Over the years this website has been through many, many changes – from HTML to Flash to Joomla to WordPress and finally to Drupal. A couple of years ago, I decided to import lots of my old programming and AS400 specific documentation into the website and imported everything in Drupal ‘forums’. Primarily as an easy place to reference old technical articles and because I thought some of the older ‘RPG Programming’ questions just might help the IBM I community out there. Apart from my burbling blogs, the forums are easily the most accessed part of the website.
However, I now find myself spending (wasting) time every day deleting spam, moderating people leaving nasty comments and just basically being annoyed by the inability of some people to have sensible conversations using online forums.
So – whats the solution?
Social media is the answer. Over the last couple of years I’ve increasingly chosen to use Facebook and Twitter to communicate. I’ve also integrated DISQUS into every article on the website, as it has superb antispam tools built into it. Effectively the entire website is now acting like a forum with facebook and twitter being the new places for chatter and banter.
So, if you’re looking for a Forum – STOP LOOKING. They are dead. Gone. Deceased.
But, every single forum entry is still on the website – just use the search button to look for anything that you wanted to find. Or of course, use Google (which knows the entire website) and tell it what you’re looking for.