Evaluating the forum after one year

I think the forum would have been great a few years ago, back when we didn’t have any good options and ended up going with Discord.

But the forum has never felt like a TZM community to me. It might have some technically good aspects, but missed some heart.
Unfortunately the moderators and admins of the other TZM communities you mentioned all seem to have gotten sick of the constant messages that the forum would be better and it feels that you’ve alienated the people who could have brought in some of the heart to balance out the head.

I don’t know if the issue with the forum is that the TZM community is simply too small to support another space, if forum’s are simply out of date as a communication technology or if it was a promotional issue.

I suspect a bit of all three.

Myself, I’ve not got the bandwidth for keeping up with a few channels on Discord and the main FB page. I’m more interested in working on the Post Scarcity Podcast, helping with the Zday events and the like.

I know that the forum has a lot of uses but what I’ve actually been wanting is a kanban board Trello like alternative so we can do project management.
That’s something I’d be more actively interested in as it’s a different space for focused project(s) or similar specific purpose.

The forum to me is just another place for people to talk. There’s plenty of that and I’m far enough along after 12+ years of TZM that I’m not that useful at greeting new TZM members. I’d prefer to be making content and tools.

That’s my 2c

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Thanks for the input! I always appreciate some critical points. However, I didn’t mention anyone specific here, did I? I wasn’t aiming for a discussion about the forum or evaluating it already.

But I know who you’re talking about. I only started to complain more about Discord as the one stop shop after about 4-6 months. By then the people you mention from Discord hadn’t logged in for a total time of less than 10 minutes. So is my pushy promotion really the reason? It might be part of it, but I don’t see how that explains the absence beforehand. I’m not very convinced.

I also don’t think the forum’s success would depend on those few people you mention. Sure, they’re powerful advocates of the movement. But we have many daily unique passive users visiting the forum. I think if there was a bit more interaction from them, it would be a start into the right direction. Of course there are a few active users that keep things alive here. And they do great stuff! But interaction is low. If I and @BoQsc would take a break and disable the RSS bot, then the forum would hardly get any new content.

I also wasn’t against group chat, I advocated this approach and understanding (which aims to combine group chat and forums):

But the issues of Discord were often dismissed as a non-issue, which I see as a lack of critical self assessment. So I indeed gave for a period daily examples of why it doesn’t work to ask e.g. people to talk in a different channel, over and over again. That’s a sign you lack moderation options, which wears out users and mods. As well as structure. In the moment chats also don’t facilitate project management, event planning, documentation and most importantly building up momentum. Again, sure, I could’ve been more subtle. But seeing people not recognizing the mess Discord is for the many use cases it is being used for, also builds up a frustration. Mixed with being Dutch doesn’t help :nerd_face:

Anyway, I had a recent chat about this with @bjk. I pointed out already that my tone and approach already changed for a few months. But for some reason this isn’t perceived like that.

if forum’s are simply out of date as a communication technology or if it was a promotional issue

I think this is just the wrong way of looking at it. Facebook is a forum, Reddit is a forum, anything that is a topic based discussion board is an Internet forum. They are very much popular. But the term forum is I think associated with the iconic phpBB forums. And yes, that’s outdated in terms of UI and UX. Discourse is much more like Reddit and to some degree Facebook Groups, without the addictive algorithms.

To some degree this is also like Discord. Because you have “typing indicators” at the bottom. Other than that it’s just text and smiley’s, just like on Discord. There is also a plugin to enable to see who’s online. Then it’s basically the same, if you really think about it. But I don’t like those kind of features. It builds up a certain social pressure that people see you’re there, so they expect some interaction from you as well. That’s also why it’s not a default Discourse feature. They base these decisions on research about healthy Internet communities.

Myself, I’ve not got the bandwidth for keeping up with a few channels on Discord and the main FB page

Same here. And that was the motivation to setup the forum. It offers many options to filter out the noise. It offers automated mailing lists with highlights and a latest and top posts (with some tweaking options). It allows us to do more with less, freeing up more time for actual Activism.

The forum also has kanban options. Here is some more info, also an open-source alternative to use if the forum isn’t good enough for projects (which I personally don’t see when looking at the scope and content of the projects).

The forum to me is just another place for people to talk

True, that’s one of the metrics where I judge the forum for. Since the aim is to bridge the islands we created. Those islands create independence and underscore the grassroots culture of TZM, which is great. But we also need to form a group mind to come together and share what we’re doing. Interactive meetings on Discord is one thing to come together, but can’t be the only solution. Because it’s in the moment, we’re not neighbors, we cannot do everything effectively in the moment. Group chat has the same issue.

I’d prefer to be making content and tools.

Same here. But where do you post that when you’re not an admin of the global Facebook page? :nerd_face: That’s also one of the reasons I started this forum. It allows for a central point to announce your content, no matter who you are. With the integrated mailing list feature and the groups and different users you can tag, it allows you to orchestrate the distribution of your content in an easy, time efficient and automated fashion. Without it you just have to have faith in the “invisible hand” of social-media sharing. Which will work, to a certain degree.


Anyway, this isn’t the evaluation already… It’s not even 2022 yet, let alone 2023. I appreciate you can arrange this redirect. I like to plan ahead already. But again, this is by no means already the evaluation and conclusion.

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If, as a newbie, I can put in my two cents, I think you’re trying to make the forum serve too many different functions. The movement needs

  • a resource where newbies can come and learn about the movement, and decide whether to go deeper
  • a place where skeptics can visit and decide whether to join
  • a locus where old timers can plan projects
  • a repository for project assets such as code, databases, etc.
  • a social meeting ground, for simply building community and human connection

Perhaps some of these can merge, and others be split off, with links between them?

BTW, I like Slack and loathe Discord. But it’s not about my preferences.

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Well it is also about your preferences, no doubt. I’ve created this new topic thread, because we’re diverging into a new topic now. We can already do some evaluating here and collect some valuable insights from anyone who would like to share some.

And as a “newbie” you can give us a fresh perspective. That’s something very valuable.

I personally would enjoy Matrix more, mostly due to its nature of being open-source and an open-standard. Other than that these platforms offer the same basics and integration I suppose. But this thread is not to evaluate Discord necessary (people could of course, as long as we don’t diverge too much away from the forum evaluation).

Also notice that the forum also has jitsi, more info here. Which may be used to have in the moment social face-to-face discussions (or just audio, even chat). Jitsi is just like the forum open-source and runs on renewables. “Become the change” applied at the core, which kind of is important for us to be taken seriously. But that’s my perspective.

We already have some integration between Discord and this forum. The forum automatically posts comments from a channel that has more than 3 upvotes. But that mechanism is broken for quite a while already (issue is at the Discord side). And in Discord is a channel called #forum-feed which posts any new topics posted here. That integration is controlled at the forum’s side.

But please @CarrollLewis, if you have any more evaluation, let us know! “Don’t be polite” as Jacque would’ve said.

“Facebook is a forum, Reddit is a forum, anything that is a topic based discussion board is an Internet forum.”

I think you are looking at it from a purely technical perspective.
I see Facebook as a place to catch up with friends, learn about what they are doing and also be able to have discussions, sometimes on my personal feed, sometimes on Groups or Pages.
You don’t have to leave Facebook to go look at the Black Box (stock footage) group, nor the TZM Global page nor many of the other communities that I’m interested in.
I do have to go to another site and have another login and use my browser instead of a dedicated app to view the GameB website which also has a forum.
I do have to visit another site to visit this Forum.

When I’m on Discord I can easily view any of the many different communities I’m a part of there.

So that’s one point of friction.

By then the people you mention from Discord hadn’t logged in for a total time of less than 10 minutes

I didn’t just say people from Discord. There’s also people on FB, etc… Although you don’t seem to be posting nearly as often there, or maybe I’m just not seeing the posts / comments as much.

You are also ignoring people who have community building skills, moderation skills and the like very flippantly. But it does seem that one of the main points did get through. If people wanted to use the forum more, they would!

I do like the way the forum emails me and can send me push notifications. I can easily forget about Discord. But actually using this Discourse forum seems more effort. There’s a higher barrier to entry.
Instead of embracing that, you are trying to evaluate this forum compared to Discord and the FB groups.

A basic breakdown:
There’s about 200k FB members on the TZM Global page.
There’s about 2-3k FB members on most of the TZM groups
There’s about 2.5k members in Discord
There’s 180 members in the Telegram “TZM EN Community - General” group.

But active members is a whole different story. There’s maybe 1% of those people who are actually active and posting.

Trying to get 2k members on this forum is achievable. But it’s going to be very hard and likely the wrong aim. Actually I don’t know what number you are aiming for, I assume it’s something you’ll know emotionally when you hit it. Probably when people are creating enough topics and activities without you actively prodding them that you feel like it’s taking off.

But I’d suggest you change what you want the forum to be used for and by whom.

The FB pages and Discord are sort of great places for new members.
I mean, they don’t have a video wall but they can easily point people to useful resources.
However the Forum seems way better for people who understand TZM well and want to take action or delve deeper into certain aspects. You shouldn’t target it at new members or even people who have been around for a year or two. But you should aim at people who’ve been in the movement for 3+ years, have had a radical change in the way they see the world and want to help enact the transition to a Post Scarcity Society.

When you compare the Forum to other TZM websites I’d be interested in knowing what the traffic looks like.

The TZM Global website thezeitgeistmovement.com got 3,538 unique visitors last month (and now the site’s transitioned to Square Space I won’t be able to get any traffic data)
The TZM Community got 307 unique visitors in October
The Zeitgeist Australia site got 160
My Zeitgeist-Info site got 82
The Price of Zero site I created a while back got 33 visitors

My guess is that this forum got less that the TZM Community site but more than some of the other sites.

Personally, I would love to use the forum more for detailed, in-depth TZM discussions which matter. Everything from updates to the Code of Conduct, to discussing the role of asking for money in the movement.

But really, what you are missing right now is a champion. Someone who’s not yourself that is having interesting discussions here on the forum and adding content that matters. Making it worth while for people to create an account, login and be a part of discussions.

Mark Enoch was the original champion for Discord. He was the one that got people using it for the International Meetings. He also came with a lot of baggage and caused a lot of new members to be turned off as he accused pretty much everyone of being part of a psyop campaign and intentionally sabotaging the movement when really they just disagreed with him. Hence he’s been kicked from Discord. That’s a whole other story, but a part of the journey other communities have gone through.

You missed the effort that people like Aaron Frost went through to get access to a number of TZM named Facebook groups which were posting very large amounts of conspiracy theory bullshit. Then enacting rules to prevent such shitposting and then having to deal with the backlash. People like Jay were a part of that and I’m sure remember.

I don’t see this forum as having gone through the trials and tribulations and becoming a battle hardened place. It’s not one I’m willing to invest time in (beyond the occasional posting like this).

I do appreciate what you’ve done. But instead of trying to get EVERYONE over to the forum, you should try getting 2 or 3 more active people.
When all you do is preach about how technically better the forum is you just annoy people. They are already having a discussion and you are telling them to move it to another room. If you did that in person then people would growl at you. They’ve setup in a room, have their laptops or phones out and are in the flow trying to discuss something and you open the door, tell them that the room across the hallway includes a water fountain and the whiteboard isn’t fixed to the wall but can be moved around so they should move there, but ohh by the way their ID cards won’t work and they’ll need different ones and the layout is such that it’s better to have long form monologues instead of the current snappy banter they currently have which has a faster iteration time and can actually be very productive. Yeah, way too detailed an example, but you keep disrupting people like that and they’ll of course start ignoring you and then start actively despising you.

However if there’s a planning workshop in the room you are suggesting and people want to be a part of it, then they’ll come join. Or maybe there’s some festivities.

Still, the forum just doesn’t feel as vibrant. I’ve written this massive message instead of a bunch of smaller ones as that’s the nature of it. A different use.

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Thanks for the input and clarification. Yes, Facebook has a different culture. And rightfully also the algorithms to make sure people see content they probably like instead of a linear timeline of everything posted. But that puts you in competition with lolcats and girls in bikinis so to speak. Things that aren’t necessary act as a supporting platform to have focused discussions.

So yes, technically they are similar. But the forum offers more focus and makes sure people get the info they subscribed for. There are a lot of Facebook Groups. None of them you can control in a unified way. Content also has to be manually re-posted across all those groups. I’ve done it, it’s a a pain. Just like having all those Discord servers, which then also have many channels. Your screenshot and motivation around it make it seem you have the impression everything is reachable and organized. I strongly disagree. I only have 4 servers in my Discord and I can’t make any sense out of it.

Here we have the groups and users which you can directly tag or DM. Also a map of where these chapters are geographically. In a previous comment I also addressed the latest and top filters which allow a nice overview. Saving time and effort to keep up.

If you want easy access, you may like the PWA (Progressive Web App), it functions as an app on your phone or computer. Just like any other app. It’s simple to install. The app offers push notifications to your phone (not as emails). Only if you don’t react to those notifications you then receive an email by default, this can be modified as well.

Those numbers you list of social-media pages, forum groups and group chats are impressive. But those numbers need to be taken into perspective. Sure active users is always lower. But also, what’s the effective reach? The Facebook posts sometimes only get a few dozen likes, sometimes even less. Liking is of course not the same as seeing and reading the post, but it’s a more accurate indication than Facebook’s interpretation of “reading”. And Discord has many users. But anyone that joins is listed as a member. Even if those people then just spend their time in another server, they’re still registered as “online” in the TZM Discord. So I think we should take those online and membership numbers with a grain of salt.

Here are some stats from the forum, with also the context. People come and watch, but don’t interact as much unfortunately. Also note the web crawlers, very useful to spread the train of thought. And this is also a yearly overview, so it’s normalized, some spikes in user activity is not visible because it’s normalized with inactive days. Quarterly and weekly overviews show these spikes better.

Moderation is easier here as well. Trust levels, (real) AI for detecting toxic language (not just a word list), a custom word list is possible though and customize some rules for that, and many, many more. When people reach higher trust levels they automatically become soft moderators as well. So as the forum grows, it automatically recruits people into a (soft) mod role. And people can flag posts as well. You also have the option of “canned replies”, which you can use for recurring interventions, saving you a lot of typing. The list is long, but I suppose you get the impression. You can do more with less on the forum.

A workshop about how to use the forum? I did that in the beginning with a bunch of people. The next step would then be the moderation course, which is in the Staff category, but yeah, only visible for staff :nerd_face: We never got that far.

That’s a bad thing? I think it’s more healthy and promotes more substance in the comments. While also being able to link easily to other threads, topics, categories and tags to save time and explaining thins again.

Thanks again for your feedback!

Quite off topic, but the TZM NL site isn’t doing too bad either. Also take into consideration that when a user has the “do not track” option enabled in their browser, Google Analytics doesn’t work. So the actual numbers could be higher.

I don’t use Google Analytics for the forum for privacy reasons. There is no such intelligent way for users to disable that tracking on the forum. But there is not a real reason to use Google Analytics anyway. You already have all the logs you need locally.

As a newbie, and having talked to some of the active users, I personally think this forum is technically a good idea in principle, but for purely subjective reasons, some users have been turned off and/or rather the discord or other formats. I like forum formats, but I think there are users who don’t apreciate all the longer format reading and writing, and prefer or are more used to other formats. By the way, and this might seem obvious, but I think all of these platforms depend on personal leadership to some extent, as they are used and moderated and organized by human people and human communities, with their subjective human tendencies and limitations and needs and whims, etc… I hope that makes sense.

As a minor issue, I think the layout is nice, but some TZM related or otherwise interesting visuals could be pleasant and offer something visual for people too.

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Hi @pau, and welcome to the forum! :slight_smile: Also thanks for leaving your feedback.

It’s generally true that people tend to write longer replies on forums. But it’s not a rule. Posts can be brief as well. Also Reddit and Facebook use somewhat the same format as Discourse (the forum software we use here). So I think people can adjust fine to it.

And about long threads, which do happen, Discourse has an option to summarize those. Saving people some time by just tuning in to what may be the most relevant comments. There are a ton of other features that help moderate and organize communication in a way that’s not doable in group chat.

Anyway, have look at the docs, there are some nice articles in there to get you up to speed on the forum features and whatnot. We also have a few community maintained wiki pages (you can also add one yourself).

Discourse can be heavily modified with themes, plugins and theme components. I’m using a few here, but I want to limit its use for stability/compatibility reasons.

Thanks. Like I said I like this format, but it seems to me that for subjective reasons perhaps, or wrong expectations or whatever, people might not be as attracted to this as to other formats. If you know what I mean. So it’s mainly a problem or ‘marketing’ and social influence, and community building, so to speak. Or maybe also just graphic design or something like that.

Yeah, that makes sense, and I’m not questioning that directly, I was just suggesting possible ways to attract people and users. I’m also not sure what or how big the audience or ‘market’ is for long format intelligent reading and writing posts type forum realistically. One thing is visiting a site, reading things on facebook, or watching videos on youtube or writing a few words on discord from their phone, and the other reading and writing long posts with syntax and formatting.

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I understand, I was just replying to the general argument that forums are “old” :slight_smile:

The forum can be installed as an app on your phone too, see below for more info:

Hi all, I’m doing monthly “Science Summaries” and am interested in working towards systemic sustainability, learned about the movement at about the time Addendum was released.

For feedback on the forum: I think it’s useful, thanks for setting it up! What I’d like to propose here as either a replacement or a complement to the forum is a “chan” for TZM or even sustainability (science/technology-based progressive sustainability in particular) in general.

I think there would be more activity and participants in a chan for many reasons. It may be the better format in principle too. Chans are basically all about or perfect for discussing ideas per se and places of high originality and in-depth discussion of viewpoints and ideas. One advantage is that they are easy to use, good for quick back-and-forth discussion and you don’t need to sign up (but can), which are some of the reasons why I think participation would be higher.

Currently, the chan closest to it is the /sci/ chan (don’t mind that there’s many unconstructive posts; note that we’d need to have rules and moderation to remove inappropriate posts (which will surely come); you can check things like the layout there). It could be called the “TZM Chan” or “Sustainability Chan” (the latter could have a pinned post about TZM). We could also discuss this in a new thread but I’d suggest setting up the board and just see how it goes (maybe I could help a bit; let me know if you have any questions). You could use (can’t link them here) Vichan (Tinyboard) (or alternatives like meguca, tinyib, uchan). What do you think of this?

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Hi @prototyperspective! And welcome to the forum!

I personally see Reddit as the best alternative, but of course the community can choose their favorite platform, regardless if the forum will stay or not. But I think if the forum is discontinued I’ll focus more on local activism again in @chapter_netherlands. So feel free to setup anything yourself :nerd_face:

@Kees There already is a subreddit for TZM. This isn’t a matter of taste which platform you like most (or even an “either-or” decision) but imo more about which technology is best suited:
If you want an active community, I can only strongly recommend setting up a chan and giving it a try. If you’d like to only have website (largely) without community and discussions where only relevant links are posted and which will remain fairly inactive (reddit) or not have the community connect and build over the Internet then an imageboard wouldn’t be relevant. I can understand if you don’t want to set it up yourself, maybe somebody else comes across this and sets it up (shouldn’t be difficult, you really only need to set up some existing software on a server).

I won’t set it up myself, partly because I don’t really consider myself an activist and think that sustainability is a subject of science (even though activism is both a relevant subject of it and a partial means to it). I don’t know of any other significant movement that has long advocated for society to orient to/via science and technology for sustainability (e.g. “scientists 4 future” is recent and not large).
One advantage of imageboards is that they also work well if there’s not much active discussions and that threads can be like reddit for posting links & media, like versatile general debates, etc.
Sorry if this didn’t address the forum itself much and only suggested a successor / complement to it.

Hi, I’ll clarify my comment a little bit :slight_smile: Yes the r/tzm subreddit is the one I was referring to. People can move their activity to that existing subreddit if and when this forum goes down. Reddit is quite popular and shares some features of this forum. Both the TZM subreddit and this forum lack active users. Reddit is perfect as a replacement since no hosting cost is required and activity is low anyway. So it will be a better fit.

But for self-hosted solutions I think Discourse (what we use here as well) is overall best. It’s used by many communities. If this forum discontinues it will be up to someone else to setup something new. Either self-hosted or hosted somewhere else, that’s up to the people that take the lead. If no one takes the lead, nothing will happen.

Did it meet its goal?

If the goal is for the forum to replace all other platforms, it seems to me that that goal is never going to be met. We cannot prevent people from having casual and informal chats, but we can establish (if there is consensus, of course) that the forum is used for serious discussions that involve important changes for TZM.

Do you find it useful?

Yes, but it could be even more so. Anyway, I don’t think we should expect the forum to serve all the interactions that happen in TZM. I am content if we use it for some specific tasks, such as conducting important discussions here and recording meeting minutes.

Should it remain online?

Yes.

Forums are irreplaceable tools to have orderly and long discussions, in addition to fulfilling the role of repositories. However, I do not think that this forum can replace other tools for other forms of interaction, such as chat rooms or instant messaging. The use of each communication tool arises from each need. If people don’t see the need to use the “forum” tool, they won’t use it.

Although it also seems to me necessary that the members of TZM always have efficiency as a premise. For example: if we old members know that there are some debates that have been recurring throughout the history of TZM and from time to time they continue to be repeated, the most efficient thing is to develop those debates in a place where they can occur continuously and where can be consulted later. So if someone new approaches TZM and asks a question that has already been answered hundreds of times, we can redirect that person to a specific place where they can find the answer or the discussion that was given to get to that answer. Unfortunately Discord is not used for that, nor do I think that is its function, no matter how popular Discord is. Nor would it be efficient to hold an assembly every time someone questions something that has already been discussed many times, unless there are new arguments to change the position. And those arguments should be dumped somewhere where everyone can look for them and answer them asynchronously.

What don’t you like about it? How to improve it?

Regarding this particular forum, my suggestions are:

  • Within the “Train of Thought” category, it would be more useful for the subcategories to refer to subjects, such as the ones we have used in the Spanish-speakers metachapter forum: Economy and Society - Education - Technology and Science - Human Relations and Human Rights - Ecology and Environment - Philosophy and “Spirituality” - Current political and social news. It does not seem so relevant to me to know in advance if the information is in video or image format, but it does seem to be able to address that topic one wants to talk about.

  • It seems to me that most of the things that the zeit-bot publishes is unnecessary and generates noise. I understand that perhaps the intention is to keep the forum active, but it can have the opposite effect, visually taking the place of the real discussions. I think it is very necessary that the visitors of the forum can more easily find what interests them. Another option would be for the bot to publish by default in a category separate from the rest.

  • What would be the reason for the topics to be closed 6 months after the last response?

  • It would not be necessary to advertise the forum if we left the function that each communication tool will have settled somewhere (for example, explaining that social networks are more than anything to socialize). Of course, for that we would need consensus among the members.

Hi @DiegoJujuy, thanks for your feedback!

The goal of the forum is explained here (also mentioned in the top post of this thread). In summary this forum was meant as the digital square where we can come together. We use many platforms, but they are not interconnected. We created islands. Each of those islands have a few active people and share ideas. This forum was meant to bridge those islands and form a group mind. Such that we may mobilize again as one, with the few people we have left. Keeping things on islands limits momentum and the development of the movement. We already lost the momentum, let’s not make it worse!

It’s of course fine to keep those islands, but at least we should be able to bridge those islands. So you can more easily organize the movement, keep track of activities of these chapters, etc. The forum offers many solutions for that, which I won’t go into now because it’s documented already in full.

So if the forum failed to bridge those islands, but yet again created another island, then it failed. I also mentioned this a year ago in my video when I promoted this idea. Then it would be better to merge with other existing platforms and make the most out of that. Reddit is the platform that comes closest. But is limited in features compared to this forum. Reddit is also not open-source and also doesn’t run on renewables. So it’s not really practice what you preach. This forum does by the way. As well as Jitsi, the video/voice conference tool that’s integrated into this forum for real-time in the moment discussions.

Forums and chat groups are totally different. They cannot replace each other. This forum is also not meant to replace Discord or alike. But for sure Discord should not be used for everything, which is happening now. Discord is a black hole. People only interact with what’s on the screen. There is no central overview either, each channel is a black hole. That’s a problem. Because it by design doesn’t move a community into a direction. And indeed you have the problem of repeating conversations a lot. Also moderation is harder in group chat.

This blog post below gives a great explanation how forums and group chat can be used together. What the strengths and weaknesses are. I’ve shared this on Discord a few times as well, but the problem wasn’t recognized. Due to that it became arguments rather then working towards improvements.

The categories on this forum are indeed high-level. That’s on purpose. The categories are forever, they should be relevant for all times and not change the layout of the forum every few months because some subject was trending. Having many categories for each subject would not make the forum self-organized. People don’t want a lot of categories to choose from. They are then more likely to pick the wrong one and thus moderators have to micro manage people, what you see on Discord with the many channels. But to create more low-level categories, tags may be used. Which do what you suggest and can be reorganized without retraining people on the forum about the core categories. But to keep tags easy to use and help with organizing posts, they too have to be somewhat generic. If they are too specific, then a simple topic for that is enough. Tags and categories should group many similar things, they should not be a single subject. Because again, a topic thread on the forum is enough in that case.

I disagree about the zeit-bot, the posts are relevant. The posts are e.g. blogs, videos or podcasts from TZM activists. It also posts RSS feeds from like-minded organizations, which I think are brilliant posts. The zeit-bot doesn’t post that much at all. The thing is, I’m the only person together with @BoQsc that creates about 99% of all organic posts :nerd_face: If more people would be active here, then the zeit-bot won’t be so much present. Zeit-bot also assists in bridging the TZM islands by posting chapter updates automatically. I don’t want to ask people to repost their stuff here manually, if it can be automated. And that’s one of the things we advocate, automation, because life is too short! :stuck_out_tongue:

Auto-closing old topics is a practice I’ve seen on basically all Discourse forums (example). I asked mods about this. The reason for that is that after 6 months it is hardly ever useful to restart that topic and would be best to start a new topic (which can easily be done and automatically reference to the old one). Also by re-using old topics, you would notify those people in there by mail or pop-up. Which also is almost never what is intended after such a long time. It can be disabled of course, per topic, if it makes sense. But if it doesn’t make sense for about 90% of the time, then it’s more mod-friendly to set a default to auto-close topics.

I’ve given up the promotion of the forum a bit, if that’s what you mean with your last bullet point? Like I mentioned with that blog about group chat and forums, people don’t want to see the problem of using e.g. Discord as the one-stop-shop for the movement. But “they” rather see you as someone that tries to sabotage existing decisions, while the intentions are meant well and not in any way directed to people. Just towards the tooling. :slightly_frowning_face:

Sorry for the long but to the point reply. It’s not meant rude, I just don’t have much time and there was much to unpack :slight_smile:

I said that about the goal of the forum because for a moment it seemed to me that I understood that you wanted the forum to replace all the islands. Now you’ve cleared up my confusion.

I was already aware of everything you mention in this excerpt that I quoted, and I largely agree. In fact, I was one of those who insisted the most that we should create the forum that we have since last year for Spanish speakers, so I understand your concern. :+1: When the forums that we used to have in Argentina and other countries stopped being online, much of the history of TZM was lost. :sweat:

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If this forum goes offline, I’ll work with @kublermdk to arrange a static copy of the forum. If possible of course. But indeed, we shouldn’t erase history.

I would like to continue the forum as well. But it seems it won’t be missed if it would go down, due to its use the past year. Reddit would then be an okayish free replacement.

I’m financially able to support the forum. But if the forum isn’t used, then it’s still a waste and the money could be used to host an amazing yearly ZDay without an entrance fee, maybe even a free drink :slight_smile:

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