Hi Folks.

By now, anyone who cares has probably seen the announcement by @Mason and @mikho about me taking over as administrator on LES.

I never thought this would happen. When I handed the community over to the community to manage 5 years ago, I very quickly lost the feeling of any ownership or authority for the place, it was always a permanent decision in my head.

I won't go into all my recent health issues again, they are documented and dotted around here already. Needless to say, I am not in a good state but stable. The silver lining is that this gave me an opportunity to get back the low-end spirit bug, and it bit hard.

Out of nowhere, I got a message asking if I would like to carry the torch again, and I have been on average 17.6% more happy every day since. The transition in the backend is going to be slow because the guys are slammed time and work-wise right now, which likely prompted the thought to hand it on/back.

Having a solid long break from the LE* world has allowed me to gain some fresh perspective but if I am being totally honest, because I was out of the mix for so long, I feel less connected to the community than ever, probably a bit of imposter syndrome.

For those that don't know me, I was on LowEndBox when LowEndTalk did not exist. I remember the WordPress forum plugin that morphed into LET, I was a moderator and an administrator on LowEndTalk, I remember a time when conversations happened on WHT!!!!! I started LES due to just being sick of the scams on LET (bit more to it but lets not dig all that up now). if someone can find and cross-post the link to my exit from LET 8 years ago, that might be a fun read.

What I can see from my perspective is that some things need to change here, no reflection on M&M, sometimes you cant see the wood for the trees or you just dont have the time and tools available to do what you want to do, the post count and comment count is down considerably by the look of it, but the core small community is still strong.

So here is what I am proposing nothing is set in stone, and I value considered opinions. I am not going to start a poll because they suck I am just going to make informed decisions on what people want and what people obviously don't. Putting what I know, I will be the most controversial first.

1. Advertising and money in general.

This place is creeping towards a 4-figure per year bill, apart from the fact that it is not low-end and that I am ok to pay for it out of my own pocket, it would be good to get some support.

This does not mean it is going to turn into low-end talk. Initially, my thinking is to use something like TinyAdz (which filters bot traffic) minimally and for not logged-in users only and taking a judgment call from there, it was a previous suggestion i think from @bikegremlin. Sorry if I am not remembering the exact details.

Excess money if any can be used to sponsor community projects and increase the resources of the free services providers to benefit the community by way of grants or paying invoices directly.

2. Offer post format.

The way offers are posted and displayed needs to change. I am proposing we remove offers from the standard forum feed and instead, they will display on the right-hand column (which obviously needs to be refactored). Clicking on them will still take you to them as a post, just like now.

The offers will be posted via a form that providers will have access to, rather than a free post, to force rules being followed and make any rule-skirting very obvious, this also gives us the opportunity to better manage the data and make things more database-driven.

3. New Users

We need to change the way new users are onboarded. Currently, you need manual approval. I am sure I can come up with something better, limited posting rights for xx hours, a new users section to post in/introduce, etc. either way the flow of people coming in needs to not have a potential 12+ hour delay.

4. The ticket/support system

This will probably be dropped and integrated into the forum, just a personal preference, I hate having to flick between the 2, I will likely just publish a break glass in case of emergency email address and centralise everything.

5. The active providers List/wiki

The plan for this from day 1 was to make it database-driven and the existing list is not maintained beyond adding new hosts, this will become database-driven and provide more stats and info.

6. Thanks

This is great, the thanks system, but it needs to evolve. I want the community to become much more self-modderating al la reddit / HackerNews so my thinking is that thanks get turned into karma and we add a "dont like/downvote" type of option, I appreciate this has a lot of challenges and probebaly 1000 conflicting opinions but I want the community to be able to have direct input in this way, annoying clickbait offers get sunk and or deindexed etc deserving good quality content gets more attention.

It's a challenge, but i think with enough tweaking we can find a balance. I had a great conversation with @joepie91 about this many many years ago, is he still around?

Good karma needs to be able to be redeamed somehow also maybe against the community free offer threads and bad karma needs to force some sort of accountability on accounts.

7. Dedicated Server offers

We need to do something about dedicated server offers, the world is just different now, static pricing is not fir for purpose, I don't know what that is yet, but once offers go form based we may be able to do something about a scale per region/hardware type/GPU etc

8. LES Exclusive offers

This is probably going to change completely. During the last poll, what was very obvious is that it was the need to be exclusive that was kneecapping it; instead, the section will probably have different, no need to be exclusive but require a reply to reveal, maybe spend karma points on, because I can say first hand, you post in there, its on nodeseek in 5 minutes or a telegram group. it does not serve its purpose.

9. user tags

User tags will become condition-based and automatic.

10. Blog/microblog/content

I don't really want to give this a name, but something that allows good quality content and information to be indexed better, in a more generic way, not buried 5 years and 20 posts deep in a forum and provide a platform for content in general.

This could be anything from good reviews, how-to, tips, mitigations, warnings, or dedicated provider pages.

11. The right-hand column rework

It is not useless, but it's really not pulling its weight. When was the last time you made use of the tag cloud?, we can make better use of this space.

12. Community Notes

This is more of a concept in my head than a fully formed idea, but an X-style community notes plugin would be a good modern tool to have in today's internet discourse.

13. Host validation

It occurred to me when handling tickets requesting a provider tag recently that it's not really offering any real protection; it takes about an hour to register a company, you can do it pretty much anonymously, and we then trust the information source provided to validate against. I am not saying it does nothing, but it may be a bit of a paper shield in reality.

I recently had to allow a host I can't really get any information on because I am not a lawyer, and their country makes finding details ridiculous. Meanwhile, I rejected a sole trader for being a sole trader who had clearly been doing a bang-up job for a while.

So I am proposing that the community gets to decide. I don't know the exact method or mechanism yet, but this is in principle, if it's a yes, we will do the checks we do that I can't discuss openly to ensure its not ban evasion, known scams, etc.

14. flagged posts and moderation

Most of you won't have ever experienced this, but it's pretty annoying to have the forum literally filled with flagged posts because @WSS said a bad word or someone does not agree with something.

Reports are great, and visibility is great, but we see them as actual posts when you flag something, and there is no real need; we can move these to a mod-only sidebar.

15. flagging in general

I want to make it visible on a post that it has been flagged to everyone and possibly even have a threshold whereby it is hidden if flagged enough, more community moderation tools.

16. remove edit limits

I want to remove edit limits on posts, its just annoying, but this will come with a public, indexed version history after the standard edit thresholds.

17. general platform changes

Vanilla open source has been EOL over a year now bigger thread about that here https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/9220/is-higher-logic-terminating-open-source-vanilla

So, at some point, this is going to become a problem. I would rather be ahead of that, but its also a massive undertaking, personally I don't see any benefit in just moving to another forum platform and trying to force a round peg in a square hole, my thinking is that we need something more bespoke, an actual LES Platform.

The base of the platform can be vanilla and it can evolve, I dont want to over promise and under deliver on this so I am waiting to get access again so I can see what the situation is, make sure dev matches prod well enough and dump the schema and map it all out a bit more first, but I think we just evolve what we have and make it more fit for purpose.

18. Doing this alone.

I am not sure I can or want to manage this solo, and by this, I mean the entire community, the daily stuff, the changes, the unresolvable clashing personalities, etc., etc., I am not sure any 1 person should.

So I am proposing we have a 2nd administrator type of role, a deputy administrator, someone who has absolute control on the forum but not platform access or technical or financial maintenance responsibilities, almost a natural succession plan, not least of all because my health situation is complex, there may be significant periods of time I am just not available later this year.

It will be my responsibility that, in the event I am incapacitated, the keys to the kingdom can be handed over entirely, instead of the forum going offline one day and never coming back.

But also someone to challenge ideas and be a second personality to provide balance, suggestions on a person? Self-nomination is also fine. ideally someone who is prepared to manage the discord channel.

I am looking forward to getting started on all of this, but in reality its probably going to be June before I can even start, so we have time to gather opinions, thoughts and dreams from everyone. Please have your say now rather than complain later

Maybe you have always thought... It's dumb that LES does not do (thing) its a great time to say it, I have my notebook open!

19. The Discord channel

While I don't plan to shut it down, that would be a dick move. I really don't like or use Discord; it always feels forced. I personally will not be managing it long term; it will go community-managed or vanish

I am not against using some real estate on the forum as a real-time chat via a websocket or something.

Finally

These are my ideas; they can change. I would always rather try something and fail and adapt and admit mistakes than never try anything, I am also very aware that the absolute reality is that there may be no desire for change, and if that's the case, so be it.

I am also prepared to do none of this and just maintain the status quo as long as people accept offers are at an all-time low, as is everything else. We can't see the drain yet, but we are circling it, if you don't want new content or new people or change, that's fine; it's a totally valid position that should not be attacked.

If the general feedback I get is that there is no remit for change, there will be no change; if there is a lack of feedback, I will take that as apathy and a remit for change.

Hit me.