In Netherlands we have a saying: to kick in an open door, meaning to say something obvious.
At the risk of kicking in an open door I suppose that the rise of AI can mean a strong fall of question-related traffic, influencing the livelyness / traffic on the forum and the Nim-community in general (another side-effect of technological change).
The availibility makes people ask the AI firstly, and if it doesnt give a good answer, the forum secondly.
I notice myself its quite easy to ask the AI; it answers immediately and in increasing quality (at least the big ones). Furthermore it is allways compliments me that I ask such good questions! :-) it has never told me something was a stupid question..
Knowing this (asking the AIs) will probably not change, must we do something about it (to attract more traffic) or accept as it is? (doing as in finding alternative ways to invite people to contribute something to the nim-community, like a programming-challenge or so...)
First of all, this forum needs to be rewritten to not be a SPA.
This forum is a result of a good intention (to showcase the Nim stack) applied to the wrong thing and implemented poorly.
The forum is the main source of information on Nim after the docs. It has to be searchable and indexable, and to achieve it it has to be as static as possible.
I'm going to state a view that could easily get me ostracized in most places now, but there's nothing wrong with pagination. Moreover, pagination should be static and only increase, so even the topic list gets numbered in descending order. This ensures increased coherency between archive snapshots made at different points in time (most topics never get bumped so having two partial snapshots of the forum made on different dates could still be interlinked easily with minimum link rot).
Well actually the AIs are sort of smart manual, standard libs and examples in one thing. Before I more often looked in the manual, now I more often ask the AI. (But the AI uses the manual i guess).
What is a Spa? A place where you get a wellness-treatment? Then I am all for it! Lets call it the Nim-relaxation-house...
Concerning improvements to the forum; i guess there can be some but i dont know if the resources are there...
I just thought of some fun micro-challenge or something to liven things up (is that english?)...
There is an assumption here we should examine. Is a programming community primarily about asking and answering technical question? Historically this has been an important function they serve, but, as you point, this is becoming less central.
I have argued previously that community is about confident interaction, knowing when and how and where to speak. What we are communicating about matters less than the camaraderie itself.
With that perspective, how badly does a reduction in questions hurt the community? I would argue, not much. Yes, it may reduce activity, but it also reduces noise, as most questions are relevant to very few of the member. In my view it balances out.
What's wrong with the current form of search
Limited history in your own comment or posts, inability to search for ancient history for a starter.
What's wrong with the current form of search
The search is not the problem, although it's very limited. Besides lots of bugs and humble functionality (most of it I don't care for), the biggest issue is this:
# wget https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/13121
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<meta name="generator" content="Nimforum 2.6.0-3b3f8d3">
<title>Nim forum</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/nimforum.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v5.0.12/css/all.css" integrity="sha384-G0fIWCsCzJIMAVNQPfjH08cyYaUtMwjJwqiRKxxE/rx96Uroj1BtIQ6MLJuheaO9" crossorigin="anonymous">
<link rel="icon" href="/images/favicon.png">
<link href="/threadActivity.xml" title="Thread activity" type="application/atom+xml" rel="alternate">
<link href="/postActivity.xml" title="Post activity" type="application/atom+xml" rel="alternate">
<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-58103537-1"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'UA-58103537-1');
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="ROOT"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/forum.js?t=2025-06-1710%3A27%3A28"></script>
</body>
</html>A drowning man not going to complain that boat has old paint.
There's no much practical usage for Nim in the first place, and so no interests. And making better docs and searchable forum, so say, painting the boat, not going to change anything.
Nim 17 years old. What its achievements, real projects doing something useful? Bunch of nonsense command line utilities nobody needs and GUI libs looking as weekend play of someone learning programming, and things alike.
@ michaelplotke
I dont know if confidence is the main issue, i think it's more a question of diversity of opinions and motivations. In itself that's not a problem, it's OK actually but it is just harder to align efforts.
I still think there should be more member-stratification meaning the diff between the programmers of Nim and the programmers in Nim, and the lib-writers sort of in between. Maybe a separate forum of programmers in Nim (app-programmers) could be usefull to lower the barrier for new-comers and enable coops of apps. But otherwise I think at least there should be two extra categories:
The fact that the Default-category is so much bigger than the rest indicates non-optimal categorization...
@ zoom
I assume it refers to the weak indexibility of the forum?
@ alexeypetrushin
What is the meaning of a dot?
@Zoom, I agree with the sentiment, but not necessarily with the approach. Making the front page paginated would mean that posts couldn't ever get bumped. Sure, many topics don't get bumped, but it happens from time to time. What you could do is have the forum paginate all posts ever created, and then use JavaScript to sort things into topics. So the underlying HTML is just a list of posts with the topic ID and title, and the JavaScript hides the post content and combines posts from the same topic into one heading. This would mean a pretty different experience if you ever turned JavaScript off, but at least it would be static and paginated.
Of course if your usecase is wget then it would probably be better to grab the JSON output anyways, much easier to parse in a script: https://forum.nim-lang.org/posts.json?id=13121.
@Hobbyman I believe the category thing is mostly down to people not realizing that there is a category switch there and people just leave it at the default. If instead of "Post" there where buttons for each of the categories you could click to post in each of the categories I believe things would be sorted much better. And a . simply means that they edited their post to say that, typically to soft-delete their post as straight up deletion isn't possible (for social reasons, technically it'd be easy to implement). Judging from the original post though you didn't miss much.
@cmc, glad you like the forum, but it can always improve! Getting feedback like this is useful for building an even better forum.
javascript rendering is not a problem for Google, or the other major search engines.
@cmc , yeah this is correct. I checked and Wayback Machine snapshots look fine too, so, perhaps it's not as bad.
Total JS-dependency for rendering mostly static textual content still rubs me the wrong way. I just don't see the point. Nim-based backend should be fast enough to render me some HTML (especially, if cached, which would be possible).
Perhaps my views are obsolete but, in my defense, I usually don't complain about it. Just seemed like this thread would be the place to vent.
Captchas still exist. Though it's sad situation after AIs can solve them relatively easy.
I paid attention that it becomes harder to solve captchas and those are insufferable waiting times, not even talking about privacy killing companies.
One of emerging technologies are proof-of-work captchas. They are self-hostable (altcha for example), can be configured for difficulty (can be automatic too) and can be set to start when user clicks the box for example, not stressing human psyche with meaningless images (as the creator of captchas stated in an interview).