Some of you are members of my forum (http://forum.aaronsleazy.com). As you may have noticed, a couple years ago I turned it private and disabled public registrations. This was a reaction to two unfortunate events: First, the number of spam registrations, in particular from Russia, India, and China, became too much to handle. Second, it was also necessary to do a lot of manual intervention and remove low-quality posts. By this, I mean drive-by-posts, such as vaguely related one-liners or, worse, meme images.
To counter this, registration has been switched to manual. If you are not a member, you need to send me an email and introduce yourself. I’ll do a bit of vetting. If you only want read access to the forum, the bar is obviously lower. To offset the administrative hassle with the forum, there is a modest one-off fee to be paid.
There is still a trickle of activity. I think that in this day and age it is not possible to have an active high-quality forum that is open to the general public. Just look at your typical YouTube channel or Reddit board — the number of people who think that “Me too!” is an important statement to make is staggering. I don’t want to expose myself to any of such nonsense, and I don’t think the typical reader of my blog wants to either. On that note, my blog is likewise moderated. One-liners normally end up straight in the trash, making for a much more pleasant environment all-around.
The forum has just been updated to a new version of the underlying software. I also intend to stop by regularly. If it has been a while since you last visited, come by and look around. It’s worth a visit.
I almost forgot the forum. I hope Stelar is still bickering there. I also hope that I don’t have to pay to login like you said above. Payment is for administration headache which you don’t have for old users. Thanks for reminding me of it.
The administrative fee only applies to new accounts.
Do you think the forum actually serves a purpose anymore? I felt it did a great job for you to post your thoughts and to flesh out some concepts with community members. Last thing I would want it turn into is the seduction section on reddit!
That won’t happen because the moderation is as rigid as ever.
First and foremost, the forum has great value as an archive, with its roughly 16,000 posts. I have even received feedback from several people who told me they went through every single thread, so there’s that. On top, there is still some discussion happening. I have no intention of shutting the forum down.
I can attest to the effectiveness of the forum. It probably is the next best alternative to a private consultation.
Even though I had my share of disagreements with him, Stelar’s posts over there are worth the forum itself. I have modeled my approaches based on what he says he does.
I have had good results needless to say.
Aaron, something is wrong with the WordPress engine of this blog. After a certain number of posts on a particular thread I get effectively “locked out”; i.e. when I submit a post, I get a 404 error message; it never posts or loads. It does not matter how many times I refresh or go back to it.
For days I have been attempting to reply to your “58 year-old woman” thread without success.
If there was an issue with my WordPress installation, then that error would affect other people as well. I just submitted a test comment on that post, which went through without a hitch. Also, I don’t think that the number of comments is an issue, seeing that there are plenty of posts with dozens of comments, while the post you refer to has less than 10 so far.
I will try one more time.
Hey Aaron I was an old member under the handle Jon Sylk. I seem to have lost my old email address and can’t really reset my password. Would I be able to receive any assistance to that effect? Regards,
Send me an email and I’ll see what I can do.