Forum dead? Created 9 months ago2024-01-29 21:04:53 UTC by Combined

Why no One Is Active in the forum?

It's very much not dead.

Just because it's not a spammy memedump, or has as much activity as a chat platform, it doesn't mean it's dead. It's just quiet and that tends to be the case for forums in this age where forums are not as popular as they used to be (which is a shame). People are still around and reading and posting, just might take some hours or days between posts.

Most of the people here use the Discord server for help and questions due to the fact that is quite faster. However, i believe some people post here when they have a seriously difficult problem.

TWHL is one of the oldest Half-Life modding communities and in recent times it certainly has been quieter around the main site and forums. The site itself is not as active as it once was, but remains a useful resource with the wiki, map vault and competition dashboard.

However, as the others have said, the vast majority of discussion these days happens on the Discord server. It's far more active, responses are far faster and it's easier to quickly share links or screenshots in order to get immediate feedback on your work/guidance with your issues.

I just aint active cause im cooking up some stuff related to goldsrc mapping although im gonna be ripped apart by urby if I post it lol

I just aint active cause im cooking up some stuff related to goldsrc mapping although im gonna be ripped apart by urby if I post it lol

I'm a kitten. I rip things apart because I love them.

Saw your tweet lol look on twitter my man, its toally fine that you ripped apart my maps xD

Hi Urby, after im done with an HL1 map i am doing, can you please rip it apart like you did with Tarek?
Lol im seriously when im done can you please rate it, so i can get better?

Oh no not again 😬

🤣🤣

Upload to the TWHL Vault and then everybody can rip it apart!

It gets worse everytime, oh well, anyway im learning Sledge now, which is quite similar to hammer which I like

what is Sledge?

Sledge is an open source level editor for Goldsrc.
Unfortunately not being developed anymore, and the Tools and Resources page says "Unfinished and rather unstable - use with caution"

I'm too young to feel this old, but when did this pivot to Discord happen? I feel like Discord was new five years ago and at some point suddenly everything was on Discord and now the web is full of defunct Discord links where there used to be forums. And yeah, the forum does feel pretty inactive.

(TWHL, never disappear, please)

Yeah, it was around late 2010s, Discord really took off soon after its release.

Though he decline of forums have been going on for longer, alongside the growing popularity of social media platforms such as FB and Twitter. Unlike forums, these platforms are designed to bring tons of personalised content directly at the users.
Between the two, it's kind of like the choice between having a bag of candy handed to you or going to the kitchen and cook a healthy dinner. The latter has higher quality, but the former gets you instant gratification for no effort. It's no surprise which one is more popular, despite the downsides.

Sadly, Discord took off forums after its release.

Between the two, it's kind of like the choice between having a bag of candy handed to you or going to the kitchen and cook a healthy dinner.

we're lucky to have both

Sledge has some forks of it on github, im using a fork of sledge called hammertime, which has prefab support and a lot of other things being added!

Sledge is an open source level editor for Goldsrc.
Unfortunately not being developed anymore, and the Tools and Resources page says "Unfinished and rather unstable
use with caution"

I use a fork of sledge which is quite finished and not really that unstable, you should try it sometime

I Will try!

monster_urby said:
TWHL is one of the oldest Half-Life modding communities and in recent times it certainly has been quieter around the main site and forums. The site itself is not as active as it once was, but remains a useful resource with the wiki, map vault and competition dashboard.

For me it's kind of amazing that TWHL still exists. It's one of the first communities that I've joined online, less than 6 months after having an internet connection (2006/2007) with 32 kb/s speed. It brings back a bit of nostalgia after those phpbb/vbulletin forums. There are still many communities left communicating through these forum types, but a lot of them died. In my country, there were big communities around hardware/software/gaming magazine forums. In the early 2010's most of the physical mediums died, and the communities slowly started to fade away. I'm guessing this is what happened in other countries too.
Then the forums slowly started being replaced with chat platforms, one of the most popular being Discord. Although highly practical in some sense, I believe it's just another symptom of the dopamine-hit-style environment the internet is today. Discussions fade into a black hole, unlike these forums where you can search, structure and have some statistics. Discord is a forum, irc and teamspeak/ventrilo server all in one. All-in-ones don't ever do one thing well.

People also grow up and there's very little time to devote to niche online communities if you have multiple interests.

Then the social media garbage started and really took off in the 2010's, sucking people's time. Nobody is immune from these trends, I myself joined Facebook because high school friends pushed me to do it. Then Instagram because a college girlfriend told me to. Now I reluctantly joined Threads because some people I know post there. I never joined TikTok and I hope I never will.
In the past decade phones have practically enslaved us. It is now impossible not to check your phone several times per day. People mindlessly scroll through stories, reels and other forms of short form media shit. I do it too, and I've done it against my better judgment until I had enough humility to recognize that I am addicted to my phone, not unlike others. What slowly got me into the addiction were a few tough mental months where social validation from online forms provided me the feel-good emotions I needed to push through the days. When I work, the only solution for focusing is to close the internet connection on my phone and put it away from my field of view.

I've been also following AI trends for a few years. The hot shit right now are LLMs and diffusion models (a.k.a chatgpt/llama/mistral, stable diffusion/ midjourney/dalle a.k.a generative ai models). The internet is slowly becoming now a cesspool of generated robot regurgitated data deluge and fake art. Where once the internet was a source of good information and radical sincerity, filled with mostly tech or trade-inclined people, it's now... I don't even know how to describe it anymore. My feeling about it is how Mark Hanna in Wolf of Wallstreet describes the stock market:

Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not fucking real.

Whoever is able to still ignore all of this and focus on their or these little community gardens, they can consider themselves trully blessed.

Technology robs us more time than the government and other necessary human chores ever will.

So considering all of this - it's a damn miracle people still come to TWHL to discuss and create stuff around an engine that's 25 years old.

Well said.

In the past decade phones have practically enslaved us. It is now impossible not to check your phone several times per day. People mindlessly scroll through stories, reels and other forms of short form media shit.

This. I used to laugh it up a long time ago, but at some point I realized I easily end up spending 5-6 hours on average just staring at the phone reading any unread public chat messages, or checking out the memes. Even when everything's been read, I end up re-reading old stuff instead of doing something more interesting.

less SCROLLIN', more MAPPIN' !!!
we need a map competition every 3 months >:D >:D >:D

Oh yeah, I miss that. The last time I did a lot of mapping was when RTSL ran competitions regularly (I wasn't on TWHL then), that always helps get over writers block (mappers block?).

What others said. Not dead, but less active than before.

I end up being alone because people are on social media. And I'm not a social media guy, quit it around 2017

Still posting my maps here, starting with example maps in 2014 and my first finished map in 2018

This is the only place, so far, that I can interact with people from around the world. The other places I interact are art websites