Thinking of shuttering the forums

[Bart]

Hey all,

I'm considering shutting down the forums for good and wanted feedback. Obviously activity here has dropped to near 0 (partly my fault for letting them go down as long as they did, which made everyone migrate to Discord). I like phpBB forums and prefer the format, personally, but phpBB is dog shit and unable to keep spam bots out. I am not sure how they are getting through the challenges, which require downloading a zip file, extracting the README, and hunting for specific words. I suspect there is a security flaw they are exploiting.

Manually deleting the accounts day after day is a chore.

Is there any strong opinion against closing down the forums and if so, why? Would love to hear thoughts.

Thanks,

Bart

[Freezer91]

I personally find the forum format easier and more accesible.
Just in case you decide to shut this down is there a discord server for supermodel? How to join?

[gm_matthew]

Here's an invite link to the Supermodel Discord server: https://discord.gg/tMWS9Azk

Discord actually includes forum channels which could be used as a substitute to this forum; so far the only thing that's been posted in those is a list of the region codes, but I might find them useful for posting topics that I might want to refer back to.

[Ian]

I find the forums useful, but it's not the end of the world if they close

[k_rollo]

Hey Bart,

If I may, it would be great if GitHub Discussions can be enabled in the repo like flycast does - https://github.com/flyinghead/flycast/discussions

Problem with Discord is it doesn't turn up in Google search. GitHub Discussions on the other hand, appear on search engines like StackOverflow when people search for issues. Q&A for emulators is an invaluable knowledge resource IMHO and effectively becomes a form of documentation for Supermodel. Users can interact with devs similar to how they're used to in forums instead of immediately raising their questions in the Issue tracker.

You also no longer have to worry about bots since people use GitHub accounts if they want to participate. It feels more accessible to Discord, because they just have to go to your GitHub repo - with or without an account/invite.

Hope you can give it some thought. Thanks for reading!

[marten]

I love the forum. but....

[Mrthunderwing]

It'll be a sad day when there's no longer a Supermodel forum, but given how much things have cooled down on here I think it'd be totally understandable if it became too much hassle to keep running. Unfortunately, I don't think this new version of the forum has ever really been able to rekindle the spark that the old forum had, acting as it was as a repository of 10+ years worth of memories, anecdotes and useful information on the development, improvement and running of Supermodel.

[Framed_Niner]

Here's an invite link to the Supermodel Discord server: https://discord.gg/tMWS9Azk

Discord actually includes forum channels which could be used as a substitute to this forum; so far the only thing that's been posted in those is a list of the region codes, but I might find them useful for posting topics that I might want to refer back to.

The link is dead. Could you generate a new one?

[gm_matthew]

Oops, I deleted my previous post thinking someone had hacked my account and posted spam but no, it was just me posting a Discord invite link

Here's a new invite link if anyone wants it, valid for 7 days: https://discord.gg/4E5jBUhK

[jrial]

I just registered today. This is my first post, and I don't expect to be very active here since I mainly use forums for support, not for socialising.

That said, I don't think shutting down forums is a good idea. Various reasons.

First reason:

Problem with Discord is it doesn't turn up in Google search.

When people encounter issues, they use a search engine to find solutions. Often this leads them to a forum thread where someone already encountered the same problem, and already solved it. Now imagine this no longer happens on a public site that's indexed by search engines, but instead on Discord. Even if they find the Discord, they're not going to search. I don't even know if you can search on Discord, although I expect so. But nobody does because:

Second reason:

Discord isn't a forum, it's an instant messaging platform. I'm not super familiar with it, but I regularly use Teams and Slack. We never search those things, because the volume of random yapping is just too big to be able to find what you're looking for. Also, people aren't as disciplined there to keep related chats under the same thread; threads are more of an optional thing. Something you use to indicate you're directly replying to something a couple of lines above, when the chat has already moved on. Or to get the OP's attention. But not to organise discussions under a common subject.

Third reason:

Discord servers tend to move way too fast. On a forum, at least you can keep up with the threads you're interested in. The number of new threads is usually very manageable, and so is keeping up with the replies in the small subset of threads you're actually interested in. Discord, on the other hand, is an unorganised firehose of random nonsense moving by at a rate too fast to absorb. I'm on a couple of discords, and unless they're really small ones where you just hang out with a couple of friends, there's no way you can keep up.

Discord has its place; it's a fun place to just chitchat with likeminded people. But as a support forum? Not really suitable, IMHO.

If the spam problem is really an issue, perhaps consider setting up a subreddit instead? Not overly fond of the format, nor the management, but at least it somewhat resembles a forum rather than an instant messaging platform.