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Thread: Forum Declines?

  1. #31
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Mark,

    I am sure that the local feline population are well pleased that your particular death threat is no longer around

    New members may like to check on Mark Boyle's earlier posts........in his old account.


  2. #32
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    Haha, by some funny coincidence, I just happened to stumble across this old bookmark thought I'd peek in... I guess I'm not the only one that had forgot about AO..!
    Credit travels up, blame travels down -- The Boss

  3. #33
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hi there Ammo, long time no see, how are you keeping?

    And what happened to the avatar.............it was a big fish with a machine gun as I recall?


  4. #34
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    It was the OpenBSD Mascot. I remembered lol. Only member here who really knew anything about OpenBSD was Ammo.

  5. #35
    Senior Member mungyun's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ammo View Post
    Haha, by some funny coincidence, I just happened to stumble across this old bookmark thought I'd peek in... I guess I'm not the only one that had forgot about AO..!
    Lol me too! Well, i decided to google my username and see what sites i could find and this was number 5 on the results and I thought "Aww i miss that place, why did i stop visiting it in the first place?". So i decided to hop on by again (After a year or so!) and put my 2c in about why I disappear for years at a time.

    When i first joined, i was (as already mentioned by nihil) in college and had many hours to spend on here. When i come here, i cant just skim some topics and be happy, i have to find the topics that i want to follow and will usually chime in with my opinion. This usually leads me into spending a lot of time here. Now I have a full time web design job and a part time design job for another company and have practically 0 time for anything else. Not even for my precious MMO's!

    Also, I have a lot of colleagues at work that I can discuss security, programming, etc. and needing to post those questions online becomes less required to get my answers. Not to mention, people are way better at googling things these days than they were 5 or more years ago. Also back in the day here, if someone asked a question that they could answer on their own, the general response was (GOOGLE IT) -- and I think they did and they realized that its easier to do that then wait for someone that can help them on their specific topic. Hindsight, right?

    I too miss the old AO days and trying to pick out the members that i would soon see on the banned list and reading through it(was my favorite thing lol). But times, they are a changing and I think the people that are into security, programming, etc already have their favorite places to learn about current practices and such so their need to discuss anything is not really needed as much. Today, the only forum i really use is MSDN and that is about it. I think a lot of people are the same way... Ok, occationally i'll read a cracked article or two and post on their forums.. =-O

    I guess I could also bring up SEO -- I had originally found this site (if memory serves me correctly) by googling something and seeing this site on the first page. Now when i google something, i rarely see AO on the first page and im guessing that could have an impact too. I don't think that there is much that can really be done about it but it could be a possibility of why less people are finding AO.

    Also, I kinda disagree about people replacing forums with myspace and facebook. About 99% of the people i see on either of those sites are talking about themselves or sending the typical "Hey, how have you been! Its been years!" messages to one another. No real discussions of any kind that i usually see.

    Im adding ao to my bookmarks so i wont forget to pop by more often!

    Edit: to back up my earlier mention about how i spend hours on here. Just typing this post and thinking of the areas I brought up, took me about 45 minutes lol.. I used to do that to like 4 or 5 posts a night.. Now im all worried that I should have been working! Good thing i had today off
    I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having sex. -- Jack Handey

  6. #36
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hey!


    Please be sure that you do

  7. #37
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    I actually joined after AO was sold and IRC was no longer affiliated to the site and I thought it was great. I wasn't even around for the "good old days", but I still loved the site. I got a lot out of it before I discovered IRC, and when I finally did find IRC, my frequency of posts declined dramatically. I visit AO off and on every few months, but almost never post anymore.

    We had some really bright people posting some great tutorials and giving good advice for a while. Something scared them off or they just got too busy or a combination of the two. I know when I was in college I fooled around a lot more with tech stuff so I needed a site like AO more. Now that I have a full time job, I just don't have time to mess around like I used to. I still check out security sites every once in a while, but not nearly like I used to.

    It's probably just a generation thing. We had a good generation providing great content, and we got overwhelmed by the new generation with a mixture of people sincerely wanting to learn (not very common), and people just needing to get something to work, or trying to hack hotmail.

    I'm just spitballin though, It's probably a combination of a lot of different things. I know for me it was mostly moving on with my life, but had a few key members stuck around I probably would have stuck around longer and used the site more often.

  8. #38
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    Quote Originally Posted by souleman View Post
    Except many of the posters had full time jobs. Quad, Juridian, myself, etc. I actually stopped showing up so much after I lost my job :P


    Now see, you should at least get the story right before you complain about JP not giving them gold dots. The ONE person that got banned this way REQUESTED that he not have gold dots. He said he didn't need them and didn't want to sperate himself or some crap (that was years ago, I don't remember his actual wording). It was at that point that I decided to ban him, and got a few people together to ban him. I think it took a total of 6 people to pull it off.


    As I stated somewhere else today, the downfal of AO for a lot of people was the loss of IRC. Even though not all the members used it, the people that posted the most often were on IRC all the time. It was a natural flow between IRC and the forums.

    Social networking has nothing to do with it. If I have a problem trying to fix a blue screen error, I'm not going to go on Facebook to try to fix it.

    And it "used" to be, you would type in some bug or error, and AO was always one of the first few links to show up. That is how we got a lot of our members also. It wasn't because AO advertised, it was because the ammount of discussion and activity the site had pushed it up in the google and yahoo rankings.
    Souleman, it's been a long time amigo. We never opened our women only spa and health club we talked about so much.

    The last time I even looked at this site was a year ago, before that - who knows... years likely. When I stumbled upon this thread it was like a blast back to 2001-2002. I can't believe I'm posting on AO now, it's weird.

    AO used to be a real community. Love or hate JP, he brought us all together with technology, to talk about technology. We all made AO what it was back then, and even somewhat of what it is today. I don't read AO anymore and haven't for many years but it seems to be just a corporate run shell of a once great site. People knew each other outside of IRC or the forums. People got married, hooked up, wanted to kill each other, etc. It was a lot of fun. I just went back and read some of my archived posts; man I was a real dick. Now I'm an old man, no longer full of fire and vitriol that used to be normal on internet forums.

    -Quad

  9. #39
    @ÞΜĮЙǐЅŦГǻţΩЯ D0pp139an93r's Avatar
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    Meh... change happens whether we like it or not.


    This site still has hope.
    Real security doesn't come with an installer.

  10. #40
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Anybody for antipoints?

    When they were prominent the site was much more active; as soon as they faded into the background, activity declined markedly

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