forum.sickos.net

when town is online I am often checking the IRC regularly while I work, and there is often something to engage with.

when town is offline I am often checking the forum regularly while I work, and there is seldom something to engage with.

i enjoy the forum more when i wait longer between checking for new posts, when i come back after a few hours and have many little golden star icons to enjoy.

i enjoy the pace of a forum discussion (the quick IRC-like topics notwithstanding) that gives me an excuse to sit and think about my replies and elaborate more than I would in a live chat environment.

100% agree on the pacing aspect - it's kinda like email to me, where there's less pressure to immediately respond to things, and you can just let conversations bubble up naturally from shared interests.

additionally i definitely think forum-style threads map generally better in my mind than IRC channels, if only for the fact that unlike IRC (where everyone is usually huddled around one or two channels), there is not really an analogous "default" thread - ergo, everything exists in its own context for its own purpose, rather than just being one big conversation. sometimes it's massively intimidating to jump into IRC when conversations are happening, and perhaps that's my own...anxieties showing.

but yes - the only downside to the forum pacing is that i have double if not triple the time to editorialize and second-guess myself - but maybe it's a possible exercise in learning to think more positively?

additionally i definitely think forum-style threads map generally better in my mind than IRC channels, if only for the fact that unlike IRC (where everyone is usually huddled around one or two channels), there is not really an analogous "default" thread - ergo, everything exists in its own context for its own purpose, rather than just being one big conversation.

definitely, conversations feel more stable on a forum than they do on live chat. each thread existing at its own URL makes it feel like it has presence in a way that a live chat does not. though i guess with Discord you can link to individual posts, the interface still makes it feel ephemeral. like it could evaporate out from under you at any moment.

with a forum thread i have a URL that i load and when i'm ready i can refresh if i want to see if there are new posts. with a live chat it's flying by with or without me.

but yes - the only downside to the forum pacing is that i have double if not triple the time to editorialize and second-guess myself - but maybe it's a possible exercise in learning to think more positively?

practice writing out and articulating my thoughts in a conversation is another reason i love forums! i think some second-guessing is nice, just reframe it as "editing" in your mind

definitely, conversations feel more stable on a forum than they do on live chat. each thread existing at its own URL makes it feel like it has presence in a way that a live chat does not. though i guess with Discord you can link to individual posts, the interface still makes it feel ephemeral. like it could evaporate out from under you at any moment.

with a forum thread i have a URL that i load and when i'm ready i can refresh if i want to see if there are new posts. with a live chat it's flying by with or without me.

this is a really good point - IMO discord feels somehow like it holds way too much AND could evapourate at any time. their gigantic, monolithic data silo probably has everything i've said to every human online between COVID and up to a year ago (when I dropped it), which is just...scary. on top of that none of that data is easily exportable to the best of my knowledge, and even if it was, it would be nothing but a curiosity. i cannot ever _reclaim_ that data from them, and they reserve the right to hang on to it long after I no longer want them to, or delete it all before I want them to.

it's nice using something built by people that I can trust :)

on top of that none of that data is easily exportable to the best of my knowledge, and even if it was, it would be nothing but a curiosity.

you can though, you can ask to have all of your messages exported in a format that you will not really find useful without processing it first, course youll lose all the context so its situational

I feel like I enjoy each of them in their own way. There are some tasks one is obviously better at than the other (eg. troubleshooting, documentation). IRC is more ephemeral, so there's a bit less pressure to be perfect (though still a lot), but it's also much harder to actually talk to people or get through a longer discussion on something important. I probably like forums a bit better, but then again that might be different for an irc server that's a bit more distributed channel-wise than town is. Then again, bbj is less popular than chat, so?

Forums are also much better for the preservation of information, so there's that too!

you can though, you can ask to have all of your messages exported in a format that you will not really find useful without processing it first, course youll lose all the context so its situational

absolutely! i figured there might be something like that, but yeah - i just don’t ultimately know what having it would do I guess…maybe i’m just fickle

the disappearing-nothingness of the IRC chat makes it oddly very intimidating to me- but i think its an artifact of how i interact with chat interfaces, i leave them generally open in the background and bop in and out now and then, scrolling back for referencing convo threads or to remind myself what was going on prior, so its sort of an unmoored feeling and i worry about accidentally ignoring conversational partners, and it just feels too demanding to like focus solely on a convo from open to closure because of having to mentally keep all of the context in frame oddly?

whereas forums ive gotten used to with flinging myself into long form roleplay writing groups set on forums and i love the feeling of becoming a "regular" just from seeing the same faces floating about and checking in periodically over stretches of time, sort of like an adventurer with a little travel log of their journey with their post history... very fun. i like the fact that we have one a lot, i tend to find myself drawn to gimmicky threads on more personal/ooc forums and enjoy yapping/answering questions or sharing little fragments on a theme, like the clipboard one quite a lot. slower engagement when ive got the energy to toss at it, though it feels less "personal" in the sense of not having the back and forth of chitchatting in a live setting

reading some of the replies here, i started thinking about the pace of classic forums like this versus the social media platforms that subsumed them, and then i started thinking about the pace and constraints of irc versus all of the things that came after it.

i appreciate how relatively few features phpBB has even twenty-six-ish years after its initial release. and that's in spite of all of the features that were popularized between then and now (i.e. liking, voting, threading, reactions, and other things i might often consider anti-features). discourse offers many of "the new features" while preserving the classic bulletin board-style "no nested threads" forum experience. in my experience, discourse is even more tasteful and usable now than when i first used it in the 2010s. that surprises me! so while phpBB is still maintained and viable it warms my heart to know that the bulletin board forum format kinda lives on despite being "depopularized" by reddit-like and twitter-like things. (and i know that discourse, specifically, doesn't work for some people... just using it as one example.)

it's interesting to me that no contemporary chatroom software is really comparable to or a continuation of irc. (i know that matrix maybe comes close, but i've never personally used that and can't speak to it. it doesn't seem widely used to me?) discord is to irc as reddit is to phpBB, perhaps... there is some kind of relationship between then but the former things are centralized super cities and the latter things are... not centralized, often not super cities. just like phpBB isn't done, neither is irc: irc 3.0 has gives us persistence and some other niceties that don't fundamentally change how irc works. but where software like phpBB and discourse live on in a meaningful way across a wide array of digital communities, it feels like irc hasn't quite survived in the same way. i'm personally bummed that discord is acceptable for a lot of communities today that would have used irc + forums in the past. i do, for the most part, understand why things are the way they are, but i'd be curious to further unpack all of the history and user interface discoveries that brought us here.

i'd also be curious to hear from those of you with experience using matrix versus irc, etc!

i really like this forum. not only is it nice to be able to check in every couple of days and have a load of new things to read at my own pace, it's also nice to be able to come back to stuff after a long time and continue the conversation like nothing happened. nominally microblogging threads were maybe meant to replicate this but not many people ever have a thread they log stuff on for months on end.

of course i love irc as well :) it's always nice to see what people are up to