To speak about the application phpBB forum

[seweli]

This is an old application. Proof, there are still these awful emoticons proposed when you edit a message, even if there are now good UTF-8 ones available for everyone:

‍‍etc.

Anyway, phpBB is still working, and contrary to Discord it is public: search engine can parse our messages, and everybody can read them directly without needing to subscribe to anything.

It's a software that "old" people already knows and it is still a service available in a lot of hosting services, without the need to manage yourself the security updates, etc.

I don't see clearly the advantages of phpBB over Reddit, but I know some people don't like Reddit, and other people don't know how to use it. (to be continued).

To have more information about phpBB, here's the link to their official forum: https://phpbbgroup.com/index.php

[pandunia-guru]

There was Reddit for Pandunia and for a while I thought that it's a good place. Unfortunately it has one big problem: you can't read it in mobile without an account. When you go to https://www.reddit.com/r/pandunia/ in mobile, it says "Unreviewed Content" and it gives you the choice to install the mobile app. I'm afraid people don't want to install an app and create an account only to read random messages about Pandunia. The old interface works better in mobile, https://old.reddit.com/r/pandunia/, but it looks even older than this forum.

Another downside of Reddit is that it's not multilingual. In this forum we can easily create new subforums for different languages and they will be visible in the same front page. This forum has potential.

On the other hand, did Reddit add any value for our community? If yes, what?

[seweli]

Thanks for the mobile addon.

I installed it on my mobile and it is much better.

The real problem is the difficulty to add pictures. I like to share screenshots to help to understand. Here's a picture from another forum. It depends from a host.

[pandunia-guru]

It's true that PhpBB doesn't store pictures. I think it's because the size of the forum database would get multiplied if pictures or even videos were allowed. (Reddit is similar. It doesn't allow posting images except as links to external sites.) I host this forum myself and my server doesn't have endless disk space unlike the social media giants.

On the plus side, this forum is public and free of advertisements and it doesn't have an "evil" algorithm that would feed your nervous system with controversial posts and addict you to likes from other people. Best of all, you don't have to attach an image to each and every post to get boosted by the algorithm to get noticed by real people. Sorry, but I could rant a long time about the ills of the current leading social media platforms. However, it's off topic.

I'm glad you are here, seweli. Without you this forum would be too silent. So thank you!

[seweli]

I can't even like the post!!!

Just joking.

I will use https://imgur.com/

[seweli]

We'll probably find better forum than phpBB.

But phpBB is better than Discord and Reddit because it's really public.

The only risk is to loose the data with uninstallation in the future, but it's possible to reassure people by offering an backup of the data (in CC by-nc for example) every year.

So here's my proposal to get people to come and contribute : now there are two sub-forums (not sure of the term), "1.Pandunia" and "2.Panlexia". There could be another sub-forum, like "3. Languages", with the possibility to create a category for a natlang or a conlang that interest one person of the forum.

And a sub-forum "4. pop linguistics" and "5. progressive computing". Just not serious ideas, but I wanted to share them