Classicamiga Forum upgrade

[Harrison]

Oh OK I get you now. How about AmiSpace?

It seems to me like the internet is going the direction of being split into three things. 1. Google (search/video). 2. Digg/del.icio.us and all that crap, and 3. Myspace/Facebook.
I was just (in a maybe not quite so obvious way) saying that such links aren't really going to do much but help this situation.

All three of those are one in the same: social networking. It is the current up and coming trend of the internet and it is bringing more and more users online for longer thanks to faster internet connections. So yes you are correct, it is the direction the internet is heading, and quickly.

Everyone wants their own little personal space online and sites allowing them to add information about themselves without the need to know how to code for the technology working it all in the background is perfect for most standard computer/internet users. Likewise people love to talk about the things they love, be it through written word or video. More and more sites are now allowing them this opportunity again without them needing to know how the technology works. Even classicamiga has been doing this since the relaunch with the ability for all members to add reviews and comments to all site content, as well as setup profiles with images and other personal information and opinions.

User generated content is the future.

Another example that really shows how this approach works has to be Wikipedia. Completely user added information and look at how large and widely used this central resource now is. And even the Amiga site Exotica has now gone down this route.

BTW, just out of interest, what happened to the idea of bookmarking a site in the browser's own bookmarks? I remember in the past seeing lots of sites which might have a little link saying 'Bookmark this site'. now that seems to have all but dissapeared, in favour of a long and constantly growing list of internet based bookinging sites, with few not even giving you the option of bookmarking it on your own browser.

Many people use shared computers, or more than one computer, in their homes, at work, at university, in public places like libraries and cafes. But they want access to a central location at all times for their bookmarked websites. If you just used a browser's standard bookmarking facilities you only ever have access to the sites bookmarked on that computer. Using bookmarking sites means you always have access to them all wherever you are.

In addition these sites help out the sites being bookmarked. In addition to the central bookmarking facilities these sites offer, it is a smart way to get the users of the site to do a search engine robots job for it. People bookmark sites, the site collects all of these bookmarks and can instantly see how many people are bookmarking each and therefore how popular a site is, and in addition users access the bookmarks via their site so they collect even more information about how often each visitor is going to each site they have bookmarked. It is a really smart way for search engines to collect data without needing to code smart robots that need to trawl the internet looking for the sites themselves. Then once the site has the bookmarked site information they can then send their spiders out to collect a complete picture of a site's content.

So social bookmarking sites are very useful in search engine optimisation to aid a site being logged properly on search engines, and people finding the site in search results. So in effect everyone wins.

[Harrison]

If any members have problems trying to post in the forums you may need to accept the forum rules again before the site will let you post again. You should be able to do this from your Profile.

This has occurred because of the move from vBulletin 3.6 to 3.7. This was a complete code upgrade rather than just a minor update due to the software being a complete new release. This therefore broke some of the modifications running on the board because they were coded specifically for 3.6 and 3.7 has a lot of code changes.

I'm still bug testing everything on the site, but I think everything should now be fixed and working as it should.

As always, if you find something that is broken, an error, or not working as expected please let me know.

[Demon Cleaner]

I've been editing/creating/answering threads for 2 hours now, not encountered any problems so far.

[Harrison]

That's good to hear.

[burns flipper]

Everyone wants their own little personal space online and sites allowing them to add information about themselves without the need to know how to code for the technology working it all in the background is perfect for most standard computer/internet users. Likewise people love to talk about the things they love, be it through written word or video. More and more sites are now allowing them this opportunity again without them needing to know how the technology works. Even classicamiga has been doing this since the relaunch with the ability for all members to add reviews and comments to all site content, as well as setup profiles with images and other personal information and opinions.

User generated content is the future.

Firebox have a t-shirt that reads "More people have read this THAN YOUR BLOG".

I love how people think other people will want to read all the minutia about their tiny, insignificant lives.

[Harrison]

Very true. The majority of general public have very little to say that is of any real interest to a single other living animal, let alone a human.

And the blogs that are the exception are normally written by writers (i.e magazine editors) or by company directors or owners so they generally have something to say about their subject matter.

But even so, social networking is the big buzz technology at the moment and all the idiots suddenly now getting online thanks to their free broadband deals think it's the greatest thing ever. In reality none of them should even be on the internet slowing our connections down because they are using our contended bandwidth to upload the latest exploits of their baby onto youtube. These people don't have any real interesting in computing and from what they use the internet for, no real interest in the actual internet. What happened to it being a resource? These idiots just use it to communicate with the people they already talk to every day at work or that live down the road.

[burns flipper]

Exactly! They should just get off the internet so the rest of us can get back to downloading pr0n.