I used to help run a few vbulletin forums, customising the code and doing admin stuff.
One of those that survive, the forum still exists (https://www.sau.com.au/forums/). It's a very specific, niche, technical forum, where owners of Nissan Skylines socialised, asked technical questions and traded.
Facebook Marketplace/eBay etc cannibalised the trading. This meant sponsors of the forum who helped pay the hosting bills slowly reduced.
Social banter moved to Facebook Groups (often more localised geographically... in its heyday in the late 90's and early 2000's the forum had people from all over the world socialising around the clock)
Which means technical Q&A is the main drawcard now, and is the most active component of the forum outside of the diehard "oldschool crew" who keep the social parts active. I expected reddit to cannibalise the technical Q&A, but it hasn't as forums present a combination of threaded conversation and blog style updates from the OP or groups of contributors.
As an SAU member for almost 20 years, the site is a shadow of its former self. The technical areas tend to be very much a ghost town, with link-rot setting in pretty hard (broken images that were once hosted on imageshack or Photobucket for example really hurt the quality of many of the DIY guides etc). The social areas are mainly a handful of as you say the "old-school crew", but nothing like "back in the day". Other than a handful of motorsport/trackday events each year, the 'club events', especially the 'social' type like cruises and meetups, are almost non-existent. I'm not sure if that's because those events tend to now be organised over social media in smaller circles, or if they just don't happen.
In short, there's just not really much attracting new (or existing, evidently) users to the forum these days. I'd say it's a classic catch-22... people don't frequent the forums so the content (and experience) suffers, and then people don't want to frequent the forums because the content and experience aren't that great any more.
We’re part of the carsales.com.au network, and we’ve been leading the Australian asset finance broker market for 19 years. In that time, we’ve become Australia’s largest car finance broker and to keep us ahead of our competitors we are investing in the best digital tools and of the best people. We are committed to re-imagining the finance industry by championing honesty, transparency and satisfaction, for both our people and customers.
The role:
We’re looking for an experienced Front-End Developer to complement our team of web and application developers. Our portfolio of websites and web applications are growing at an exponential rate, and require someone to help us deliver internal and consumer facing digital products.
The voyage from Spain to England's quite short. For a voyage from South America to Australia across the Pacific, you'd need a few ships purely to carry supplies, plus you'd have to account for a fair amount of losses of ships and men due to bad weather, disease etc.
In my concept of the future there will be no "Save", but instead any input/document will be passively cached locally in volatile storage, and archived incrementally on a non-volatile medium... without any active user input. In which case you'd only need an icon for "New", "Open" and "Delete".
If you're talking about representing a change of state (volatile to non-volatile), then borrow from Chemistry where a change from liquid to gas is represented by an arrow up, and a change from liquid to solid is represented by an arrow down. You could use the Unicode character U+21DF, a symbol that's already on every computer. Inversely you could use U+21DE to indicate "Load".
Those courses are mandatory because the Australian government now correlates generic graduate attributes with funding allocation. This means that all Unis have to show that a percentage of their graduates are competent in, and all graduates have access to courses in ethics, sensitivity, knowledge application, problem solving, and communication. Uni administration forces lecturers to integrate these into their courses, and they then deliver a half arsed rendition to the students.
From the conversations going on on Kickstarter the LIFX was a mesh network configuration, whereas with the Hue you'd be connecting a bunch of slaves to a central hub. This could come into play depending on the amount of bulbs you plan to use and where.
In Australia we have a government run registry which documents all lobbyists and their activities:
http://lobbyists.pmc.gov.au
The closest I could find in the US in a quick search was followthemoney.org and the Senate Office of Public Records site (which maintains an archive of filings as required by the Lobbying Disclosure Act).
Is transparency just a matter of making these isolated pieces of information more easily accessible and transformable/visual... and using an easy call to action to petition or donate to pro-bono lobbyists who serve the public as counteraction to corporate (or even foreign) lobbying.
One of those that survive, the forum still exists (https://www.sau.com.au/forums/). It's a very specific, niche, technical forum, where owners of Nissan Skylines socialised, asked technical questions and traded.
Facebook Marketplace/eBay etc cannibalised the trading. This meant sponsors of the forum who helped pay the hosting bills slowly reduced.
Social banter moved to Facebook Groups (often more localised geographically... in its heyday in the late 90's and early 2000's the forum had people from all over the world socialising around the clock)
Which means technical Q&A is the main drawcard now, and is the most active component of the forum outside of the diehard "oldschool crew" who keep the social parts active. I expected reddit to cannibalise the technical Q&A, but it hasn't as forums present a combination of threaded conversation and blog style updates from the OP or groups of contributors.