Thinking of shuttering the forums

[Bart]

Hey all,

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

Manually deleting the accounts day after day is a chore.

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

Thanks,

Bart

[Freezer91]

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

[gm_matthew]

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

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

[Ian]

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

[k_rollo]

Hey Bart,

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

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

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

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

[marten]

I love the forum. but....

[Mrthunderwing]

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

[Framed_Niner]

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

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

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

[gm_matthew]

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

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