Activation emails for new user registration not working?

[Buster's Uncle]

A purely personal demand: I'm putting my foot down; NObody ever try to tell me to involve myself w/ reddit and/or Discord ever again.  I've said no a million times.  No means NO.

ENGLISH-DO YOU SPEAK IT?!

[Green1]

Just curious...(and after this, no more. I do have some cooth.)

Why?

You once said forums are not girlfriends...lol.

And you might get folks that feel the way you do.

Unless you are hiding from the lizard people that run the big places. But sometimes if you want to nerd herd, you have to go where nerds are. LOL!

[Buster's Uncle]

[ninja'd]

As for the other point of interest in all that - sisko has been paying the monthly bill for quite a few years.  We were trading off 50-50 for a long time, but he set up an auto-pay w/ the host, and I wasn't strongly motivated to complain I wasn't getting my turn more than twice before he mysteriously went radio silence.  I HAVE paid the annual domain fee since.  It suddenly doubled last year, after two years running they let it lapse AFTER I paid on time.  This year I told them they'd lost my business forever after that and doubling.  As god is my witness, we're going down forever if we aren't off iFast by October.

Also, there's an ethical issue; the Founder really DID found this site all by himself in late 2010, I didn't sign up at his little side project for nearly a year, did take on half the running, but didn't volunteer to assume half-ownership -pay bills- responsibility for about another.  I've more-or-less considered myself THE owner for a while now, but this is a bridge too far, kicking him to the curb.  I can't, ethically.  One of the things I'm pursuing is trying to re-establish contact, for help, or at least consent and a passing the torch.

[Buster's Uncle]

Just curious...(and after this, no more. I do have some cooth.)

Why?

You once said forums are not girlfriends...lol.

And you might get folks that feel the way you do.

Unless you are hiding from the lizard people that run the big places. But sometimes if you want to nerd herd, you have to go where nerds are. LOL!

Nossir.  I done tried to tell you why -ten years ago and just this week- too many times, and we're not wasting my time that way any more.

[Trenacker]

Ethically, it's one thing to search in good faith for somebody long ago disappeared and then move on after a very long period of time has passed, and another to just shove them out the door of an open train.

There is such a thing as spousal abandonment, and the same principle probably works here if nothing legal is at stake--especially because I'm sure you're open to acknowledging "the Founder" on the site in perpetuity.

[Buster's Uncle]

Heck yeah.

I feel burned, but I still love that guy - we all owe him, always.

[Buster's Uncle]

There's no ethical problem with sharing strictly my end of a private message.  Below, the follow-up email I sent sisko this morning, and what I relate therein is 100% true, though censored here.  -I fancied that subject line bolded might get his attention and brevity can be a virtue.



I dreamed iFast went out of business suddenly...

...Not a week before AC2 reappeared.  -And our database was gone.  Forever.

Holy [censored]!

There are what appear to be very brief server failures several times a week ever since.


We really need to migrate to a better host and upgrade the SMF version and otherwise get right with the tech.

[Geo]

The need you, they'll look up at you.

[Buster's Uncle]

I found a log w/ 200 unactivated users and just approved the lot -I'll deal w/ bots if they manage to post- spread the word, please, to anyone you know who's tried.

There's also a signup setting I can turn off for email activation, and I'm still looking for it.  Today, for sure.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh, I got that took care of hours ago.  Have since promptly approved the signup of our new tech guy, wilkesreid; he and t-ras have been on the server working today.  Nothing's going to happen today that you'll notice, but we're suddenly on the right track again

A user from reddit who was in the mass approval has posted in Post if You're Not A Bot! thread since.

Signups are working now, y'all!  Spread the word!

[Green1]

Oh, I got that took care of hours ago.  Have since promptly approved the signup of our new tech guy, wilkesreid; he and t-ras have been on the server working today.  Nothing's going to happen today that you'll notice, but we're suddenly on the right track again

A user from reddit who was in the mass approval has posted in Post if You're Not A Bot! thread since.

Signups are working now, y'all!  Spread the word!

This is good.

I was almost fixing to suggest if you could not get it resolved to archive it, put it up on some place you control and go with a more user friendly forum solution (if one exists). Just for your sanity.

[bvanevery]

Omg - I knew email notifications was broke, but didn't think of this.  Draz had just fixed email after long labor --- beginning of 2022, maybe.

Thank you for confirming, I think, that email notification about forum threads I'm subscribed to, is also broken.  It's why I didn't get any kind of heads up when this forum suddenly reanimated itself about a month ago.  I had no idea, and that's going to be true of most of your existing user accounts.

At first I thought, hey!  I could finally kick version 1.59 of my SMACX AI Growth mod out the door, put an announcement on r/4Xgaming, and drive some new users here.  But then I thought, hm.  They won't be able to sign up, which means lost / put off users for the effort spent.  It also means that if they suddenly want to ask me about my mod, I won't know that they're asking the questions.  I'm not currently in the habit of manually checking this forum every day, nor would I likely be.

I already see the impact of not getting notifications in this r/GamedesignLounge thing I run, as Reddit doesn't notify me of anything in the moderation queue.  I can go days or even weeks without responding, and that's embarrassing.  The answer would be to learn rudimentary Reddit scripting and cobble together an automated solution to the notification problem.  Why Reddit won't give me that out of the box is highly annoying.  Such issues have something to do with the moderator revolt of a couple years back, over their sidelining of third party moderation tools.

Complaining about the various misfeatures and capitalist pig strategies of Reddit is a 'nuther long post.  The short version is, Reddit has its uses as a recruiting tool.  But it cannot replace a proper forum based community.  Reddit's goal is to propel your community towards millions of members so that they can advertize to the biggest bucket of eyeballs.  In this process of growth, they destroy communities.  At scale, any moral values of the community founders will be effaced.  I've seen it happen in r/simpleliving and r/vanlife, both places I finally had to let go of.  The pandemic especially accelerated the process, with all the time people were spending at home and online.

The problem with Discord is it's bad as an archival medium.  There's the inherent lousiness of the ephemeral verbal diarrhea format, commonly known as "chat".  This can be overcome at small scales: the Emperor of the Fading Suns community, the Galactic Civilizations community, and the Will To Power community, are all reasonably navigable.  But I seriously doubt that anyone's content is being tracked by internet search, archiving, and backup stuff.  For someone wishing to protect their investment in content production, that's a disaster.  I'm certainly not going to pull out all the stops to "aggrandize Discord", that's just the bet of a complete sucker.

Anyways... can't seriously turn on a pipe of new users, until there's somewhere to receive them, and notify them that they're valued.

[Buster's Uncle]

Yes.  There's some other things broke -all the code lines showing type-stuff- but the only -short term- priority -besides getting competent hosting- is the email not working.