The future of the Voxelmanip Forums

ROllerozxa	ROllerozxa	Posted on 2025-05-22 00:22 (edited 2025-05-22 00:23) Link
Posts: 255 Joined: 2022-06-04	Pretext The activity on the Voxelmanip Forums has come and gone in waves throughout the years (yes, it has been years now, I can't believe it myself), as new people (usually acquaintances) would register and then invite their friends alongside, and we would have some bursts of activity. You can see for yourself the posting activity on the forums, from the date that it launched to today, using a quick chart I made from the posts table in the database in November of last year: While you see that the activity has been slowing down for quite some time, the final burst of activity was in March-April of 2024 when a friend of mine registered, and invited some of his friends alongside. Later in April I closed down registrations due to a former member who is not welcome anymore for reasons that will not be stated here. They would regularly, repeatedly and with some serious determination register new accounts over and over again and post to show their presence. This individual has made it their only purpose in life to destroy any community they latch onto, and have all time in the world to do so due to their current living circumstances. Regular plain old advertisement spam - a bot account registers to post a link and then you never see them again, delete and ban - generally simple to deal with. Targeted spam to disrupt a community by a human with too much time on their hands and a new IP to burn every day - difficult to deal with. Due to the already waining amount of activity on the forums, I decide to close down registrations in April of last year. And without the potential of new users to the forum, it shortly fell into a hibernating state. And then we go to the present day. I write this in May of 2025 coming back to here because I want to see it be active again. After so many years of being on the Internet, roaming different services and platforms over the years, there is nothing quite like a good-old message board forum. My return was partially thanks to me registering on another Acmlmboard-like forum recently, and being immersed in a wide range of happy emotions from that. So here I am, and here is the plan going forward. The Plan The Voxelmanip Forums has already seen some changes, but there will be more to come. I have already begun picking back work on Cirrusboard and by extension the fork that Voxelmanip Forums runs on, and should hopefully also finish most of the last items on the checklist of features that existed before it switched to Cirrusboard. You have, of course, also seen me begun to post here too, and I will continue to do that. I will also be opening registrations, but with a twist. I will be implementing an invite-based registration system, so in order to register you will need to enter an invitation code. This invitation code you will get from someone who is already a member on the forums. This will stop the spam and abuse that caused the completely open registrations to be closed, but I also have grander visions ~~(of delusion)~~ for this invitation system. Everyone who is already a member at this point will act as seeds for the community that will be here. You have the power to invite people. The tree of invites will be kept track of internally in order to ensure accountability, but I hope that people will act in good faith nonetheless when inviting new people. Users who then get invited can then invite new people, and the community will expand through this process by traversing social graphs. I'm also currently in the process of restructuring the forum list, which still isn't complete. I have a general vibe and direction I want to go with things that I have a hard time putting into words at the moment, but that hopefully will become clear soon enough with things like the new Projects forum. We'll probably have some kind of "relaunch" of the forums when I've got the invite system in place and a stable forum structure, but I'm sure what that will actually entail. We'll see.

ROllerozxa	ROllerozxa	Posted on 2025-05-22 23:42 (edited 2025-05-22 23:44) Link
Posts: 255 Joined: 2022-06-04	The new invitation system is now live. You can generate invite codes through the page that's linked on the top-right of the index page. You can either send the code itself which someone can fill out on the register page, or you can send a registration link which contains the invite code included in the URL. I assume the latter will be most useful, but who knows if someone will want to write down codes on a piece of paper or something. You will also be able to see on users' profiles who was invited by who, and how many members someone has invited. In the future I might make a user tree similar to the one that lobste.rs has to visualise the relationship of user invites. (I have taken a pretty large amount of inspiration from lobste.rs for the invitation system, in general) But with this, registrations are now open again! Invite new people here.