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Across the board is the vintage computer enthusiasm and Forum interest waning?

NeXT said:
Keyboard prices are tied to a group who is mainly separated from the VC community by money and Ritalin.
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I'm stealing this :)

But I have noticed toxicity and elitism has been getting in the way and has pushed some people out of the community on bad faith.
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And that's a shame, because without a constant stream of new people, the hobby will stagnate and/or die.
 
I don't think general interest in vintage computers is waning but as others have pointed out I ultimately think the killer is the way some communities treat newcomers and their members in general. I realize sometimes people get the feeling that a community (or the people running it) doesn't actually care about their members. YouTube is by far the worst offender in this category and it does seem this forum is friendlier than most aside from the occasional argument. I should probably "keep my conspiracy theories to myself" before I go into too much detail though.
 
I think we need to relax.

I don't see much wrong other than Ebay prices and I can't get any time off work to fix things !

Just bought a PS/1 :)
 
AndyO said:
Firstly, it is very hard to read because the text is so small and the line length too wide for comfort, and secondly because the structure of the forum is just too big - there are too many places where you might find useful/helpful information or guidance, and the new format for it has reduced the clarity and delineation of sub-sections to a point where navigation is harder, and frankly more tedious.
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Seems easy enough to fix, most browsers have a keyboard shortcut to increase/decrease the font sizes. Safari is Cmd-+/- I think on Windows or Linux most use Ctrl-+/- or Alt-+/- IIRC. Won't do anything about the line lengths for you though.
 
NeXT said:
On the other hand I've received death threats myself from a community that as time progressed being the old tech guy who knew old, spoke nothing but old and pointed out that old often worked better than what was new wore out its charm until finally someone (to this day I'm still certain someone in the moderation/administration circles are involved) decided to deliver an unmarked box to my door full of hard drives and a note saying either I upgrade or die.
I like working with old computers, software and hardware as much as the next person here but when things get that real, forget it. I'll keep my accomplishments to myself. They can continue to worship LGR.
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Are you seriously taking a box of hard drives as a death threat? Is this like the nerd equivalent of the horse head??
 
+1000 to the sw being hostile to users. I’m very active in the hobby but seldom log in here due to the fact that the forum sw obsoleted my old ipad. I’m only on now because I’m at the dentist.

My post months ago was Poopoed by an admin telling me that I had a spelling error. Oh well, life is sort.
 
8008guy said:
+1000 to the sw being hostile to users. I’m very active in the hobby but seldom log in here due to the fact that the forum sw obsoleted my old ipad. I’m only on now because I’m at the dentist.

My post months ago was Poopoed by an admin telling me that I had a spelling error. Oh well, life is sort.
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Complaints are fine, but do you have any suggestions on how to improve things here on the forum?
 
Agent Orange said:
Complaints are fine, but do you have any suggestions on how to improve things here on the forum?
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I did with my original posting, keep the forum SW compatible with older devices. You guys simply told me that you are not programmers and did not write the SW.

So I went from reading everyday, probably posting once a week. To reading once a month or less. I'm bummed that I am "locked out" using my old iPad. I really enjoyed the forum. I participate in several other forums, Astronomy, Sinclair ZX81, Ham radio, and classic car forums. Somehow ALL of them still let me use my vintage ipad. I'm not going to give apple 800$ just to access this one.

I'd love to post my projects. So far this year I designed and built a 16k/64k RAM/ROM memory card for my Mil Mod8 (reproduction) and a boot loader using a raspberry Pi. It runs Scelbal. I just completed my John Bell CRT controller and a backplane for it. I reconstructed the assembly SW for the John Bell controller. And now I am working on a 16k Mark8 card that supports RAM/ROM in multiple configurations. But unless I can casually interact with other forum users every evening, from my Ipad, I lose interest as I can't interact in "real time." I'd rather lay in bed reading and relaxing rather than site at my desk in the evening.

Sorry, I haven't got any great answers. Catch you all in a week or so.

len
 
I'm new, but I just want to say that this forum is a fountain of knowledge and masterpiece of information. During my googling for information about vintage pc's this forum continuously came up in my search results, and I continued to search the forum directly to find nuggets of wisdom. Regardless of the signal-to-noise ratio, or how satisfied you feel about the interaction today (although it is a shame the site doesn't work on everyone's devices) I believe at some level you can rest assured that your contributions are totally invaluable and will continue to be as long as there are vintage addicts, which given the human race's diversity and curiosity is practically forever imho.

Cheers, and thank you for your generosity!
-Newbie Forum User
 
Timo W. said:
Who said anything about copying databases???

First, every public forum is crawled by archive.org. You can browse copies there, unless robots.txt on the server blocked it.

Second, the point I made was that Discord and similar stuff are chat-like. What you post there doesn't stay. You don't have threads or any other means to find info that was posted 10 years ago. With a forum, you have.
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Discord does have threads now, and they can be saved for posterity (as long as the service remains active). Pinned comments for beginnings of a discussion are a thing as well, but require moderator intervention to note that something worth saving is being discussed. The search function on Discord is quite impressive, but tends to have a poor signal to noise ratio between relevant information and shitposting. However, generally, the biggest failure is that the platform is still missing out on external archiving. Who knows how long the software will even last before the next big thing arrives and all that history is lost.

Historically, I was an IRC guy. Die hard until about 10-12 years ago. Visited many social platforms along the way. This forum is one I don't use too often anymore, as my brain has become accustomed to more "instant" conversation, answers, and gratification. I'm fully aware of that implication, and try to remain mindful about dopamine addiction ;)

I don't think the retro/vintage community is stagnating or shrinking - my twitter feed shows that it's quite alive and well - thousands of people posting their project logs in short-form threads. That platform really needs an easier way to search and find relevant information as well. Twitter is my primary method of choice for documenting my projects, builds, and troubleshooting efforts these days. If you build your network around the retro scene, there are a plethora of helpful people and the content is excellent usually.

Forums overall do seem to be an excellent method of documentation that are relatively easy to search and archive, but my guess as to why forums as a whole are failing is due to the same issue I mentioned above - they're slow. People don't get those instant answers when they post a question that hasn't been asked before (or was not easily found via search). With the speed of communications these days, many folks desire the quickest option. That ends up being Reddit, or Vogons, Discord, Twitter, or *shudder* - Facebook. Right or wrong, it seems to be the way humanity as a whole is trending. Not much to be done there but wave our canes and yell at the passing clouds.
 
8008guy said:
I did with my original posting, keep the forum SW compatible with older devices. You guys simply told me that you are not programmers and did not write the SW.

So I went from reading everyday, probably posting once a week. To reading once a month or less. I'm bummed that I am "locked out" using my old iPad. I really enjoyed the forum. I participate in several other forums, Astronomy, Sinclair ZX81, Ham radio, and classic car forums. Somehow ALL of them still let me use my vintage ipad. I'm not going to give apple 800$ just to access this one.

I'd love to post my projects. So far this year I designed and built a 16k/64k RAM/ROM memory card for my Mil Mod8 (reproduction) and a boot loader using a raspberry Pi. It runs Scelbal. I just completed my John Bell CRT controller and a backplane for it. I reconstructed the assembly SW for the John Bell controller. And now I am working on a 16k Mark8 card that supports RAM/ROM in multiple configurations. But unless I can casually interact with other forum users every evening, from my Ipad, I lose interest as I can't interact in "real time." I'd rather lay in bed reading and relaxing rather than site at my desk in the evening.

Sorry, I haven't got any great answers. Catch you all in a week or so.

len
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Seems to be a fair point. A vintage computer website that can't be used on vintage computers !

But being realistic, while we freely use it, the forum hardware and software is I bet not zero cost in money and time, so I imagine its not a simple choice.

It is what we make of it, and I will spend time to post what I hope is interesting and encourage everyone to do the same.
 
zombienerd said:
Historically, I was an IRC guy. Die hard until about 10-12 years ago. Visited many social platforms along the way. This forum is one I don't use too often anymore, as my brain has become accustomed to more "instant" conversation, answers, and gratification. I'm fully aware of that implication, and try to remain mindful about dopamine addiction ;)
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I knew somebody like that years ago that would not use a mac forum because the replies took too long (minutes, hours, maybe a day) so he hung out on IRC.

Newsgroup were probably the best at keeping information around a long time because no one person was responsible for them. To this day I still find useful information on old newsgroups.

Forums are second best at having useful information in a logical easy to follow format but they can easily get taken down due to costs or lack of interest.

Facebook seems to be only good for selling stuff or pictures.
 
It would be great, but the first priority is to ensure that people can communicate effectively.

A site that is usable by Telnet would be giving up pictures, links to other pages, etc. It would be a fun addition to a forum, but being able to use the forum from vintage equipment is lower on the priority list compared to enabling people to discuss, use and repair their vintage equipment.
 
Forums limiting picture sizes was probably a holdover from when most people were on dialup then an actual space limitation (these days anyway)?
 
Trixter said:
I disagree. The vintage computer forum is for discussing vintage computers, not serve as a platform to be used by vintage computers.
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Sorry, it was meant slightly tongue in cheek.

But if other sites can be used by an older iPad, it seems ironic that this one can't. But, yes its performance shouldn't be hampered I suppose.
 
I've had repeated problems with people who invoked GDPR because it gave people dangerously easy access to law-binding "nuke everything attached to their profile/alias/username" power. I've seen people pop up, post some amazing things, then vanish again. Other times you kept an older article, blog post or even a forum bookmarked and one day you went to look something up and it was gone. It might be in the internet archive but for all other purposes it's gone because someone opted to "start fresh" and obliterated everything behind them. Discord internally and most modern social networking sites are GDPR-compliant even if they are not directly operating out of the European Union, so closing an account means total deletion. Not fun especially in the case of Discord where even if threads are a thing, once it's gone that's it.
For the places that predate GDPR I'll always use the case of Nekochan.net as armageddon in the death of a computer forum when the demands of one person to delete their account in a ragequit resulted in the total deletion of the forum and nearly 15 years of third party support, software and documentation.
 
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Unknown_K said:
I knew somebody like that years ago that would not use a mac forum because the replies took too long (minutes, hours, maybe a day) so he hung out on IRC.
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For rambling discussions, forums are fine.

But if I have a question, that's best vaguely presented and hone in with a experienced person, IRC is a much better way to go.

I mean, I certainly enjoy writing up pages of context targeted toward 3rd grade readers in order to simply set up the circumstances for the question as much as the next guy.

But if you have someone interactive, you can typically skip most of that in the moment of the discussion.
 
Trixter said:
I disagree. The vintage computer forum is for discussing vintage computers, not serve as a platform to be used by vintage computers.
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This is a funny comment...

Might I remind you that much of the relevant content on this forum comes from "us" the vintage people who lived the history of exactly what we are trying to discuss on this forum. Many of "us" are at the end of our careers, and some nearing the end of this worldly existence. Many of us come here because it's fun to relive and share our knowledge. Myself, being very close to the end of my working career am getting tired of chasing the next new "exciting" apple device or microsoft OS. I've lived on the cutting edge of microcomputesr and the commercial Internet. At this point in my life I just want to play with the toys I am interested in.

If I can easily access this forum I will participate. If you make it difficult I won't. I know others who feel the same way.

At the end of the day this is all about tools. You can either keep older tools relevant, or break them. It's exactly the same reason why the US has not moved to the metric system, because it make zero sense. You have a massive install base, why screw with it. That is exactly where we are here. You can rationalize the merits of your new software at the cost of a small percentage of your user base. At some point you will whittle away the stick in the name of progress.

At the end of the day a toilet seat is still the most universal API.
 
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