How can we breathe some life back into the forum?

[Pepe]

Admin! Thanks for your insight comments. And even more for keeping the forum alive all the years!

[laurie]

All I can do is keep the site up, until it breaks under the weight of a flood of bots

Thank you. Truly appreciated.

you abandon ship just to get "onboarded" (or shanghaied) to a big social media site.

There are a few of us who will resist. I have zero presence on big social. No Facebook, Instagram, etc. Not even The Gear Page. I'll generalize, but it all seems like a time-sucking, brain deadening wind-tunnel of bullshit. As I mentioned in another post, perhaps I'm just becoming a curmudgeon. But I'd much rather have just a few relationships that have true meaning. This forum gives that, and I'm very grateful.

[Pepe]

I feel you, Laurie. All these sites can indeed become a pure time sink and you will face utterly stupid things when using them, but in the case of Instagram I really benefit from that plattform.

Without Instagram I wouldn't have got in touch with some really wonderful people, especially Hideki Ishikawa, the owner of the musée KORG in Japan, who supplied a contact with Hiroaki Nishijima, the mastermind behind my beloved KORG effect pedals and the PME system, plus co-designer of the KORG MS synthesizers.

[BearBoy]

All I can do is keep the site up, until it breaks under the weight of a flood of bots, and you abandon ship just to get "onboarded" (or shanghaied) to a big social media site.

I'd just like to echo Pepe and Laurie's gratitude for you continuing to do this. This site is a great community and I am sure all of us are very thankful that it continues to exist.

The forum is being inundated with bots and other connectivity issues. That takes ups bandwidth, data, and sometimes limits the capacity of viewing the site. Increased bandwidth risks raising server cost increases. The bots goal is consumerism, to the point of breaking the site, which leads to everybody leaving for the bigger sites like Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube where consumerism is the main goal, already achieved.

Another forum I frequent was having massive issues with bots consuming all their bandwidth and it kept going offline. They seem to have fixed it by introducing Cloudflare to weed out the bots but I expect that costs additional money (and is a bit clunky for genuine users at times).

Beyond forum problems: How many new rock bands exist in the past 20 years? Hollywood between 2000-2015 was bought up by private equity firms, hedge funds, etc which then dropped bands from their labels because they only wanted single pop stars, not bands. It was all about profit. Not as many new people want to be guitar players, because they aren't influenced by it anymore.

That's a really interesting point. When was the last time a guitar based band became global stars? There are definitely still guitar bands touring stadiums etc but they tend to be bands that have been around for decades. Having said that, the guitar industry (and pedals!) seems to be bigger than ever. Not sure if it's being driven by older people like us (I assume?) buying loads more gear than we realistically need or that younger people are still being attracted to pick up the guitar despite the lack of any global superstar role models? Or maybe it's just my YouTube algorithm pumping loads of guitar related content my way...

Although Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo are often seen playing the guitar so who knows

[fernieite]

(This website does not run ads, never askes nor accepts donations, and never will.)

Just existing is the fight, free from ads. All I can do is keep the site up, until it breaks under the weight of a flood of bots, and you abandon ship just to get "onboarded" (or shanghaied) to a big social media site.

Admin - thanks so much for all of your hard work and sacrifices over the years! It's certainly refreshing to be a part of a forum that operates without financial motives. It's extremely rare in this day and age.

Like some others here, I've never had an account with facebook, Instagram, Twitter (x) and the like. And I never will. (But yeah, I'm old and set in my ways)