I don’t really like posting in places with too many subforums; I can’t figure out where to post things appropriately.
I’m a total newbie—used the open-source xiuno to build my site, and right when I started, xiuno announced it was shutting down. To this day I’m still stuck on php7.2. Along the way, I spent money hiring people to develop various features I needed, and later made some friends who offered tech help for free.
But the environment always sucks. Over here, I spend money and time thinking things through—right as I finish a new feature, someone else copies it exactly and sells it, claiming it’s “original.” Try talking to them and they’ll insist it’s their own work, not a copy. To this day, they still occupy the abandoned xiuno site, tricking new newbies into thinking they’re the actual creators of xiuno, selling them those so-called “original” products.
Of course, that’s just a little story from a particular year—I’ve let it go; it doesn’t matter anymore now.
The hardest part of running a forum is management. Basically, nobody will bother to look at the rules you’ve spent so much time making. They just do whatever they believe the rules are.
When you punish them, they’ll curse at you, attack you, doxx you.
They ignore your rules and trample on your order. Even if it’s their repeated violations—ignored reminders and repeat offenses get them banned—they’ll call you a dictator and spread rumors elsewhere.
You’ll even get some people mass-registering fake accounts, posting sensitive content in the middle of the night, and then reporting you everywhere.
Damn, I went on a tangent.
Lately, I’ve started using AI to edit my forum. From the early days of copy-pasting code and endlessly troubleshooting, now AI just hops straight into the terminal. As a newbie, I’m the biggest beneficiary—I can throw any idea at the AI without worrying, and it’ll finish it for me in no time. I don’t have to keep paying people for custom work, or bother friends all the time.
It can take just a sentence or a screenshot from me and make the whole thing work. I love AI.