Dear One Big Torrent,

The Forum is dead, Real Dead.

If you want to keep it allive then I advise you to get rid op the SPAM because if someone posts something it gets spammed of the map by all the 'phonesales' etc. This is A; bad for the poster and B; bad for the reader who can't find the 'real' posts.

Cheers,
B

Totally agree with you, and I'm glad it has been sorted now. It's a crying shame the forum is so inactive, cause it could be a great place to discuss stuff we are all interested in.

I can't help but refer back to what Chomsky tends to say, that the internet is a great resource, but that it also atomizes people. Lots of people and small groups are working on important issues, but there is hardly any communication between them. Suffice to say, real change in society is nigh on impossible without mass action and real communication and proper co-operation and co-ordination.

Big corporate leaders meet at Davos and wherever for a reason...

the forums are sloppy, the torrent comments are sloppy, and suggesting that it requires 500usd a month to run a site and a tracker like this is fraud.

i love the sentiment, but the execution is lacking.

bookz wrote:the forums are sloppy, the torrent comments are sloppy, and suggesting that it requires 500usd a month to run a site and a tracker like this is fraud.

i love the sentiment, but the execution is lacking.

I have to agree with this.. not sure where the claim about it requiring 500usd to run this place comes from, but I find the torrent interface on this site to be quite.. cumbersome, non-standard, and ugly. One has to wonder if the money this site generates is really going into improving this site.

For an example of a much cleaner, and more organic format, see the site Son of Shun. It has a forum interface allowing people to upload torrents within the same interface, which allows people to comment on the torrents and have debates within the same thread of the torrent. This leads to more people participating in the forum. And the forums and interace are a lot less ugly than this site. The other benefit is that older torrents can be "bumped", making older torrent threads visible once again, so that reseed requests can be made and filled.. instead of what goes on here, which is that everybody leeches a torrent when it is uploaded and nobody bothers to keep it seeded or to reseed it. And duplicate torrents of the same program/documentary are added periodically when instead simply reseeding an older torrent, via the torrent/thread bump mechanism as in Son of Shun, would be preferrable as you don't have to split the swarm by creating a whole new torrent.

I really think that improving this site's interface and making the torrent section more organic with the forums, as is done at Son of Shun, will create a more community feeling and encourage people to start participating in the forums. The way things are currently with this site seems to serve a very narrow purpose, which is to get maximum Google hits...

I'm sorry to say that I agree with quite a bit of that too. No idea about the Google thing as I've no clue how that works, but there are many things that can be done with the site. The forum link to torrents is an excellent idea, which I support. The comments are fine and dandy, but it should really be in the forum instead. As guest I can't see how Son of Shun works, but what kind of site is it? Worth registering?

I do like the white and clean interface, but it would be great if we could get more info on torrents directly, for example via the arrow, instead of clicking on the link itself. A section of the description could be showed for example, with a link to "More".

This only concerns the admin team, but it would be great if it was easier to manage torrents and forum. Especially the ability to ban and delete many torrents at once. We probably get quite a bit of traffic these days, as spam has increased, and going through each torrent and banning it and deleting it takes time.

Would also be nice with some kind of voting system for the torrents. A thump up and thump down for each for example. Then it could be possible to sort by best/worst votes too. Plus, if torrents were linked to forum threads, a little icon with how many posts are in the affiliated thread.

The login doesn't seem to work ideally either. When I log in I get an error message about not having admin rights. And if I log in from the forum, I'm suddenly not logged in in the torrent section. Not sure what's up with that.

Pangaea wrote:As guest I can't see how Son of Shun works, but what kind of site is it? Worth registering?

It's worth registering.. just to check out the interface and to see how it works. It seems to be a site mainly for American shows like the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Real Time with Bill Maher but many torrents on this site end up there, and vice versa.

Pangaea wrote:The login doesn't seem to work ideally either. When I log in I get an error message about not having admin rights. And if I log in from the forum, I'm suddenly not logged in in the torrent section. Not sure what's up with that.

I have all kinds of problems with the login as well... First, when I log in through the main torrent interface, and select the checkbox "keep me logged in", I still have to repeatedly log in .. sometimes a couple of times a day if I visit the site that often.

I also have get similar errors trying to login into the forums.

Same thing here. I tick that box from time to time, but it doesn't work.

Checked out that site, and it does indeed look quite nice. The torrent threads are great.

What's a shame about this place is that here is so little action in the forum. We're a bunch of pretty like-minded individuals, so I'm sure we'd have loads to talk about. We could learn a lot, share info and so forth. But right now people just check the newest torrents, downloads whatever they want, and that's that. This site could be so much more. That said, I don't exactly have the knowledge to improve it, and as Obama shows every single day, talking is cheap.

Yep it's a shame there isn't more activity here. I don't know how it turned out like this, but as I said in that other thread, I don't think the spam was the main cause.

Forum intregation with the tracker is very buggy (although joe deserves huge credit for working his ass off on it back then). The board software is very complex (far outweighing the tracker in that respect), and to get things integrated to a point where it runs 100% smooth and does all we want it to would be a shitload of work. For the long run, I rather thought about dropping the forums and improving the torrent comments to accomodate some of the things you guys mentioned above, and facilitate communication, on both the substantive and the technical.

the forums are sloppy, the torrent comments are sloppy, and suggesting that it requires 500usd a month to run a site and a tracker like this is fraud.

First of all we rarely ever meet that donation goal. And second: maybe in La-La-Land being threatened by hundred-thousand Euro lawsuits is plenty fun on that kind of a budget. Where we live, I can tell you, it is not

Very much agree on the spam. This forum has been more or less dead for a very long time, probably years to be honest, and the spam situation is fairly new.

Not entirely sure what is the best process to get it more active. But if some sort of forum is to be kept, it could perhaps be an idea to show the last 5 active topics on the frontpage. For example like this site. To the right, under the ad (or an empty spot if you use FlashBlock), are 10 topics with recent posts in them. Something like that could hopefully entice people to visit the forum too, and post a bit here and there.

Just a couple of thoughts.

* take a look at http://www.mybboard.net/ it's what many forum sites are using these days. It's free and really fairly simple to set up, if someone has the time. It can be jazzed up or stripped down in many ways.
A makeover could get a little more regular input here.

* forum moderators. It looks as though there are some regulars here that are showing interest in improving things. Using the myBB set up and adding a couple of forum mods (with no influence over tracker or index) would certainly give this place a little extra life.. or at least reduce the spam.

This forum could be a great resource, a place for currently small groups of individuals, or even merely individuals to unite in common thoughts or advance their learning.

Certainly it would begin as a private club for a while with only the regulars posting but I'm fairly convinced it would attract more posters as time passes.
Activity is the key.
I've often wandered in here in the hope of finding some insight on topics in the torrents or recent news reports, the potential is there.

..a penny for your thoughts.

Thanks for the post.

Those are very valid concerns and suggestions. From time to time I've tried to be active in the forum, hoping it will lead others to be active too. But it quickly becomes boring to talk to myself. Perhaps you're right that we need some kind of starting group. I also think we need to integrate the forum much better with the site and first page, so the forum isn't like a completely separate part.

Just checked out a live demo of MyBB, and it looked pretty good. The phpBB3 versions I've come across don't have proper URL postings (we have to put in [url=...], while myBB had this one sorted, so this alone is a big selling point for me as I think users shouldn't have to put in code for something as simple as that. It also automatically opens external URLs to a new window/tab, which I also prefer.
Maybe there are ways to do this in phpBB3 too now; I haven't checked lately.

Some years ago I ran a blog at Wordpress, and it included a spam filter called Akismet. It was fantastically effective and caught at least 99% I would say (looking at my blog's statistics). Very rarely did anything get through. I noticed that the live demo had a pluging for Akismet. If this really works, it would pretty much stop all spam - at least my robots.

The problem for this site, I would imagine, is that a lot of work went into integrating the forum into the overall site's design. Ideally we wanted one signin process and so forth. That work was never completed, as it doesn't work as it should. But I would imagine if we installed myBB we would be back to the forum as a separate database with two signin processes. If this was changed, it would be problematic to update the forum for later patches and upgrades.

I've had the same feeling as you when visiting the forum, hoping for new interesting posts. Sometimes my hope is raised, only to discover that they are spam. I honestly think this site (or rather, forum) can be a lot more than it currently is. Would be great if this could be a go-to-place for discussing a wide range of issues addressed in some of the material in the torrents. I haven't exactly gone looking for it, but I haven't come across such a site. I know Znet have a forum, but that's only for Sustainers, which is bound to limit participation a lot (with the upside of preventing spam and trolls).

phpBB3 has made some new releases since this forum was started and some advancements have been made in the mod but I have not been able to add them to help out since it was moved to the new server.
I have decided to drop the phpBB from PMBT as it is to hard to keep up with all there changes.

the last release I did made it very easy to upgrade and should really be added to this site.