Sometimes we just figure it out because someone connected with them a long time ago. Hotwheelz for example.
I've instructed my older daughter that if I pass away suddenly, she is to come here, post the Scarface quits his job scene from Half Baked as my final post on this place.
Part of me wonders how this place will coast after I die. I won't care at the time, but while I wait for death it's an interesting thought experiment about how long the service will run until credit cards get killed, etc.
I also find it interesting to think that I assume this place will run that long in the first place, and not be tanked before I die.
It’s still doing better than a forum I had going since 2012. I finally shut it down a month ago because there was about a half dozen people using it. And only two of them were not family.
Yeah... I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been thinking here and there that the place has run it's course.
Just don't do that if you can. I feel weird about having "known" strangers for 20 odd years, but I enjoy it. Lots of really solid info about a myriad of topics along with something that is going to make me laugh.
For sure... even though usage has dropped down in a big way, I still find it fun and interesting. I thought about shutting it down, but haven't come anywhere close to actually doing it.
I've mulled over how to allow the other forum I run to continue on. There are a lot of moving pieces, though - someone has to be able to take over the domain ownership, DNS and servers, and be familiar enough with how everything is constructed to be able to keep it moving. Passing account ownership in an age of MFA and email verification isn't as straightforward, and you don't always want the second person to be able to actually take everything over at will, so how do you transfer this only when you disappear?
You'd be surprised. There's a pretty consistent 45+ logged in users per day. It's fairly common for active posters to be outweighed by logged-in lurkers by quite a margin.
Well, I’m still here. I should probably post more often but I’m more of a lurker. I’ve definitely appreciated this board throughout the years.
I am on of the ones that are always logged in. I have this up on my work comp and just stays logged in.
Interesting - do you issues with bot traffic or anything? Assuming not much if a user has to validate registration, but wasn't sure how that's dealt with on forums.
I'm probably here to stay, until death or dissolution. The reason I took a long break in prior to 2014, I was living on a boat and travel quite a bit. I didn't have consistent internet access, except for my smart phone, and was just more active on cruisersforum.com. If I go back to that lifestyle, I'll probably have starlink. Mobile internet that worked on the ocean and in anchorages was many levels more expensive back then, compared to now. I like you folks and respect your thoughts and opinions. I think everyone here now is honest, and none of us are putting on airs. I don't think any of you would drug me and steal my organs if we were to meet. I do not feel that way about the few other places I still hang out online.
It's possible that there are bots who have bothered to register and then lurk but there's not much point in it so I doubt it's much more than onsie-twosie. Bots are used for two purposes, advertising and scraping, both of which are typically time bound. Lurking is not advantageous for advertisers, so they either post ads or post benign content to build up reputation before posting ads. Nearly all scraping is done anonymously. I have a few checks for bots on here - new user registrations are checked against two different bot databases, posts are run through Akismet spam checks, and we're using a decently advanced version of Google's CAPTCHA. We get a few registrations a week for users who never post, and they're almost assuredly bots, but it's more effort than it's worth to try and keep up with them since it's low volume. But, for example, there have been 65 different registered users who have at least 1 post who have visited here since Feb. 1. None of those are bots, and some of them just haven't posted in forever. Like, hi @Queen-Bee! I see you out there and you should grace us with your voice. Or lurk, whatever anyone feels comfortable with.