And NBR is dead!

[unnoticed]

I had my eyes on the forum the last hours of the day of closure.
A few minutes later I was met with the forum has been set to archive mode, then site under construction.
And now this. Eh well it was fun while it lasted.

Kind of threw me off with this whole thing...not feeling too enthusiastic writing anything, maybe it will pass I dunno.
Hopefully most of old users will find this forum with time, it seems like its the best candidate out of all that popped up.

[Vasudev]

I have joined all NBR alternatives.

For some reason I'm unable to login to notebook-review. I did give my email to site admin.

@RecieverCan i re-create thermal paste, iOS cleanup, secure erase ssd using Livecd threads etc here? Any blockers/legal disputes by using archived snapshot of nbr from wayback machine?

EDIT: Did t456 join here? He has helped many a times with bad bios flash, display firmware issue on AW  etc...

[Reciever]

21 minutes ago, Vasudev said:

I have joined all NBR alternatives.

For some reason I'm unable to login to notebook-review. I did give my email to site admin.

@RecieverCan i re-create thermal paste, iOS cleanup, secure erase ssd using Livecd threads etc here? Any blockers/legal disputes by using archived snapshot of nbr from wayback machine?

EDIT: Did t456 join here? He has helped many a times with bad bios flash, display firmware issue on AW  etc...

There aren't any issues that I am aware of but that being said we wouldnt be able to fight take down notices either. 

I cant recall if t456 is on the forums, I havent personally looked over the list of members but would be happy to have him.

[Dannemand]

On the topic of TT history and "what happened?":

I only came to NBR in 2012, much later than @John Ratsey and @mujtaba and some of the other oldtimers. But boy, the forum really was hopping in those days. And not just in the busiest sections, which kept hopping even when activity in other sections began to drop off. Even with a fairly large team of active mods, you couldn't be away for long without having a backlog of new reports and posts to deal with. Not to mention spam hunting. I found the hidden image SEO spam to be a particularly captivating sport 😁

I believe a turning point was when Chris Leonard left as Admin, as I recall in 2014. The changes in TT may already have been underway, but he still seemed engaged in the forum, worked actively with the mod squad and appreciated their efforts, and was an active liaison between TT and the forum. Ben Rubinstein did a good job too when he took over.

But then came the XenForo migration, which I believe had a deeper and more lasting impact. I sensed a drop in member engagement and activity following that. I cannot say if it was the Like/Rep stats lost in migration that hurt stickiness, or the broken links or any other user facing issues. But it seems to me member activity levels never quite recovered to their old levels after that.

One curious side effect of the migration was only visible to the mods: Handling of spam and member reports became much more streamlined in XenForo compared to vBulletin. While making the tasks easier for mods, it also led to a dramatic drop in the interaction between us. We used to have lively discussion of most (or many) reports. While XenForo still allowed that (of course) it was a much tighter feature, leading to less discussion and, in turn, less interaction between mods in general. Several mods, myself included, never became as active as they had been before the migration, neither as mods nor as members in their respective sections. Some I haven't seen in years now.

Between falling pageviews and the rise of ad blockers, I assume NBR and its sister sites became just as described by others: A property that barely paid its own expenses, let alone justified any investments. While I am dumbfounded while TT didn't allow members (or others) to acquire the site and/or its content, they do deserve appreciation for keeping the lights on for several years after their original decision to shut it down.

But here we are now: The precious content was archived, both by archive.org and by the valiant efforts of @Aaron44126 and other contributors to NBRCHIVE. And we have this (and other sites) to keep the community alive. So, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times 🙂

[Ashtrix]

Good to have this thread. Thank you to all for your valuable thoughts aftermath.

I believe Market dynamics changed the world entirely. Nowadays people do not care much for tuning or even owning their own hardware. They are simply consuming everything. Be it any form of Entertainment (movies, games, music), News, Hardware & even Cars every single Electric Car is a massive pile of Data equivalent to oil and it's going to be doubled down onto us with these so called "Always Connected" Cars etc. And due to huge growth in mobile devices giving rise to popular social media groups making forums oldschool - WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord etc, these were always on the hindsight of the mega corporations.

 

So by the constant changes shifting the userbase also changed, many ventured into desktops esp after the MXM was axed with 980M being the last, 2015/16. I used to see so many posts and threads back then later on it changed a lot. More so Clevo owners lounges were bustling with all these threads on MXM cards even they changed the Form factor it was plenty. But eventually it faded out. Now Clevo doesn't even make an LGA machine anymore, LGA1200 is the last of it's kind. Kinda mirrors how Alienware went BGA and I remember Porras and other reps who used to help a lot before BGA and all was dead later, but the forums still were having traffic thanks to @Papusan and other folks constantly engaging and educating folks, still it was not enough. Even Prema is not that active likes of old times. I also remember Svl7, since a long time back. I hope he is fine. Prema is doing well anyways. So is Johnksss all of them BIOS modders.

 

Also @Dannemandbrings up an excellent point of how Vbulletin change effected. This occurred to XDA and Head-Fi too, XDA changed the forum design 2 times. One was I think long back when the forum look changed a lot in 2012-2014 couldn't remember, but still was super popular even if the Android user base was 1%, slowly the Android modding scene also faltered as many stopped thinking about Pocket Computers but rather some media consumption device it dropped to below 1% who mod Android, esp these FB, IG played a big role in changing the thought processes. Now XDA is a barren disaster land, their portal is a joke. Forums are a mess. Android itself is a big gigantic rotting carcass (Android P, Android Q, Android 11). Head-Fi layout also is a giant mess now, I find it very hard to navigate properly. It's mostly a lot of sponsored content emphasized now. With the axing of 3.5mm jack even worse sadly. 

 

Ultimately from what I learnt here, NBR was already on life support. Makes sense since the main sites were dead. Finally they also did some similar analysis, and after the folks at TT who wanted NBR to stay alive also probably left. Saw nothing but a loss of money, thus axed the entire forum along with it's valuable treasure data from the face of internet. A big shame. 

I myself am done with Notebooks pay more for less and get shafted later on. Fun fact - Look at M18x R2 it's running RTX 3000. It even outlived Area 51M. Also now there's no more Unclewebb here for that massive Throttlestop thread, no more TDP Pascal Unlock thread. And a lot of others..Clevo BIOS mod. I fear this even makes the scope shrink further on top of the big little BS from Intel. I wish all the best to all the folks who are going to build the future of NBR on these alternatives. 

 

 

[Samir]

On 2/1/2022 at 2:21 AM, mujtaba said:

TT is focused on B2B. In the last years, we didn't even have an intern allocated to us. It's sad because NBR had very high standards as a community. Even though I totally stumbled upon it looking to buy a W3J, I quickly joined the place and eventually joined the rank of the mods. At the time, we had two admins, one was Brian who was very good at the business side and Andrew who ran the technical side. They quickly got Charles on board as a community manager and the collaboration of the three made NBR as great as it was. After acquisition, however, we were thrust from from a small B2C site catering to a growing market to a small part of a big business on NASDAQ. Compared to a small company which is a burden of love and everyone knows everyone, big company politics and mentality is a very different game. We could complain more about TT but really, we would be wasting our breath. Let's work on trying to do our best.

P.S. Brian went and founded StorageReview.com which is an excellent place for all things storage.

Very cool to hear about the history of the site.  Storage review is my go-to for storage lookups so that's really cool to hear!

 

On 2/1/2022 at 3:18 AM, John Ratsey said:

My recollection is that it was started by Andrew Baxter and Brian. I joined NBR in April 2005 when it was rapidly growing and Andrew would accept and publish a wide range of reviews by forum members (who got $50) to supplement those he did himself. The quantity and variety, was in my view, a valuable supplement to standardised reviews and must have brought more traffic to the site. NBR was one of several sites (Brighthand.com, DesktopReview.com, DigitalCameraReview.com, NotebookReview.com, PrinterComparison.com, TabletPCReview.com) under the technologyguide.com umbrella. By 2008 a reviewer / editor (Jerry Jackson) had been hired. Jerry's email address changed from @technologyguide.com to @techtarget.com in 2013 so I think that's when the sale to TT took place. The reviews became less abundant which would tend to reduce the traffic.

Thank you for sharing!  It's interesting how when the few people at the core of the company moved away from the front, that's when the quality seemed to reduce.  This is an interesting business lesson for those of us that own forums.

 

On 2/1/2022 at 5:59 AM, Custom90gt said:

@Samir, I do really like the idea of an article about the history of NBR and such.  I couldn't help, but the two old mods above could, and maybe Charles could chime in too, you never know...

I'm so glad to hear it!  So if an article like this existed, what aspect would you most enjoy reading about?

 

On 2/1/2022 at 6:21 AM, mujtaba said:

I could tell you all day long about the trolls we had to ban. One guy asked for nuking entire Country_X and when I intervened, told me that his opinion is right and I am biased because I came from the same region. But at the moment I think we better devote time and energy to help this forum.

I think every mod has dealt with some sort of crazy issue.  I call them 'stories from the trenches', lol.

 

On 2/1/2022 at 9:55 AM, Dannemand said:

On the topic of TT history and "what happened?":

I only came to NBR in 2012, much later than @John Ratsey and @mujtaba and some of the other oldtimers. But boy, the forum really was hopping in those days. And not just in the busiest sections, which kept hopping even when activity in other sections began to drop off. Even with a fairly large team of active mods, you couldn't be away for long without having a backlog of new reports and posts to deal with. Not to mention spam hunting. I found the hidden image SEO spam to be a particularly captivating sport 😁

I believe a turning point was when Chris Leonard left as Admin, as I recall in 2014. The changes in TT may already have been underway, but he still seemed engaged in the forum, worked actively with the mod squad and appreciated their efforts, and was an active liaison between TT and the forum. Ben Rubinstein did a good job too when he took over.

But then came the XenForo migration, which I believe had a deeper and more lasting impact. I sensed a drop in member engagement and activity following that. I cannot say if it was the Like/Rep stats lost in migration that hurt stickiness, or the broken links or any other user facing issues. But it seems to me member activity levels never quite recovered to their old levels after that.

One curious side effect of the migration was only visible to the mods: Handling of spam and member reports became much more streamlined in XenForo compared to vBulletin. While making the tasks easier for mods, it also led to a dramatic drop in the interaction between us. We used to have lively discussion of most (or many) reports. While XenForo still allowed that (of course) it was a much tighter feature, leading to less discussion and, in turn, less interaction between mods in general. Several mods, myself included, never became as active as they had been before the migration, neither as mods nor as members in their respective sections. Some I haven't seen in years now.

Between falling pageviews and the rise of ad blockers, I assume NBR and its sister sites became just as described by others: A property that barely paid its own expenses, let alone justified any investments. While I am dumbfounded while TT didn't allow members (or others) to acquire the site and/or its content, they do deserve appreciation for keeping the lights on for several years after their original decision to shut it down.

But here we are now: The precious content was archived, both by archive.org and by the valiant efforts of @Aaron44126 and other contributors to NBRCHIVE. And we have this (and other sites) to keep the community alive. So, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times 🙂

Very cool to hear about the effect of the xenforo transition.  I wasn't on NBR then, but remember seeing the same falloff in traffic on other sites that moved to xen and thought it was just a perception--but it seems to have some real truth to it.

Hey Receiver or other mod, I think these historical posts should be spun off into their own thread with the title 'What Happened?'.  It would be great place to have all the real history of NBR from those that lived it. 🙂

[unnoticed]

55 minutes ago, Ashtrix said:

Good to have this thread. Thank you to all for your valuable thoughts aftermath.

I believe Market dynamics changed the world entirely. Nowadays people do not care much for tuning or even owning their own hardware. They are simply consuming everything. Be it any form of Entertainment (movies, games, music), News, Hardware & even Cars every single Electric Car is a massive pile of Data equivalent to oil and it's going to be doubled down onto us with these so called "Always Connected" Cars etc. And due to huge growth in mobile devices giving rise to popular social media groups making forums oldschool - WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord etc, these were always on the hindsight of the mega corporations.

 

So by the constant changes shifting the userbase also changed, many ventured into desktops esp after the MXM was axed with 980M being the last, 2015/16. I used to see so many posts and threads back then later on it changed a lot. More so Clevo owners lounges were bustling with all these threads on MXM cards even they changed the Form factor it was plenty. But eventually it faded out. Now Clevo doesn't even make an LGA machine anymore, LGA1200 is the last of it's kind. Kinda mirrors how Alienware went BGA and I remember Porras and other reps who used to help a lot before BGA and all was dead later, but the forums still were having traffic thanks to Papu and other folks constantly engaging and educating folks, still it was not enough. Even Prema is not that active likes of old times. I also remember Svl7, since a long time back. I hope he is fine. Prema is doing well anyways. So is Johnksss all of them BIOS modders.

 

Also @Dannemandbrings up an excellent point of how Vbulletin change effected. This occurred to XDA and Head-Fi too, XDA changed the forum design 2 times. One was I think long back when the forum look changed a lot in 2012-2014 couldn't remember, but still was super popular even if the Android user base was 1%, slowly the Android modding scene also faltered as many stopped thinking about Pocket Computers but rather some media consumption device it dropped to below 1% who mod Android, esp these FB, IG played a big role in changing the thought processes. Now XDA is a barren disaster land, their portal is a joke. Forums are a mess. Android itself is a big gigantic rotting carcass (Android P, Android Q, Android 11). Head-Fi layout also is a giant mess now, I find it very hard to navigate properly. It's mostly a lot of sponsored content emphasized now. With the axing of 3.5mm jack even worse sadly. 

 

Ultimately from what I learnt here, NBR was already on life support. Makes sense since the main sites were dead. Finally they also did some similar analysis, and after the folks at TT who wanted NBR to stay alive also probably left. Saw nothing but a loss of money, thus axed the entire forum along with it's valuable treasure data from the face of internet. A big shame. 

I myself am done with Notebooks pay more for less and get shafted later on. Fun fact - Look at M18x R2 it's running RTX 3000. It even outlived Area 51M. Also now there's no more Unclewebb here for that massive Throttlestop thread, no more TDP Pascal Unlock thread. And a lot of others..Clevo BIOS mod. I fear this even makes the scope shrink further on top of the big little BS from Intel. I wish all the best to all the folks who are going to build the future of NBR on these alternatives. 

 

 

I used to be active both on Head-Fi and XDA.
I stopped being active at Head-Fi a few years back, they changed the website some and I just felt lost.

I was active at XDA in the beginning of android up until 2017-ish and then more sporadic.
First they changed the default theme to an identical theme but narrow formatting, setting the theme to wide theme worked fine as long as you kept cookies for the site up until an admin messed up maintenance on default theme.
They changed the default theme again to a more modern look.
They tried to fix it but failed. Their fix was to be logged in and then setting the theme, saving the settings by profile instead of with a cookie...worked fine the first two or three times until theme reset to default again even signing in.
Pissed me off because
1. Their new had a larger font, less content fit in the same space as the old narrow theme and even less than wide theme.
2. Their fix didn't work.
3. Then they started doing all this stupid redirects for market whatever in the app development section, xposed and magisk. These all required to use the new theme, otherwise you redirected to a page saying something like "this only work on the new theme".

The final draw was the new xenforo platform. Yuk.
I hardly visit xda anymore. Only browsing for device specific threads.
The whole professionalism was lost after ~2015..just crap, noob posts and general support as opposed to actual modifying and low level risky stuff like S-OFF, bootloader reflashing, low level modifying partitions to run newer android versions...I don't remember everything but back then we actually hacked the crap out of our devices and wrote technical documentation and guides for my own use and contribution to our geeky community.
Man the excitement and sweaty scared we all was, its the middle of the night and this command may fail and my phone may never start again. You don't get this excitement nowadays with android anymore.
Most risky you might do is to put your phone in EDL mode.

[Samir]

26 minutes ago, Ashtrix said:

And due to huge growth in mobile devices giving rise to popular social media groups making forums oldschool - WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord etc, these were always on the hindsight of the mega corporations.

And what gets to me about this is that if you look for information on almost anything--cars, computers, photography, you name it--the answer will always lie in a forum, not on social media.  Sometimes you'll find answers on an independent blog, but searching a good forum is almost always a sure fire way to find the answer if it exists or others to discuss the issue with.

In the advent of social media, the past is blown away like dust in the wind with a memory of just microseconds.  Almost like the idea is to forget history or prevent it from even existing.  And this flies directly in the face of forums which build knowledge based on the history of posts in the forum.  Personally, I don't understand why forums are dying since they have the answers.

[mujtaba]

55 minutes ago, Ashtrix said:

Good to have this thread. Thank you to all for your valuable thoughts aftermath.

I believe Market dynamics changed the world entirely. Nowadays people do not care much for tuning or even owning their own hardware. They are simply consuming everything. Be it any form of Entertainment (movies, games, music), News, Hardware & even Cars every single Electric Car is a massive pile of Data equivalent to oil and it's going to be doubled down onto us with these so called "Always Connected" Cars etc. And due to huge growth in mobile devices giving rise to popular social media groups making forums oldschool - WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord etc, these were always on the hindsight of the mega corporations.

 

So by the constant changes shifting the userbase also changed, many ventured into desktops esp after the MXM was axed with 980M being the last, 2015/16. I used to see so many posts and threads back then later on it changed a lot. More so Clevo owners lounges were bustling with all these threads on MXM cards even they changed the Form factor it was plenty. But eventually it faded out. Now Clevo doesn't even make an LGA machine anymore, LGA1200 is the last of it's kind. Kinda mirrors how Alienware went BGA and I remember Porras and other reps who used to help a lot before BGA and all was dead later, but the forums still were having traffic thanks to @Papusan and other folks constantly engaging and educating folks, still it was not enough. Even Prema is not that active likes of old times. I also remember Svl7, since a long time back. I hope he is fine. Prema is doing well anyways. So is Johnksss all of them BIOS modders.

 

Also @Dannemandbrings up an excellent point of how Vbulletin change effected. This occurred to XDA and Head-Fi too, XDA changed the forum design 2 times. One was I think long back when the forum look changed a lot in 2012-2014 couldn't remember, but still was super popular even if the Android user base was 1%, slowly the Android modding scene also faltered as many stopped thinking about Pocket Computers but rather some media consumption device it dropped to below 1% who mod Android, esp these FB, IG played a big role in changing the thought processes. Now XDA is a barren disaster land, their portal is a joke. Forums are a mess. Android itself is a big gigantic rotting carcass (Android P, Android Q, Android 11). Head-Fi layout also is a giant mess now, I find it very hard to navigate properly. It's mostly a lot of sponsored content emphasized now. With the axing of 3.5mm jack even worse sadly. 

 

Ultimately from what I learnt here, NBR was already on life support. Makes sense since the main sites were dead. Finally they also did some similar analysis, and after the folks at TT who wanted NBR to stay alive also probably left. Saw nothing but a loss of money, thus axed the entire forum along with it's valuable treasure data from the face of internet. A big shame. 

I myself am done with Notebooks pay more for less and get shafted later on. Fun fact - Look at M18x R2 it's running RTX 3000. It even outlived Area 51M. Also now there's no more Unclewebb here for that massive Throttlestop thread, no more TDP Pascal Unlock thread. And a lot of others..Clevo BIOS mod. I fear this even makes the scope shrink further on top of the big little BS from Intel. I wish all the best to all the folks who are going to build the future of NBR on these alternatives. 

 

 

In laptops, the computers are much more powerful so the need for incremental upgrades is less than before. Way back then, Asus A8Js used to be a budget friendly ($1400) gaming laptop with Dual Core T7200 / 1GB RAM / 120GB HDD / 7700 Geforce Go. Now you can get An Asus Tuf A15 with an 8-Core Ryzen 4800H / 16GB RAM / 1TB SSD / Nvidia RTX 2060 for the same price.

In contrast, the PC market has responded very positively to the enthusiast segment over the years: mechanical keyboards, gaming mice, high frequency monitors, gaming chairs, overclock friendly motherboards, easy to use watercooling and extremely nice and good looking PC Chassis.

I agree very much with you. People are used to things that "Just work" with no tinkering. I still don't know how people use anything but a laptop/desktop as their main machine. But people all around are more than happy to do everything on their phone. Now even the software experience is degrading. The only saving grace is IMHO Linux and open source software, where you actually have a good degree of control over your experience/work.

[Dannemand]

@AshtrixYou're spot on with the migrations at Head-Fi and XDA: These things really can kill user stickiness and engagement. In my opinion Head-Fi has come through reasonably. But XDA is lost, if you ask me. I hardly ever go there now, where I used to be fairly active, and a member since 2008. I probably will again some day.

I don't know what the better answer is when a site has grown out of its current architecture, as was definitely the case with XDA. Maybe to migrate with as little change in layout and features as possible, then incremental feature changes afterwards. XDA chose to take on everything at once, which is understandable since they also badly needed a redesign. But the loss of users and activity is evident.

In addition to outright feature disruptions, I think many tend to underestimate the effect when Likes/Thanks are lost, which seems to be common with migrations (NBR, XDA, I forget if Head-Fi too). Nobody wants to seem vain, and we all say "nah, it's not that important". But that's mostly referring to each member's collective Like/Thanks count. The individual Likes/Thanks on each post is a part of its content, and speaks to its quality (or sometimes just popularity, I guess). If a member has invested much time making a history of quality posts, I believe it can have a discouraging effect when those Likes/Thanks are lost in a migration.

So there, I said it 😔

 

 

[mujtaba]

33 minutes ago, Dannemand said:

@AshtrixYou're spot on with the migrations at Head-Fi and XDA: These things really can kill user stickiness and engagement. In my opinion Head-Fi has come through reasonably. But XDA is lost, if you ask me. I hardly ever go there now, where I used to be fairly active, and a member since 2008. I probably will again some day.

I don't know what the better answer is when a site has grown out of its current architecture, as was definitely the case with XDA. Maybe to migrate with as little change in layout and features as possible, then incremental feature changes afterwards. XDA chose to take on everything at once, which is understandable since they also badly needed a redesign. But the loss of users and activity is evident.

In addition to outright feature disruptions, I think many tend to underestimate the effect when Likes/Thanks are lost, which seems to be common with migrations (NBR, XDA, I forget if Head-Fi too). Nobody wants to seem vain, and we all say "nah, it's not that important". But that's mostly referring to each member's collective Like/Thanks count. The individual Likes/Thanks on each post is a part of its content, and speaks to its quality (or sometimes just popularity, I guess). If a member has invested much time making a history of quality posts, I believe it can have a discouraging effect when those Likes/Thanks are lost in a migration.

So there, I said it 😔

 

 

That reminds me. Back then, a negative rep from someone like Chaz hurt a LOT!

I personally liked the vBulletin experience more, but I think it is much more heavy on the servers.

[Dannemand]

18 minutes ago, mujtaba said:

That reminds me. Back then, a negative rep from someone like Chaz hurt a LOT!

I personally liked the vBulletin experience more, but I think it is much more heavy on the servers.

As I remember it, Reps from superheroes like Chaz or John or others who had BOTH history AND Rep themselves, added a lot of Rep points. I don't remember negative reps.

And yes, both as user and mod I liked vBulletin better as well.

Speaking of, I just ran out of Thanks/Likes to spend here. I'll have to owe you one. Tomorrow is another day 🙂

[John Ratsey]

16 hours ago, Samir said:

Except this is where the legal waters get muddy.  Supposed there is a user in the EU that somehow has their GDPR rights violated unbeknownst to the site owners and files suit in the EU.  Because there are relationships between the EU and US as far as judgements, etc, if a EU judge adjudicates the case in favor of the user, the user now has a mechanism to seek retribution from the US company.  It's a rare case, but the EU itself has done this against places like FB and google, so there's case law there already.

And for most companies this potential liability over something that doesn't necessarily swing the bottom line is nix the liability.

As one who lives in GDPR territory and runs a small website with a mailing list and forum, my understanding of GDPR is that it was aimed at two things which are relevent here (i) No trading of peoples' details without their explicit consent (companies used to make money from these) and (ii) take reasonable measures to keep peoples' details secure. It would be prudent to note on the registration form that the details entered will only be used for this forum and not shared with others and the members' details should preferably be encrypted. However, I'm not too worried if the hackers get my email address as the scammers and spammers have had it for years due to a hack on a major software site.

[Clamibot]

I still have a few tabs open from the NBR forum. I don't want to close them because if I do, I won't ever see an NBR forum page again.

I'm glad the forum was able to be archived. I believe it's downloadable too, so we can all have a personal copy of all the knowledge contained there.

[joluke]

my last post on NBR:

@Vasudev i know you replied but i didn't read what you said because the forum was already down

[Samir]

On 2/1/2022 at 2:47 PM, Clamibot said:

I still have a few tabs open from the NBR forum. I don't want to close them because if I do, I won't ever see an NBR forum page again.

I'm glad the forum was able to be archived. I believe it's downloadable too, so we can all have a personal copy of all the knowledge contained there.

I forgot I had a bunch of these open on another system (some were threads I had not saved to pdf) and I was able to save them to pdf in my archive.  You should be able to do the same and then close them after checking your print to pdf. 🙂

 

On 2/1/2022 at 12:02 PM, mujtaba said:

That reminds me. Back then, a negative rep from someone like Chaz hurt a LOT!

I personally liked the vBulletin experience more, but I think it is much more heavy on the servers.

Everything that's older was lighter on servers--case in point is firing up a vb3 instance on modern hardware and it just flies.  There's still a few small boutique forum platforms that actually mimic vb3 to the t and are still super-light.  But the drawback is scalability which is quite important.

[Reciever]

I actually liked the rep/like system on nbr as opposed to OCN. You want to show support in something but not quite something deserving of rep specifically. That's how I thought of it anyways. What about you guys?

[Tams]

On 2/1/2022 at 1:25 PM, Samir said:

Except this is where the legal waters get muddy.  Supposed there is a user in the EU that somehow has their GDPR rights violated unbeknownst to the site owners and files suit in the EU.  Because there are relationships between the EU and US as far as judgements, etc, if a EU judge adjudicates the case in favor of the user, the user now has a mechanism to seek retribution from the US company.  It's a rare case, but the EU itself has done this against places like FB and google, so there's case law there already.

And for most companies this potential liability over something that doesn't necessarily swing the bottom line is nix the liability.

You're overthinking things.  And GDPR hasn't been an issue for forums.

The sites were abandoned (likely not profitable enough) and the forums weren't worth put.  Sure they were worth quite a bit to us, but monetarily they were worth very little.  And then add in server costs and they might even have been slight losses.

TechTarget seem to be going as usual, so to echo others here, someone sympathetic to the forums probably left and/or an accounting review found the forums still existing and costing money, so they were axed as part of normal 'fat skimming'.

[Aaron44126]

On 2/2/2022 at 1:19 AM, Reciever said:

I actually liked the rep/like system on nbr as opposed to OCN. You want to show support in something but not quite something deserving of rep specifically. That's how I thought of it anyways. What about you guys?

I noticed that giving a “sad” reaction to a post doesn’t seem to add a rep point.  On your profile, you can see this – 60 rep points (current value) only adds up if “sad” and “confused” are excluded.

 

Can the point values of the different types of reactions be adjusted?  Could a certain reaction give more than 1 point?  (Not saying we should do this, just wondering what the options are.)

[Reciever]

That's all default function, it may be something we keep but certainly not as it currently functions.

[IgwanaRob]

On 1/31/2022 at 11:51 AM, Tenoroon said:

I managed to get the video under 4.88mb, but I had to cut quite a bit out, but here's the video: (don't mind the music I didn't know the recording was capturing it lol)

 

I do like that opening shot! 😉 😁

[mujtaba]

On 2/2/2022 at 9:49 AM, Reciever said:

I actually liked the rep/like system on nbr as opposed to OCN. You want to show support in something but not quite something deserving of rep specifically. That's how I thought of it anyways. What about you guys?

Rep also had the nice feature of supporting personal messages, which often made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I checked my rep messages on NBR a couple of days ago. That took me back to many years ago...

There is no doubt that some people will abuse a system like rep (as we knew that some NBR members did). But I mean, as there is no monetary compensation, people might as well enjoy recognition from their peers.

[Reciever]

58 minutes ago, mujtaba said:

Rep also had the nice feature of supporting personal messages, which often made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I checked my rep messages on NBR a couple of days ago. That took me back to many years ago...

There is no doubt that some people will abuse a system like rep (as we knew that some NBR members did). But I mean, as there is no monetary compensation, people might as well enjoy recognition from their peers.

Yeah I really liked that as well, except for one detail which is likely just me being ignorant. The longer messages I could never actually read them because it cut it short and didn't expand it even when looking at the rep message under your profile.

 

So there were many where I had a good idea what it was trying to convey but others where it was hard to extrapolate.

[Custom90gt]

1 hour ago, Reciever said:

Yeah I really liked that as well, except for one detail which is likely just me being ignorant. The longer messages I could never actually read them because it cut it short and didn't expand it even when looking at the rep message under your profile.

 

So there were many where I had a good idea what it was trying to convey but others where it was hard to extrapolate.

Hah not that it matters now, but if you clicked on your reputation for the post (that someone left rep on) it would bring it up in a pop-out so you could read it. 

[Reciever]

44 minutes ago, Custom90gt said:

Hah not that it matters now, but if you clicked on your reputation for the post (that someone left rep on) it would bring it up in a pop-out so you could read it. 

Ah well the more you know! Lol