The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)

[alexgt]

There is a place for some kind of connection but it runs on a 9v battery.

[Dream of Omnimaga]

Oh ok. IIRC there was a TI  or HP calc that lacked battery support. Maybe because batteries didn't exist back then. Imagine a calc that runs at 120 volts

[alexgt]

Well if you had an outlet the power would't be a problem

[Dream of Omnimaga]

But then that brings back the issue about the teacher probably not expecting wires to go through the classroom so when checking if students are working, he could hurt himself by tripping on the cord. Now I was more talking about a calc literally using 120 volts of power  instead of like, 6-9.

[TheMachine02]

But but but ... you want to put a Xeon in this calc or what ? 

[Dream of Omnimaga]

Oh I was talking about 60-70's calcs. Back then the technology was much less advanced. Also weren't computers the size of a gym?

[TheMachine02]

Yeah, with the computer being the size of a room, and eating half the production of a nuclear central. That would be funny back then 

[Dream of Omnimaga]

On a side note, I am removing Hays Games from the forum list. It appears that their web board that used to be located at http://amazingforums.com/forum/HAYSCORP/ is gone (it was still up a few years ago and I even made an epic necropost with Kerm) and Archive.org never cached it, so there will never be a way to retrieve post stats for it.

EDIT: TICT board is done from 2002 to 2010. It was not hard to add at first, but when I reached 2008 it became nightmarish. The only way to do it afterward, due to lack of viable Archive cache, is to count every topic reply one by one >.< (thankfully the forums are still around there aren't that many posts from after 2008 outside the TIGCC programming sub-forum)

EDIT: TICT is now complete. They had like 10 posts a year after 2011. But that's pretty much the case of every 68K-only forum after 2010.

[alexgt]

Did you start calculator programming two years ago too or was it programming for other platforms?

Sorry for not seeing this
I started with Ti-Basic on a 84+

[Lionel Debroux]

About the TICT/TIGCC message board: I stopped attending my own board after getting doubly censored, by guess whom, for suggesting to a user that he should post on e.g. Omnimaga, which was more active. That was several days after the post had gone unnoticed. In the first round of censorship, only the links were removed; after I put them back with a public complaint, the whole post, including technical content, was erased.
I could have bothered Thomas Nussbaumer immediately so that he spanked the offender appropriately, but I decided to focus on more productive matters instead. I told him a while later, for informational purposes only.

[Dream of Omnimaga]

To be honest, I never understood (and when you tell me, I forget immediately afterward) why you are not root admin of your own board, considering you are at the head of the TICT website. If, back when I ran Omni, had no admin powers on my own board and that I received abuse from a biased moderator, I would have immediately created a new forum somewhere, even if it meant a crappy Invisionfree or Forumactif board, then replaced the messageboard link with it in my website navigation. But again, most people on TICT board came for TIGCC help, not TICT releases, so perhaps it would have been better off to just link to some other existing TI forum so that the person doesn't get attention.

It is not surprising that every forum moderated by the TICT mod you are mentionning died abruptly after 2005 (or immediately after becoming mod at the said site if he joined later). Here is an updated TI community yearly activity chart, which now includes TI-Gen and TICT (although 2007-08 TICT stats might be quite innacurate):



And some other sites died rapidly or split off for much less worse stuff, which shows that forums with people who constantly instigates disputes  and have biased moderation that favors specific people tend to not remain lively for long, since eventually people will just leave in bulk, either leaving calc stuff for good, migrating to another forum or starting their own. In the least worse cases of forums where controversial remarks are often launched, it is not as bad and the site can easily recover, but some people will stay away. When a staff's forum goes from 20K posts straight to 2K in one year there is a serious problem and they truly did piss people off hard to achieve that (or the people were already pissed, then finally had enough). But there are exceptions, of course, such as prolonged downtime.

[Lionel Debroux]

I used to be one of the admins of the TICT/TIGCC board, indeed.
Around 2005, several months after finding out for good about you know who's shenanigans, and understanding how he had betrayed my trust and naiveness, the mood had degraded on the board, as a result of the tougher interaction between him and me now gone public. So I gave moderator privileges to a couple reasonable friends from TI-Gen (they were root staff there and we interacted with them on a daily basis), with a mission of keeping him and me on check, because our behaviour had started turning users off the board. I did so without discussing the matter with the other admins of the TICT/TIGCC board, and I stated the promotion publicly, IIRC in one of the topics where infighting was occurring.

Soon thereafter (an hour or so, IIRC), you know who revoked these moderator privileges, before either of these persons was even able to use them, as well as my own admin privileges.
Of course, that made me angry, but by the next day (I found out about the move shortly before leaving the university, and at the time, I didn't have Internet access at the flat), I decided not to fight against the move. Not fighting soon proved to be one of the best things I ever did for the TI-68k community's sake: you know who had already conspired with Sebastian about forking the TIGCC message board to another place if I asked Thomas Nussbaumer to override his move, and needless to say, publicly make me forever responsible for the change. He stated multiple times that he was very surprised that I didn't fight his action; looks like he thought my behaviour was as predictable as his... but fortunately, it isn't.

[Dream of Omnimaga]

UPDATE: Both Tout-82 forums have their stats compiled now!

Those two sites are really strange: In 2013, Tout-82 was redone from scratch on Forumactif because the original site had an outdated forum software and unmaintained site. However, they decided to keep both versions of the site running afterward and many members stayed behind. So the result is that there are now two different sites of the same name currently in operation (and struggling for activity). Some moderators maintain both boards.

I used to be one of the admins of the TICT/TIGCC board, indeed.
Around 2005, several months after finding out for good about you know who's shenanigans, and understanding how he had betrayed my trust and naiveness, the mood had degraded on the board, as a result of the tougher interaction between him and me now gone public. So I gave moderator privileges to a couple reasonable friends from TI-Gen (they were root staff there and we interacted with them on a daily basis), with a mission of keeping him and me on check, because our behaviour had started turning users off the board. I did so without discussing the matter with the other admins of the TICT/TIGCC board, and I stated the promotion publicly, IIRC in one of the topics where infighting was occurring.

Soon thereafter (an hour or so, IIRC), you know who revoked these moderator privileges, before either of these persons was even able to use them, as well as my own admin privileges.
Of course, that made me angry, but by the next day (I found out about the move shortly before leaving the university, and at the time, I didn't have Internet access at the flat), I decided not to fight against the move. Not fighting soon proved to be one of the best things I ever did for the TI-68k community's sake: you know who had already conspired with Sebastian about forking the TIGCC message board to another place if I asked Thomas Nussbaumer to override his move, and needless to say, publicly make me forever responsible for the change. He stated multiple times that he was very surprised that I didn't fight his action; looks like he thought my behaviour was as predictable as his... but fortunately, it isn't.

Yeah the thing is that until around when the guy bashed my three POTY BASIC contenders in December 2005, he had a small group of hardcore followers who worshiped him like a god and defended him at any cost. After the 2005 POTY incident about my BASIC games on his forum then the other one about F-Zero 68K, he got pretty much everybody except maybe three people on his bad side and they finally realized the truth. Add to that another incident in 2006, then the French 68K community was done.

On the other hand, certain people on French TI-68K forums liked to troll and often tried to drag him into flame wars instead of devoting enough time to moderate him. But of course, I'm not admin of those sites so I'm not one to tell others how to run their sites. I only wish that back in the days, we could have convinced members who are fed up with the situation to switch over to Omnimaga or TI-BANK, before those members are gone for good, but again, it would have been hard to convince people to continue using a tool made by him, so perhaps that wouldn't have worked, not to mention that TI has put 68K calcs on life support years ago.. (they're still sold here, but nobody makes program for them and I bet that they are no longer really produced)


EDIT: Macross Software stats are now complete, as well as Espace-TI.

Another problem with new forums is that most people only care about calcs for 2 years, so they enthusiasticly launch new TI discussion forums, only to abandon them 2 years later.

[Dream of Omnimaga]

UPDATE: Stats for Tama-Team and the Z80 yAronet forum have been added. However, I cannot retrieve stats for the Z80 forum from before it was hosted on yAronet, because Archive.org has an annoying robot.txt exclusion bug that checks current robot.txt instead of archived ones, so if a website is available in the archive for browsing, but then one day, the domain name is squatted and the robot.txt starts blocking archive.org bots, then all archived copies of the website will be no longer available, rather than just copies from after the domain name squatting. It's a shame, because forum89.vvlr.com was available in the archive for about 12 years until recently...

EDIT Here is the completed chart, for now (maybe I'll find other sites in the future)


EDIT: There are now extra stats, such as how many forums per year had opened/closed, how many had 1000 posts, how many had 10000, 20000, etc.

Also, I notice that there is a massive increase in post quality overall in the TI community since 1997. From 1997 to 2002 it was pretty much like Youtube comments with lots of spam, from 2003 to 2009, low quality forum discussion was rampant, especially during the 2007 upsurge of new French forums, then randomness flatlined afterward.

[Unicorn]

Yeah, I occasonally find old topics on cemetech, and its pretty spammy.