and now edited to make sense of 2 quick replies in the middle.

i deleted this in less than 10 seconds after posting because i pressed the wrong button and the was a lot still to write.

i never hosted nodebb, but i had experience hosting discourse in the past... long story, still TK ( cregox.net/discourse ).

to answer the question from another perspective: nodebb ain't really free, imho. no forum tool is. but it gets very close to it. it even does offer a truly free experience (with hosting) to selected open source projects "in need". it shouldn't be too hard to get in it if you have any need of it at all!

also, to be honest, the only real reason to even get a forum today is if you're using reddit, twitter and/or facebook properly, or even if you're hardcore and are on scuttlebutt or mastodon, and those are not enough to move on your communication within your community. the social media today is the big reason why most forums are a thing of the past.

or (now to question the mods, without using the interrogation format), if you, like me, is a complete geek looking for nice tools for whatever, including tweaking them just for fun! heck, i even made a little business out of this (back in the days, with discourse), but making money out of it wasn't really the point, ever.

wished there was a free hosting for that...