Lol, I thought I would check @boethius's new posts and came upon this thread.

I got a lot more out of your anarchism/communism discussions which seemed much better rooted in actual historical precedent, backed up by the source material which I further explored. It seems your content has veered far from the vigorous philosophical subject matter I first came to respect you for when joining this forum.

Maybe all these what ifs are true to your life as @Jamal indicated but I don't see what these extremely idiosyncratic scenarios have to do with the 'price of fish' (to use a British colloquialism) here.

I understand if someone, for instance, suffers a violent attack they may have much more awareness about threats in the future. It is whether the vigilance is rational or not. If it becomes hyper-vigilance where they were afraid to leave the house then that is not helpful, which seems akin to these extreme hypotheticals you are posing here.

From your postulating, this forum does not seem any different from other businesses in the UK, and all businesses in the UK should shutdown immediately to pour over these possible risks.

Of course nothing is 100% and any other company would be open to the risks of being sued you are proposing here.

But if boethius was, as @Outlander said, "just trying to look out for the best interest of Jamal, and as a result, all of us," you have to wonder why he responded to every correction with an evasion such as "Well the main point is that..." — Jamal

There's zero evasion, the idea you could start a business and cannot ever be summoned to court is absurd, for any business. Moreso for a business that does anything remotely controversial in addition to hurting specific people's feelings (which, at least from my perspective, some banned members seem to have had their feelings hurt).

Risk analysis starts with considering extreme scenarios and then working your way down to the mundane.

It will be your business. If you don't want believe anything extreme could possibly happen, such as some government official in the UK reading something published/hosted by your business and being like "we need to put an end to this," then ok don't believe that could possibly happen.

The reason I propose that as a risk worth considering is because there's a pathway available to you at the moment that would reduce all categories of speech-litigation risk, from the smallest to the most extreme, which is incorporate in a place with far more clear and secure freedom of speech laws. UK may still take issue, but they can't force a foreign business to do something in a foreign country without that also being the law in that foreign country (they also know foreign countries don't like that, same as no UK judge wants to be told what to do by some foreign judge according to laws that don't exist in the UK, say sharia law, so the reticence to even try to compel a foreign company to do something is extremely high).

However, if you're response is "that's fantasy, no government official has ever taken issue with things people say online and then gone about abusing power to suppress that speech or as retaliation," well then ok, sure, but there's still all the other categories of litigation risk.

As I say, make your own risk scenarios and assign your own likelihood and impact numbers to them.

Some scenarios (disgruntled ex-forum client of your forum business) I'm not saying are existential, just a pain in the ass that you may need to deal with and other strategies available avoid creating service-client legal relationships.

The purpose of considering this category of risk is that you may need to deal with such a scenario that consumes a lot of your time, all the money, and a lot more, you've brought in through the service equivalent of donations, and completely erases all the benefits and peace of mind you thought the business would create for you. Now if you sit down and think about this scenario and conclude the risk of this happening is 20% ... ok, is that a risk you're willing to take?

And so on for other risks, all the scenarios I propose have some likelihood of actually happening.

As with all risk analysis, there is a threshold below which the additional risk is just added noise to your daily risk of being just being alive; just another of many improbable disasters that could befall you at any moment from being struck by lightening to being in a plane crash. Risk is non-actionable when it approaches this "improbable disaster noise".

Risk that requires further analysis is anything above this "background risk noise".

Doesn't mean anything has to be done about the risk but only further analysis can provide some reason to do nothing. To take base jumping, once the weather is such that there is a "freak gust" risk that could be lethal, maybe our base jumper is still going to jump but it obviously depends on "how likely": 1 in a 1000 is way higher than the otherwise risk of death that day, but perhaps still far below the base jumpers risk tolerance, but let's say some numbers guy comes up with 1 in 10 ... obviously a different situation and anyone who jumps would be considered to have a death wish, playing Russian roulette for all intents and purposes.

In terms of dealing with the risk, even super mundane legal harassment by an ex-member that has zero merit and can't possibly win but a judge is willing to give them their day in court to hold you accountable, you still have to show up in court and deconstruct even spurious arguments.

There's a whole spectrum of risk, lot's of risk categories, the "go-no-go" decision should be based on some rational evaluation of all the risks and summing them over a reasonable period of time before a choice to renew, handoff or abandon naturally re-emerges, say 5 years, and that total risk below your risk tolerance.

Now, exactly what number in terms of likelihood and impact will be somewhat subjective. Take our base jumpers, they may agree there's wind, may agree gusts to happen, but one may "feel" the weather is simply calm enough that a freak gust would be 1 in a million, so jumps, and another feel it's more like 1 in a hundred and so doesn't jump.

The rational framework for making the decision is nevertheless the same for each jumper.

So in your case, you should make a spreadsheet with the different categories of litigation and compliance risk, and punch in numbers of likelihood over 5 years and then impact (basically money required to deal with the eventuality). The sum of all these values will be some expected value of the decision.

From a business planning perspective, what really bothers me is that no actual benefits have been described. You could change technology, comply with the laws, without making a business and creating any of these client-service litigation risks.

So, the expected value in this case is always negative. Normally, for a business, or then new business project, to be a good idea you go through this exercise about the risk and then go through the same exercise about the benefits. Analytical milestone 1 is the expected value of the benefits far outweighing the expected value of the risks.

To take our party management corporation for example, all the risks of what can befall wild party goers (and the impact on the bottom line) can be analyzed in the above way, but then also all the benefits of people paying for the party, networking with celebrities that absolutely need to be at your parties, legal consenting sexual opportunities as the party maestro everyone loves and so on.

However, if you go through all the costs and risks and the expected value of costs exceeds the expected value of the benefits, then the decision cannot be rational.

Analytical milestone 2 is then considering the stochastic nature of reality and that even if the expected risk-benefit is positive there is still the possibility of catastrophic failure, and that's where the risk tolerance comes in.

Analytical milestone 3 is then considering the ways to lower the risks even further and amplify the benefits.

You could change technology, comply with the laws, without making a business and creating any of these client-service litigation risks. — boethius

You keep repeating the falsehood that operating as a company creates new risks. TPF is already a service, and I'm already a UK citizen. Creating the company will make no difference to risks or user rights. The only thing it will do is protect me personally (and make it a little bit more convenient to operate in some other ways).

I was serious when I said we've had enough of your posts in this discussion. You've had your say, I've taken your objections seriously, now stop.

Can I ask why you have gone the subscription and premium forum software route rather than free and open source?

Being honest the choices I read above about Discourse being 'slick' to paraphrase seemed rather trite.

I am a wholeheartedly biased open source advocate.

Also biased in that I much preferred forums from the early naughties in my formative years of the internet when phpbb was top dog. I still prefer that forum software in this day and age of emojis, reaction scores, and other social media inspired forums with added content and phpbb is still an updated project.

Not saying that will sway you just that is what I prefer. I have come to enjoy the ragtag motley crew especially our raucous and polarising Uncle Boethius so will go to whichever y'all go most likely just that I prefer clean and simple forums like phpbb. For the subject matter which is about level headed rational discussion I don't see why you have to be 'trendy' and go with the most flashy forum software of the moment with its related costs.

Can I ask why you have gone the subscription and premium forum software route rather than free and open source? — unimportant

Discourse is 100% free and open source. I'm just using it in the incarnation hosted by Discourse themselves. By paying them we keep a high quality open source project going. Plus I can move the site to my own server any time I want without even telling them (I just take a backup, available in admin).

So basically we're paying for top-class hosting and maintenance, and we get to take the software and data away with us any time we want.

I opted to do it this way for the reasons I explained. High performance and reliability without any server maintenance or performance enhancement responsibilities.

I see. Thanks for explaining. I had never looked into it tbh. I know a lot of forums use discourse these days and simply have not had an interest since it is not the old school aesthetic I like.

I have been toying with the idea of making a forum or two myself for a while - nothing to do with philosophy - and I quickly decided I would choose phpbb if I ever use one.

I too have been a coder for some years, though haven't done it in a couple of years now. Not coding directly but adjacent skills of admin of server running and command line stuff which I also enjoy.

Each to their own. I have always detested the old bulletin board design.

Lol, then we have nothing more to discuss on this matter.

Actually though, it's not in fact a matter of "each to their own", since the old design is objectively bad, with overly long column widths for text being one of the worst aspects.

EDIT: I mean line lengths

Well, respectfully, it is because I could pick a host of things I dislike about current forums - the bloating and infinite scroll, the overly 'busy' design and litany of options which do little, imho, to improve the experience. Maybe improve the addictive nature, like with the social media sites they are based on, but do not add anything positive over a simple text forum.

I opt for things like command line email clients though which is not most people's cup of tea so not expecting to win anyone over.

Modern forums are great, and command line tools are great. Just yesterday I installed a dictionary and thesaurus on my computer which I can look up in the terminal. For example...

infinite scroll — unimportant

Ooh, this. So much this. It's especially impactful if you browse on an Internet connection that is slow or throttled. As a web developer myself it's just so frustrating as to wonder what on Earth content is being transferred that would have just been easier to send straightforward to the browser.

What about IE6 or people who disable Javascript for security reasons, for example? I'd almost think they're purposely making "progress" bad so people get sick of it and return to simpler times. Yes, that's a pleasing thought for anachronistic persons like us to hold, outnumbered and out-voiced as we are. We'll be proven right to the world someday. Someday... :starstruck:

Edit: I think it has something to do with data archiving, to be honest. Or if you're a bit "creative-minded" some agenda in relation to such. Makes it harder to web scrape. You actually have to know what you're doing and simulate a JSON AJAX request, often using a token that is difficult to obtain by the most popular HTML scraping methods.

Read this discussion about infinite scroll:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/infinite-scrolling-is-a-total-pain/225532

A small minority of loudly opinionated people love to hate it but their reasoning rarely withstands scrutiny.

We'll be proven right to the world someday. Someday... :starstruck: — Outlander

Don't stop believing Outlander :strong:

You keep repeating the falsehood that operating as a company creates new risks. — Jamal

Way more risks.

As a UK business you can for sure be sued in the district your business in incorporated. As we've been debating, being sued in some random UK district is pretty special circumstances and then to enforce that ruling on you as a person would anyways require coming to the district where you actually live and have assets and enforce that ruling that way.

Being a UK citizen is not equivalent to having a business.

Furthermore, the fact that you can be sued and someone can argue that you're providing a service for clients, means that's a hurdle they need to overcome. A judge could easily throw out such a case when he or she learns that you aren't a business, you don't make promises, and philosophy is your hobby that you do for your own betterment and the betterment of mankind.

The "it's actually a service" argument usually requires some actual tangible benefit you would normally get from a company, like shoe shining.

"Arguing with people", as we are doing right now, you certainly can get from a company but you can also get in pretty much every aspect of private life from your wild ass parties I've never been invited too, on the street, in the bar, with family at Christmas, with strangers on a train; all of which aren't paid services and when you're arguing with a company it's likely also not the intended service you paid for.

So there's a good chance if anyone did sue you right now a judge would just throw the case out. Every hurdle to a court hearing is both additional protection and disincentive to actually suing you, as there's all these problems to solve.

Likewise, any sort of consumer protection mechanism, if someone complained right now and they don't have a business number and they're trying to convince some consumer protection bureaucrat that "actually he's a philosophy business selling arguing with him and others services", their reaction will most likely be considerably less than enthusiastic.

As soon as you're a business it goes without saying you provide a service, as that's what businesses do. No hurdle to starting the complaint process: you have a business ID, brand, address of incorporation, clear as day where you are liable. If your service is providing philosophy somehow then that's your service, same rules apply as providing any other service.

And maybe step back and consider the consistency here.

Every extreme scenario I describe you dismiss offhand, zero engagement, and yet the primary motivation to make a business is to avoid a 19 million pound liability? An extreme scenario that can actually be easily dismissed as those levels of fines are for multi national corporations that actually have 19 million pounds lying around, not micro-businesses. However, what people may do if they get emotional enough and can really do those things (like start consumer protection mechanisms of one kind of another) is 100% a risk that cannot be dismissed.

To further support your decision to mitigate this 19 million pound fine risk you propose a spurious argument that you can potentially be sued right now as a business, even though you are clearly not a business, and so you may as well be a business!!

Now, I've described plenty of spurious arguments that you dismiss offhand!!

However, your spurious argument that you're already a business is unlikely to ever actually happen. Judges do not view themselves as having the time to bring private citizens to court to have them account for the actions of a business that clearly doesn't exist. It must be very clear that you are in fact operating as an illegal business (getting money to shine my shoes) for this argument to apply.

Yes, people can contribute to the upkeep around here out of the goodness of their heart: but that does not make them special and doesn't change the relationship in any substantive way, and, more importantly, you clearly don't aim to profit but are clearly just helping out your fellow philosophy hobbyists and a little help your way is appreciated. Super clear as day non-formal hobby club of some sort that people have a right to do based on the freedom of association.

As soon as you're a business, you can easily be brought to court to answer to spurious arguments. Private citizens must be protected from predatory business and therefore judges must try to afford private citizens every opportunity to hold their services to account and have their day in court. On that day it can become clear that the matter is really, really, really dumb, but to get to that clarifying moment can be reall expensive.

For those interested, once you've gone through the steps of net-present-value analysis and something seems reasonable to do, the next analytical steps are taking into account things like opportunity-costs, depreciation of assets, insurance policy analysis (of the bad things that can happen, is it already insured, is it a net-present value to insure against it; would insurance resist such a claim, to what extent can they do so and can that be dealt with, would successful insurance effectively equalize the costs or only somewhat as there would be reputational damages and other non-insurables anyways involved, etc.), various discount and interest rates, and a bunch of accounting stuff I don't even know how to do.

@boethius I love you. You're a rare breed. But the man has made his decision. Any benefit (or detriment and consequence) of his decision is now his and his alone to own. Your efforts are, as always, truly appreciated, if not only by myself. :100:

Let us move onto greener pastures, shall we? :smile:

Let us move onto greener pastures, shall we? :smile: — Outlander

Let's hope that the admin at the new site doesn't somehow forget to approve his registration. :wink:

boethius I love you. You're a rare breed. — Outlander

I love you too Outlander <3

Any benefit (or detriment and consequence) of his decision is now his and his alone to own. — Outlander

That maybe, but the point of risk analysis is also to have a plan to deal with things, so they don't catch you off guard.

For example, if @Jamal sees to it to always be able to answer (in terms of resources and time) a summons in some reasonable amount of time, by flying back to the jurisdiction his business is incorporated, that would already be a big risk mitigating factor. But would require pro-active planning for it on @Jamal's part such as not taking engagements that would make it impossible to answer a summons.

Likewise all the risk categories can be planned for and mitigated.

Just because base jumpers conclude that "probably" no one will crash, that does not mean the event shouldn't be planned for so as to potentially save their life if they didn't die on impact.

The mitigation strategy for being harassed by a government official could be just immediately close up shop, for example, or then make as much noise as possible and become super famous!

So even if someone's mind is made up and not affected by new information (such as how to professionally go about making business planning decisions), the analysis is still critical to be sure to keep the risks as low as possible and have some basic plan of what to do if they happen.

Let's hope that the admin at the new site doesn't somehow forget to approve his registration. :wink: — Jamal

Every single scenario I described can happen to you.

And as you say yourself, as soon as you are faced with actual liability then you are stuck in the UK jurisdiction, can't move, can't just closeup shop and walk away. The start of one lawsuit, no matter how spurious, could commit you to dealing with UK jurisdiction, all choices (that you have right now) removed from you, for years. That's high impact, regardless of the eventual result! so the likelihood does not have to be very high to warrant taking such a risk seriously.

So much this. — Outlander

Right on. Time for a 'hard fork'? :yum: would probably be a community of 2.

Read this discussion about infinite scroll — Jamal

The time it took to load that link is case in point lol. Discourse takes like 20+ seconds for me to load a page. Phpbb very quick.

It is like the latest windows versions require greater and greater hardware requirements in the name of 'progress' when I can run linux just fine on cast off machines from family members from a decade or more ago.

I don't care what people say about infinite scroll, won't change my mind. Pagination worked perfect and cannot envision a case where infinite scroll would be better since I value conserving resources and that is the opposite "load everything to get to the part you want in a thread" rather than jump to specific page. If I am wrong, don't care, don't like it!

EDIT: Ok I did read the thread. I see a message claims that 'posts are loaded in and out while scrolling just the same as with pagination'.

Maybe true but I just prefer the old style even if performance is 1:1 the same, just because that is what I first learned and liked. Don't care if it is nostalgia or what. I hate social media too maybe because it wasn't around when I was young but I think I would dislike the vapid nature of it even if I was young when it was already established.

I have always despised 'booze culture' and that has been around for a long time before I was born.

Discourse takes like 20+ seconds for me to load a page — unimportant

So when you went to that link I sent you, it took 20 seconds? I find that hard to believe. If so, I think your experience is unusual.

I don't care what people say about infinite scroll, won't change my mind. — unimportant

I see.

EDIT: Ok I did read the thread. I see a message claims that 'posts are loaded in and out while scrolling just the same as with pagination'.

Maybe true but I just prefer the old style even if performance is 1:1 the same, just because that is what I first learned and liked. — unimportant

Ok.

I think there's a confusion in many of the criticisms of Discourse. The software itself actually isn't resource-intensive for the client, i.e., in the browser when visiting, navigating within and using a Discourse forum (all else being equal); what is more challenging is hosting it properly, because it needs a lot of memory. If people have had the experience of slow Discourse forums this is often a server issue. That won't be an issue for a site hosted on discourse.org, so TPF will run well.

EDIT: But the first load can be slow, I grant you. It's always fast after that.

A small minority of loudly opinionated frustrated people love to hate it but their reasoning rarely withstands scrutiny. — Jamal

All scientific innovation (read that again, EVERY single thing around you that isn't a rock attached to a stick) was created by a small minority. This in and of itself doesn't seem to be very useful in any intellectual or logical context of an opinion on the topic, particularly one about scientific or technological development and related feedback.

People who become frustrated who don't express their frustrations are the leading cause of mental illness, violence, and more. This is scientific fact. They don't "love to hate" they simply have no choice but to express frustration (whether warranted or easily prevented or not) with something that happens to be, at the time, well, frustrating. I feel that is fairly self-evident. You never get angry? We all know you do. Speaking of which, that doorman (or lobby person) at your (possibly former) apartment better be alive. I recall a distinct level of frustration (loudly opinionated—albeit solicited—remarks) in regards to him. Besides. Frustration leads to reconsideration of choice and action, which in of itself (reconsideration of past habits) is the eventual driving factor responsible for every great invention or innovation not discovered haphazardly.

Just as easily what is responsible for how the world is today: a combination of ingrained need to conform meets hedonic treadmill

But all that aside. Do you have a link to a (popular/live/"actual") forum that uses Discourse? For some reason the meta links on the site itself seem to be "low-fi" or not the full featured version shown on the main site.

Is there simply no pagination at all? I'm curious how that would work with a long discussion with say several hundred posts. Presumably you'd click a new topic and end up at the first post. There's surely some "jump to most recent post" or effective pagination link, yes?

It just seems kind of nice for those with analytical minds who like to study certain posts from varying users the ability to control a certain "sphere" of 10-20 posts at a time (and then navigate to them after viewing the most recent post) and mentally recall "Ok, I was on page X" as opposed to "I last left off reading at 'that guy with the zombie baby as an avatar's post", for example.

Not a big deal. All benefit comes at a cost. Naturally. I'm sure a few lone people might prefer traditional pagination is all. No fuss, just a view I'm sure others might hold. :smile:

So I'm responsible for mental illness now? :wink:

Is there simply no pagination at all? — Outlander

I think that's right, yes.

I'm curious how that would work with a long discussion with say several hundred posts. Presumably you'd click a new topic and end up at the first post. There's surely some "jump to most recent post" or effective pagination link, yes? — Outlander

There's lots of in-discussion navigation conveniences, and you're taken to the last post you read, just like here. But why don't you go and have a look? Here's the meta.discourse.org topics ordered by number of replies descending:

https://meta.discourse.org/latest?ascending=false&order=posts

Now don't judge it too quickly. It'll take some getting used to for an old codger like you.

But why don't you go and have a look? — Jamal

I will, thanks. I'll even update my browser for you.

(Interesting because I do fairly often, it can't be more than a few months since I got the latest version, and yet, this is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/bvrNCnX.jpeg -- I am on Firefox 115.29, interesting this is the "extended support release" version since I am on Windows 7, which I just noticed Google Chrome literally refuses to offer any form of update for Windows 7, instead requiring a minimum of Windows 10 [I'd have to jump a full 3 numbers ahead] alas this is the view I am stuck with, and perhaps may be the same for others? Not sure)

It's not a big deal at all. I don't need colors or images. Certainly not to dissuade your welcomed newfound enthusiasm for this forum by petty (albeit genuinely observed) observations that apply to very few, as you say, after all. :smile:

Ah. Windows 7 is old so you can't run up-to-date browsers. ChatGPT told me "Use Firefox ESR. It’s the last modern browser that still supports Windows 7."

I checked on my phone. It has a nice, compact yet usable "floating" pagination feature on the bottom right of the screen. Some might even call that overkill as far as pagination design. :razz:

Yeah, just had a look. Works quite nicely on the phone. That timeline thing sticks to the right of the posts on a pc, rather than floating.

One of the things I really like about PlushForums is that when I click on a discussion it takes me to the last comment I viewed, and not just the first/last page.

Does Discourse do that?