WELCOME BACK! - Forum is back after 6 years!

[DJpowerHaus]

In late December 2019 this forum was shut down after 6 months of really bad spam making it nearly unusable. Today it's back!

Forums like ours have been on my mind recently as I realized how so few still are used. In the last decade, nearly all forum traffic has been syphoned off by Facebook / Reddit / Discord / Whatsapp groups. This puts the sharing of this information in the hands of a few mega corporations. If their policy is to not allow it, they can simply cut it off.

Now with AI, all the information people used to browse THOSE sites with lies in the hands of a new class of mega corporations. No need to browse and post to a forum, when you can just ask AI to help you answer your questions. This is how the Internet dies. Without the hard work of people getting dirty and sharing their real life experiences, the REAL knowledge never grows, it's just repeated around in circles.

COME HERE AND SHARE. Share your real life experiences with others and create knowledge. I'm not opposed to having our information syphoned off and integrated into an AI. It's already happening. We need to keep learning, sharing, and being a community before we can't anymore.

The irony here is that the forum is back due to AI. I used a tool called Claude to update the forum software, import the old forum, identify and remove spam users, topics and posts then remove them. It also helped me to make the upgraded phpBB site look like the old one even though the old theme wasn't compatible. I NEVER could have been able to do this without AI's handholding. Sure, I feel conflicted, but writing off this world changing technology doesn't solve the problems it creates.

My dad was afraid of EFI and used carburetors will into the 1990s. When I soldered an ECU up and got the car running in his garage, it made it seem a whole lot less daunting to him. Computers in cars were no longer this impossible to understand black box. It was a system just like the ones before, with the same inputs and outputs, just a different method in-between. Now it's the corporations that make it harder, not the technology. For my Mercedes Sprinter van I got a laptop with hacked dealership diagnostic software. Learn about the technology, share that with others, make your own rules.

The world is about to get a whole lot weirder. I recommend playing with AI tools now, talk about them, and make your own rules.