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Fate of HTLAL | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| aokoye Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5339 days ago 235 posts - 453 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese | Message 129 of 178 11 August 2015 at 1:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I don't know that the rules at the new forum are any more restrictive than they are here but I also think that the admins over there were doing a lot of putting out of fires so to speak (not in the flame war sort of way). What I would like to see is some sort of code of conduct that is built at least semi- democratically. That said given the instability of the situation at hand (are we staying or are we going, what is FX doing in terms of wanting to be in contact, etc etc) I can see why haste was made. Either way I would like the rules to be more open (while remaining respectful - which is totally doable, even on a large scale) than they are here. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5024 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 130 of 178 11 August 2015 at 2:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Ditto and ditto.
I am not a Windows man. Anyway, if there's actually any value in using tapatalk to browse this forum (I see some forum users consider it intrusive undesirable, and admins favour adding 'mobile' themes over in-forum tapatalk implementations), I think it should be easier to get tapatalk to 'learn' how to crawl a site which is pretty much frozen code-wise. Any viable solution to that little issue, and the ridiculous slowness, bugs, etc. mentioned by aokoye and others, are fixable in a blink of an eye, just like sing85 said -- that is, if there's a will in FX's part, which still remains the big question.
If you want some stats, a little less than than 520000 users (around half a million) are registered here. Of them, about 14000 have actually posted. And then there's always people like sing85 again, who just post for the first time after being quiet for more than three years -- so I simply have no way of knowing how many 'real' users we have here, but I'm guessing it's upwards from 20000, i.e. two orders of magnitude more than, or 100 times as many as, the .org site. Personally, I'm sitting on no fence. I will stop hanging around here when the server is shut down or dies, and not a minute before. If I am thus crazy and doomed to become the resident ghost of the site, then so be it. As for the alternate forum, nothing against it per se, it looks cool and such, but I'll move there only after this one is gone -- I'd frankly prefer not to divide my attention before that time comes, though, so you won't be seeing me over there. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5060 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 131 of 178 11 August 2015 at 2:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I think most of us long-time HTLAL members would be happiest if we could keep what we are used to, and fix what we have, that would be fantastic! As it is, the current situation will resolve itself one way or another. It seems apparent that FX is interested in keeping HTLAL online but not interested in modernizing or fixing persistent long-term problems. Hopefully, he will "step up to the plate" and do something positive to maintain his legacy and give us the best of both worlds- an HTLAL that works and with all our archive intact and accessible for the foreseeable future.
Without such a move by FX, entropy will have its way with our beloved site and forum. There will be a next crisis, we all know this. I for one am fed up with the opacity of what's going on, the lack of communication and the lack of, frankly, respect for the community. HTLAL could be the best language-learning site on the internet made relevant for the latter half of the second decade of the 21st century. We could and should be the go to spot for anything and everything self taught language-learning related. As it is, the last outage has shown that there have been a lot of frustrated people who wanted to join and couldn't. Perhaps they even committed the unpardonable sin of changing an email address! These folks showed up like mushrooms after a heavy rain in the "temporary" forum. Some of them are unschooled in or unaware of how to behave properly in a forum. Some of them have no idea who the long term members are and who is giving good, legitimate advice because our history didn't transfer. Most of them just want to learn a language and are feeling their way through it. They need help and guidance from people like you, Christina, and you, Kanewai, and you, Luso, and you, Chung, and you, Von Peterhof, and you, Juan, and you, Daristani, and you, mrwarper, and you, patrickwilken. Never have you been more needed, and genuinely missed! I don't mean to miss any names, but you know who you are and we miss you too. I, certainly, do not like what has happened, but it has happened as it was bound to do. Right now, we are in uncertain waters. Our old, faithful ship is rusting, limping along with a bad engine and even worse, our captain is nowhere to be found. In fact, the captain has left the ship without giving the crew permission to fix it. Some of us left the old, faithful, ship because we had no choice when the domain name expired. We found the new ship runs more smoothly, isn't leaking and the captain actually talks to the crew, gives the lieutenants permission to fix, maintain and improve it, and even asks the membership what they would like in a new forum. Other people who had been following alongside the old ship, who wanted to sail with us but just couldn't get on board, joined up, giving new life and energy. Is the new (hopefully, temporary) ship perfect? Hell no! There are a lot of changes I want to see. I certainly hope it doesn't remain as just a simple forum. It needs more. It deserves more. It needs all of its able crew. When August 22nd dawns, it is an opportunity to build a new home for a new, and more secure future. I hope that FX wants to be a part of that future and secure his legacy he worked so hard to build here. Here's hoping that we can have the best of both worlds! The alternative is to stay on the old, deteriorating, ship and stay without maintenance, without modernization, without an influx of new lifeblood and simply wait until the ship's engine finally conks out, the leaks sink the ship, it hits an iceberg or its captain just disappears while we are powerless to do anything about it. Just some food for thought from someone who loves HTLAL and language-learning, as I hope FX still does too. Edited by iguanamon on 11 August 2015 at 3:33am 18 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4687 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 132 of 178 11 August 2015 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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And the discussion over at the new forum about rules of conduct make me extremely
uncomfortable. If we were to see the birth of a new forum I would have liked to see one which was more flexible and with more free speech than this one. Not less. I get the impression that the alt-forum has people showing up who were banned here. There are a few who seem more invested in arguing about civil discourse than in discussing languages. I smell trolls. Edited by kanewai on 11 August 2015 at 5:54am 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Rhian Moderator France Joined 6295 days ago 265 posts - 288 votes Speaks: English* Personal Language Map | Message 133 of 178 11 August 2015 at 11:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
You're spot on. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5859 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 134 of 178 11 August 2015 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I wholeheartedly agree. Related to these topics, there's one thing that has been bugging me for quite some time. Maybe it's inevitable, I don't know. Here goes: I'm under the impression that over the years HTLAL has lost (or rejected) a lot of people that gave it (or could have given it) more diversity. And that's because of their level of English. I've seen native speakers of interesting languages like Bengali, Thai or Khmer (among others) leave the forum (or lay low) because they got tired of withstanding the attacks of some obnoxious teen with fifteen minutes to spare. Maybe they came from societies where replying "this is utter bullshit" (as I've seen Josquin do recently - good one there, mate) is unacceptable. Maybe they thought their level of English wasn't up to scratch on an argument. Or maybe they just lost patience. I don't want to end up with a FIGS (French-Italian-German-Spanish) learning forum, here or elsewhere. As I said in the beginning, maybe this is inevitable. I hope not. Edited by Luso on 11 August 2015 at 12:48pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4437 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 135 of 178 11 August 2015 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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As regards the rules of conduct and moderation on the other site, rdearman has made it very clear that as site owner and administrator he is legally responsible for all the content on the site and therefore liable for anything which could be in breach of the law. That seems to be his main reason for enforcing a clear and strict moderation policy not allowing messages which could be read as racist, sexist or inflammatory in any way, or linking to sites with illegal downloads etc. Personally I am perfectly happy with that, just as I have always been happy with the way this site has been moderated. I prefer that the trolls are stopped and blocked before they make too much mayhem. To be honest, I wonder what motivates some people to ask for more lenient moderation. If I wanted to discuss politics, I could sign up to the Guardian or join the BTL-crowd at any big newspaper web site in the language of my choice, If I wanted to discuss religion, there is a place called religiousforums.com where you are free to engage in theological debate. However, I come here to engage in conversations about languages, and the only politics I think should be OK to discuss is language policies in different countries.
Luso, I also would like to see more active members from Asia and Africa with interesting native languages, but I am afraid that the forum is very much "dominated" by native English-speakers and Europeans of various nationalities but with basically the same cultural background. I regret this, because apart from the language aspect, I am also interested in hearing from people with a different cultural background. Edited by Ogrim on 11 August 2015 at 5:09pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6395 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 136 of 178 11 August 2015 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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One more thing is that rdearman and emk obviously consider sexism and homophobia as bad as racism, which is how it should be on a modern forum with diverse people. The internet was a different place when FX wrote the original rules and I don't think he's actually a bad person or anything, but officially the rules still ignore extremely common ways of being disrespectful.
Although given my experience with menstrual cup communities where gender-neutral language is a requirement (because people who have periods can be trans men or genderqueer/agender), I was surprised by the reactions to encouraging gender neutrality and prohibiting sexism and homophobia on HTLAL. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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