Something Awful and Friends - The roller-coaster train-wreck embarrassing downfall of a Web 1.0 giant and its tick offspring like from Cloverfield

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Three Gorillion Dollars said:
Yes, and in true Something Awful fashion, people were punished for posting that ZDR did it deliberately. The official story was that he was implementing some new technical fix, that just happened to delete his posts and only his posts and he never posted again. After grifting all that money.
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Lowtax ran interference by saying it was a data center power outage. They just loaded a back up, then they sock puppeted zdr for awhile.

I remember some goons saying zdr was chilling in discord somewhere
 
Jeffrey posted a State of the Forums update. Didn't read it, but I assume it's a lot of words about how he likes girldick in his ass.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS said:
I totally meant to hit send on this earlier. It's time for a long overdue state of the forums. I have broken this post down into three sections for finances, community management, and tech, and will get right into it.

Finances

Overall, site finances are strong. We have plenty of money and my eyes are going to be on spending it to improve the site, rather than simply trying to make more. We make comedy here, not record-setting profits.

2021 Raw Store Revenue:
Jan: $8,642.35
Feb: $6,301.55
Mar: $6,394.30
Apr: $5,790.25
May: $6,786.75
Jun: $5,994.07
Jul: $5,780.50
Aug: $6,349.80
Sep: $7,959.04
Oct: $8,919.35
Nov: $6,809.95
Dec: $5,565.20

2022 Raw Store Revenue:
Jan: $6,350.65
Feb: $4,794.45
Mar: $5,566.65
Apr: $5,083.10
May: $4,136.20
Jun: $4,433.55
Jul: $6,689.95
Aug: $6,337.80
Sep: $4,991.05
Oct: $5,317.75
Nov: $4,753.00

2021 Patreon Revenue: $9,974.21
2022 Patreon Revenue YTD: $11,141.09

These numbers represent the actual total amount of money being spent on store purchases. The fees we pay on these amounts are variable but seem to hover around 8% each month. This is not great and, while other payment processors are on our radar, switching will be a real pain. If we were hurting for money, shopping around for a new processor would be more worthwhile, but as it stands we’re going to focus on other things.

Store revenue is down from last year. There aren’t as many new accounts being registered, and not as many avatars are being changed. Additionally, we permabanned someone who spent rather a lot on the forum, enough to make a noticeable impact. Stay fucked off, Alec Eiffel. We certainly intend to increase the amount of new users and if you want to hear about our plans for doing so, keep reading.

Patreon continues along normally. We similarly pay fees here and it’d be better if we had recurring payments built into our store, but we do not. Development effort is going to go to the forums and frontpage before we start worrying about new store features, even cost-saving ones.

NordVPN (!):
When I bought the site from lowtax, I listed all of the assets I wanted in the sale. In this included the nordvpn affiliate account. I didn't really intend to use it. The site doesn't need me to spam "nordvpn" announcements to stay afloat, and they personally annoyed me. I didn't think much of it, but in 2021, I did decide to log into the account. It proceeded to tell me that I could claim a payout of $14,927.94. Apparently, SA gets a cut of the money any time one of you renews your service. I did not really believe that I could email them and ask for 15 thousand dollars, but I did email them, and there it was.

So, our 2021 nordvpn revenue was $14,927.94. At present they owe us $7,536.95 for the year, which I have requested a payout on. I plan on cashing this out on a roughly yearly basis and including that in these updates going forward.

Needless to say if anyone is interested in NordVPN, you can buy it here. I love the nordvpn deal now.

Costs:
Our hosting costs have crept up to around $2100 per month. Previously I included these for every individual month, but they are pretty stable and do not prove that interesting. This increase has a few sources. A big chunk of it is that we are now replicating our database and backing it up. Some of it is from having replaced ancient VMs with new modern ones, while not finishing the job of decommissioning the old ones. These costs will go down when this work is done. They will, however, remain higher than the $1100/month or so that we paid when I came on board. Lasting cost increases represent actual meaningful upgrades to our site’s resiliency, which is exactly the thing the money should have been going to all along. I believe some of these cost reductions can take place before the next one of these, so stay tuned.


Community Management

Things posters should know
  • Policy for suicidal posting updated Sept 2020 - This predates my ownership of the site, but I’m not sure if many posters are aware of it– we completely updated our policy on suicidal posting/posters and drew on suicide hotlines and other resources to create the current policy. Thanks to Cyrano, Athanatos, Goons are Great, and twoday for all their work on this. (If we have missed anyone, please let us know!)

Things we have done
  • Handling :siren: drama :siren: - There have been various dramatic events that have come up and we’ve done our best to handle them in a respectful and professional way. :sweatdrop: Unfortunately, this takes up a lot of time and resources. Please be less dramatic.
  • I'm sure many of you have noticed that I am scatterbrained and don't always follow through on things I say I will do. This is not remotely acceptable and so I have hired an admin assistant to keep me on task. Her username is wintertime and she will also be running the SA’s twitter account. She might PM you if you make content that she wants to feature on there, so stay tuned. Shoutouts to her for helping me actually get this monster post put together.
  • Athanatos put together announcements that highlight ongoing and interesting threads across different forums. These were great - it can be hard to find new threads, which I talk more about below, and getting handed a list of new ones semi-regularly helps. Look forward to more of these and let an admin know if you have ideas for threads that could go in a future announcement.
  • Established forumadmins email address - As forum members sometimes find it hard to reach the admins, we established a new email address, forumadmins@somethingawful.com. This goes to all admins and can be used to reach us in the event of an emergency or even just for regular feedback.
  • Pragmatica continues to keep the “behind the scenes” organized - from tracking internal issues and establishing processes in finding moderators to encouraging feedback on how we can be better mods and admins. For example, she revised and expanded on Ozma’s original Mod Handbook from 10 years ago and is now a massive guide to the mod tools, procedures on SA, and represents a great deal of work. The “mods, the queue, and you” thread in ask/tell contains text from an older version of this that you can see here. Historically, the forums moderation side was very informal and a bit disorganized, and her work has encouraged better record-keeping and streamlining processes for more consistency across the forums.

Things we are in the process of doing
  • Mod guidelines - We are currently finishing a list of public-facing guidelines for how mods should conduct themselves. This is something I promised a long time ago and am going to deliver on now. Expect to see them in the near future.
  • Handling drama - This will, of course, be ongoing as things crop up, but we are actively working on better ways to handle drama and head it off before it becomes a big problem.
  • Site outreach using other social media - The Twitter has been dormant for quite some time, but as part of our mission to redirect the public to less stupid forms of the internet, we have decided to get it running. People on twitter will see random funny things from the forums and perhaps some of them with senses of humor will show up to post. Other ways of reaching potential new users are in the planning stages.

Things that are on our radar
  • Site growth - This is, far and away, the most important issue facing SA. How do we get new users to come here? I’m listening. If you have ideas, we want to hear them. Promoting funny content from the forums is the obvious first step, and we’re underway on that plan, but let’s hear your weirder and funnier ideas for this one. We have money to spend on this and are actively looking for ways to spend it fruitfully. We want to find people who have senses of humor and contribute their own content.
  • Site interface changes - What do you guys think about us providing ways of more easily finding new threads? I think this is an issue - a lot of users stick to their bookmarks and don’t necessarily see new threads, not even ones that would sincerely interest them. Sometimes a thread is rebooted and user never finds the new one, and “loses” that thread forever. What do you guys think of new threads “sticking” on the first page of a forum for awhile longer, so you’d see some mix of the newest threads with the newest-posted-in threads? I don’t want to change fundamental site features like this without talking about it, but I do think this is a real limitation. Do we surrender to web 2.0 and try to figure out “threads you might like”? Produce more ad banners for threads that are seeking new users? Athanatos's announcements are a step in the right direction here, but I think we could automate some things here
  • Support page/forum rules revamp - The support page as it stands is out of date and nearly useless. The forum rules are a front page article for some reason. We would like to rework these entirely to make them more useful.

Tech

I’m going to let Astral describe everything in detail, but forums tech has come a LONG way since the last one of these updates. The things that are large enough that they warrant mentioning are:
  • Updated forums PHP version from 5.3 to 7.4. This represents a decade’s worth of changes to the programming language the site runs on. The forums store runs on 8.0 and we’re working on the forums upgrade to that now.
  • Correspondingly, our databases are now all running up-to-date modern versions of mariadb.
  • In addition to all the security and modernization that comes with using maintained tools, the site now loads a whole bunch faster as well.
  • Off site backups ensure that a single natural disaster can’t wipe out our whole database forever.
  • Just about all of our image and video storage now uses simple modern object stores instead of an expensive file server.
  • Established “Thread IKs” as a proper forums feature
  • The waffleimages have returned. Ancient memories, made whole again. Speechless.

Things we are in the process of doing:
  • Further php version updates - serious code modernization is underway.
  • Frontpage overhaul. I am.....distraught at how long this has taken but I promise it is really coming. The frontpage is important as a way for the outside world to get a glimpse inside our forums and I would like to get back to that, pronto.

Things that are on our radar:
  • Better post attachments - “attachments 2.0”
  • Public Contribution! At the very least, we intend to open up our CSS and javascript for public patching. Unlike the forums code, this code is entirely owned by us and we are happy to accept patches and suggestions on how to make it better.

Overall, owning this place is completely insane. As mayor, I'd like to think I've kept the town of SA from slipping into the ocean, and I couldn't have done it without all the mods and admins putting in many hours of volunteer work on behalf of the site. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the site these past years and I look forward to many more.

Wishing everyone a happy holidays,
Jeffrey

:santahurr:
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astral said:
Tech Year(s) In Review

It’s been a little over two years since Jeffrey purchased the forums, though it hardly feels like it’s been that long. In that time, we’ve made enormous strides in tackling the technical debt left across the website by the previous owner; we’ve also introduced several new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

To really appreciate just how far the site has come since then, it’s worth looking back at where things stood before then, when Lowtax still owned the website and Jeffrey had only just volunteered to help out with the forum code. The infrastructure was aging; systems were unpatched, and let’s speak no more of the old frontpage CMS server that was still running on software that stopped receiving updates in 2012.

  • Previous developers’ code edits were not recorded: the last tracked items we could find dated back to late 2014. Edits to the forum’s code since then had been made on the live servers only, including edits performed directly on the mangled machine-readable version of the forum’s JavaScript files rather than the human-readable source code files. A development/staging server (where the site’s developers could test code changes before they went live on the website) was partially configured, but unused. In short: it was a mess.
  • The forums were originally (in radium times) set up to have both primary and secondary database servers. However, after everything was virtualized and moved to the cloud in 2016, the former owner was uninterested in having any sort of redundancy, let alone backups. We built out some replicas and set up backups around a year and a half ago; earlier this year we successfully moved to an even more modern set of database servers with significantly higher specs. This has almost completely eradicated the intermittent spikes in page load time we were seeing with the old one. We also have remote backups prepared in the event of some sort of disaster.
  • There was a virtual storage server that hosted the site images/videos/downloads, forum images, etc. We migrated all of these to a modern type of file hosting using object storage. At the same time, we upgraded the forum store so it would remain on supported software versions to ensure continued PCI compliance. We significantly enhanced its security, and your data is safer than it ever has been. As a reminder, no part of the forums/store/etc. store any of your payment information; that is all stored/handled by the payment processor.
  • The majority of the forum stylesheet and JavaScript files were still hosted on the forum servers themselves, and they did not benefit at all from any content delivery network (CDN). We moved those files to object storage as well, where they would successfully be cached, meaning quicker load times for forum pages; we also improved the caching strategy so that Firefox users’ browsers would no longer need to revalidate every image, stylesheet, and JavaScript resource on the page any time they hit :f5:. And, speaking of stylesheets, don’t forget there’s a dark mode now.

Our main focus so far has been bringing the aging infrastructure up-to-date. Early 2022 saw the culmination of much of this work, where we were able to finally implement a multi-year jump in PHP version from “abandoned roughly seven years ago” to “7.4, which was actually supported by its developers until two weeks before this post”. Since migrating to this version, forum pages have been loading faster than ever.

Aside from infrastructure, we’ve made several other noteworthy improvements. We recovered a copy of the most complete waffleimages archive kept by forum hero Scuttle_SE, and we set up our own mirror under the [fixed]wi.somethingawful.com[/fixed] subdomain. We also adjusted things so that old waffleimages images and links in threads would automatically point to our new mirror instead, restoring many old threads to their former glory.

We turned an intermittent DDoS earlier this year into an opportunity to improve things across the board, addressing several inefficiencies when presenting forum pages.

Several forum pages, including the Leper’s Colony, now display events in local time instead of server time, so people no longer have to try to work out the time zone difference. Staff information is now displayed in user profiles, so you don’t have to wonder what forum a moderator you’ve never seen before moderates.

The Thread IK system in particular saw a large overhaul, starting with bug fixes around its permissions to a new, useful display of Thread IKs at the top of applicable threads and, finally, a page for the administrators to manage Thread IKs. I look forward to seeing more Thread IKs now that the system is feature-complete!

We’ve squashed several troublesome bugs that had plagued the forums for years. For example:
  • When the forums were especially busy, pages could start to take multiple seconds to load or even time out entirely, making the forums unusable. This was resolved with a newer version of the forum’s data cache software.
  • Posts used to sometimes get “stuck”, needing a new reply to “free” them; this turned out to be caused by the script that handles new replies doing two tasks out of order. The cache would be cleared before the new reply was available, meaning if someone viewed the thread in that brief timespan, the page would be re-cached without the latest reply.
  • Putting unicode into your custom title in the store would completely mangle it, and that has all been fixed.
  • Just a week ago we fixed an incredibly annoying issue with thumbnail images (timgs) where they would screw up people’s scroll position when trying to jump to a specific post.

Our current major project is to once more upgrade the backend software powering the forums. This requires a ton of cleanup of the forum code, and it’s been going pretty well – it’s led to innumerable small bug fixes along the way. After our preparation for this upgrade is “complete”, we’ll be doing some beta testing to catch any lingering issues, and then the forums should enjoy another boost in speed once everything is finalized.

Looking towards the future, we have already made significant progress towards the restoration of the frontpage. The frontpage and CMS have been thoroughly overhauled to run on modern software versions. Our next tasks are to address the static site generator and the Rube Goldberg machine that takes articles from the CMS and delivers the frontpage content to you. I apologize that this has not gone more quickly; upgrading the store and the forums were, quite simply, the highest priority.

After the frontpage overhaul is out of the way, the forums will once again be the primary focus. Aside from the continued overhauls necessary to pay down the remaining technical debt, we’ve got several exciting new and improved features planned, including improving forum attachments, better forum announcements that you can dismiss, and better page templates that look and feel good to use on a mobile device. We’ll also be expanding the experimental BBcode buttons to a standard feature with support for more BBcodes, and don’t worry – you will still be able to disable them in your forum options if you don’t want them.

Finally, I would like to personally thank all of you: Jeffrey for buying the website and for hiring me, everyone who buys things at the forum store or donates to the forums patreon or the forums directly so SA can afford more development time, and also thanks to everyone who posts on or even simply lurks or reads the forums. It has been my pleasure to help dig these old forums out of their pit of neglect, and all of you have made that possible. :cheers:


P.S. Everyone is welcome/encouraged to read and participate in the Technical forum (TECH), the forum to discuss the forum software. There’s a changelog thread where the latest updates get posted, a thread to report issues, and the rest of the forum is full of feature ideas, questions, suggestions, bug reports, and more.
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thread archive
 
today’s the day for plinkey’s harakiri i checked but it didn’t happen yet ;(
i am nostalgic with waffleimages coming back. that was unexpected
 
Doobiewatch:
Doob now looks like he's pursuing Ozma
1670704829032.png
godbless....
 
Jeffo said:
The fees we pay on these amounts are variable but seem to hover around 8% each month.
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8% is criminal highway robbery. Jeffo confirmed cuck.
 
I was reading some goons suggesting ways that the forum can disavow its past on old threads to warn new users (as if there were ever going to be any) that SA is not like that any more (don’t worry - nobody is funny here these days, guys). Jeffrey posts « NOTE TO PARENTS: If your child is showing symptoms of prodromal schizophrenia, call their pediatrician or mental healthcare provider at once » yet note to parents: if your 14 year old son decides he wants to castrate himself, be sure to encourage him, you fucking bigot…
 
_Samson_ said:
I was reading some goons suggesting ways that the forum can disavow its past on old threads to warn new users (as if there were ever going to be any) that SA is not like that any more (don’t worry - nobody is funny here these days, guys). Jeffrey posts « NOTE TO PARENTS: If your child is showing symptoms of prodromal schizophrenia, call their pediatrician or mental healthcare provider at once » yet note to parents: if your 14 year old son decides he wants to castrate himself, be sure to encourage him, you fucking bigot…
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If your child posts on SA disown them.
 
_Samson_ said:
I was reading some goons suggesting ways that the forum can disavow its past on old threads to warn new users (as if there were ever going to be any) that SA is not like that any more (don’t worry - nobody is funny here these days, guys). Jeffrey posts « NOTE TO PARENTS: If your child is showing symptoms of prodromal schizophrenia, call their pediatrician or mental healthcare provider at once » yet note to parents: if your 14 year old son decides he wants to castrate himself, be sure to encourage him, you fucking bigot…
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Post some screenshots please, this sounds hilarious.
 
Shotgun Badger said:
Post some screenshots please, this sounds hilarious.
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Forum's current culture.png


That whole thread is pretty funny, some goons are seriously talking as if SA still has something to offer to new users, other than being a retirement home for Web 1.0 nerds with current year wokebrain.

New faces.png


Dude, Twitter has kind of cornered the market of "places for very online retards to post retard shit". Don't get your hopes up about those new faces.

Kiwi Farms.png


Godscock.png


Yeah totally.

lol.png


I know, right? Where else but SA can you get the raw experience of reading a marginally funny post followed by twenty people quoting it and adding "lmao". That's some good engagement.
 
Something Awful said:
View attachment 4048392

That whole thread is pretty funny, some goons are seriously talking as if SA still has something to offer to new users, other than being a retirement home for Web 1.0 nerds with current year wokebrain.

View attachment 4048356

Dude, Twitter has kind of cornered the market of "places for very online retards to post retard shit". Don't get your hopes up about those new faces.

View attachment 4048428

View attachment 4048362

Yeah totally.

View attachment 4048380

I know, right? Where else but SA can you get the raw experience of reading a marginally funny post followed by twenty people quoting it and adding "lmao". That's some good engagement.
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Is this an old thread? They're talking about here like its been taken off the internet.

And, christ, the emptyquoting on SA is so spot on. They can act superior about not having reactions or something on their posts but the side effect is so much dumber, nobody wants to read 20 people quoting a post and saying 'lol'. Also, in addition to cutting down on that KF's reaction system makes it far easier to search through a long and old thread for the best posts when the posts with the most reacts get highlighted. Its fucking ridiculous how much better the user experience is for KF compared to SA when you consider the difference in age and especially income between them, and the fact that KF is pretty much constantly being attacked in a way SA rarely is anymore.
 
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all of the keffals dropkf sa woke etc people have adopted an official policy of just pretending that they won and kf is not really existing any more rather than acknowledge how dumb all of them look in retrospect for gloating over our demise. it’s a like a more flaccid « we were always at war with oceania », if you can be flaccid after your « big surgery ». yet plenty of active SA mods have copped to reading this thread, undoubtedly only for online safety reconnaissance purposes
 
Something Awful said:
It's the current State of the Forums thread. Some goons think KF is dead because there was a thread about us getting dropped by Cloudflare. They celebrated our death, and then the thread got closed. So that's the last they heard about us.
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Nobody wants to be the first to say that KF's back because they'd fall under suspicion of visiting it. That can really put a dent in your political reliability report.
 
_Samson_ said:
all of the keffals dropkf sa woke etc people have adopted an official policy of just pretending that they won and kf is not really existing any more rather than acknowledge how dumb all of them look in retrospect for gloating over our demise. it’s a like a more flaccid « we were always at war with oceania », if you can be flaccid after your « big surgery ». yet plenty of active SA mods have copped to reading this thread, undoubtedly only for online safety reconnaissance purposes
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Like, at the end of the day, all of the insane shit that this forum has gone through in the last 5 months and the fact that somehow we've come out the other end intact (at least for now) gives me a stronger sense of community loyalty than more than a decade looking at Lowtax and his successors send SA in ever more idiotic directions and squander all of the opportunities they've been given. KF might have one of the worst reputations on the internet but even the worst of times drew attention to the site in a way that SA hasn't had in 15 years, the legion of enemies and Null's insane efforts to keep the site online has attracted attention from all comers, its pretty much single handily keeping alive every youtube internet drama channel and Null's livestreams are shockingly popular when you account for the fact that he can't do it on mainstream platforms. What has SA being doing lately in comparison?

KF as a forum feels modern while in comparison SA feels antiquated. Its comical how much better the User experience is here despite the absurd mismatch in respectability between SA and KF, not to mention the fact that KF has been dropped by almost anyone and everyone faintly legitimate around, here's some of the things that KF does better than SA when it comes to basic posting experience:

  1. Search function. It is so much easier to search for something specific here than on SA, its a simple process to tailor your search by things like user, subforum, timeframe, tag etc. On SA the only default option you have for search is basically just the subforum, and of course that doesn't get into the fact that the function is infamously, constantly broken and frequently unable to return satisfactory results.
  2. Posting options. On KF its so much more ergonomic to write out a long effort post, there's a lot less time fiddling with things like BBcode or wrangling images, its particularly helped by the way that you can just host images directly on the site and forget about things like imgur. There's so many more basic options on the posting panel, things like drafts, undo and redo, fuck even putting in a smiley is much more straightforward here with a simple dropdown menu. On SA its still the glorious year of 2004. Its particularly funny to me that they stick with these kinds of pointlessly antiquated systems when Goons pride themselves so much on being the 'smartest place on the internet'.
  3. Reactions. Goons can scoff at this but the alternative is obnoxious empty quoting that plagues SA with people posting 'lol' or 'Shut up bitch', reactions let you have a quick engagement with a post that doesn't fill space with pointless filler, and unlike reddit it doesn't interrupt the flow of a forum conversation with downvoted posts being suppressed and upvoted posts rising to the top, and you have tons of options to tailor your reaction beyond a bland 'good' or 'bad' reaction. Also, frankly, its kind of nice to see a bunch of positive reactions if you've made a good post.
  4. Thread highlights. Considering how many ridiculously long megathreads that SA has they really desperately need something like this, the basic problem they have is that, without somebody keeping a master list of worthwhile posts, its impossible to keep track of the relevant posts on a very long thread which can mean that new readers or readers who've dropped off a thread for a while can get hopelessly out of the loop, which further contributes to those kinds of threads getting incredibly cliquey and impenetrable to outsiders which is an massive problem on long SA threads. Thread highlights help so much on KF's extremely long threads, letting somebody who doesn't have time to sift through hundreds of pages of brainless chat skim through the thread and read the best and most relevant posts that let them stay abreast of the conversation.
  5. Community highlights. On the splash page for KF anybody can quickly be informed of the goings on inside the forum and whatever timely developments have happened regarding popular topics here. At best on SA they have to individually pin a thread on every subforum, and most people won't read it beyond the title.
  6. Responses to your posts are brought to your attention as part of the alerts, which keeps people more engaged in ongoing conversations without constantly having to check threads, on SA the only thing that indicates somebody is responding to you is the fact that responses to your posts are highlighted in yellow when you are reading the thread.
  7. And finally posts on KF can actually be deleted without breaking the forums, its hilarious that I even have to type that out.

There's tons of other little things like the way that you can see if posts have been added to a thread while you are typing up a response, or the way you can save quotes and other such things, or the larger amounts of info about happenings on the forum you can see on the front page, fuck we even had Dark and Light modes years before SA added in something so fucking basic. Just about the only thing I guess I would like to see here that SA has is an indication of how many posts were made on a thread since last you checked on it.

Even if they fucking despise the actual content here Goons really ought to swallow their pride and look at a forum like KF to see how much better a forum experience can be in 2022, it doesn't have to be time machine back to the early 2000s just because its not Twitter and Reddit.
 
Damn, zhir's right. KF really lacks the quintessential forum experience of clicking past page after page of people typing "lmao" and "no u" to try to find the next piece of actual thread content. SA clearly offers the superior posting experience. All that and you get banned by a sex offender too. The zoomers will be queuing up to pay their 10bux.
 
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