Current state of the forum
 

Is it just me or is activity on this site dwindling down? Doesn't seem to be as much traffic and fewer ppl responding. Also, does anyone know what happened to Zeno or dude111? Nothing from either of them in several months and I gotta say im getting worried.

Definitely decreasing, and likely a good part of it is frustration at the lack of maintenance.

Yeah, its a shame really. Alot of info here and alot of great ppl too :(.

https://imgur.com/gallery/icy-dead-people-pLPsi :P

Zeno died a few months ago and will be missed. (There's a thread in it)

Don't know if dude111 lives or not, but he won't be missed... Probably the dumbest most annoying member not to be banned. He knew NOTHING, and if you explained anything to him he wouldn't get it, necro posted to long dead threads constantly, would spam the place with dumb valueless cheerleading posts, etc.

The lack of photo upload support has been killing us for years and everyone has complained.

The recent spam from that one guy didn't help either.

Oh man, I had no idea. What a mess. Zeno is definitely a huge loss.

The message I've gotten from mentioning Videokarma exists on various places in Discord is that many people know of it, but it's boring.
I can't speak for how many people refused to protect against COVID but you can't help but notice a number of long-standing members around that period abruptly stopped being active. They're Dead.
The topics are stale, the mentioned broken image attachments makes following along to progress threads a test of one's patience as you open the images one at a time and it's a lot of....that kind of crusty old man you get from Baby Boomers who don't realize the ground they stand on as they mock those below has not existed in the gist of things since George Bush Sr. was president and the grumbly tones of dry humor mixed with bragging about just how sharp and vivid the color pictures are on their TV (again) don't blend well with the ETF posts which feel like they only get posted due to nobody looking at their own news board.

You are getting beaten out by a chromiun-based web app which has an even worse text search and image uploads that only exist for a finite amount of time. As insulting as it may be, perhaps steering away from a generation of television repairmen, engineers and radio operators who have at best, 15 more years left in their lives and being more open to a generation who are only familiar with solid state or post-CRT video might help. The fad of 80's vibes is starting to fade out but the demand for Lost Media (stuff that either was never re-released from corporate media vaults or only exists on old tapes) is huge.

Edited:
Also...
This has been up for at least six months? A year? Audiokarma got an upgrade....at some point to Xenforo. We're still on Vbulletin. As far as anyone knows we're pissing money to a donation link and nothing has happened. You didn't even moderate when Greystoke went off the handle. Those are posts are still there. Everyone can see it. It's embarrassing. Nobody's donating money to a forum that has virtually no moderators on deck.

Its too bad what is happening to this site.I considered videokarma a forum that you can post about flat screens and newer tech. The other forum i belong to,Antique radios forum is for vintage tvs and other vintage tech.no flat screens.I have gotten help and education about flat screens here. Hopfully,things improve here in the future. RonL

At least one silent key member I knew Dieseljeep was vaxed for COVID he had a stroke within months of the shot and 2-3 years later got turbo cancer, which he didn't survive, which has developed mysteriously often in vaxed folks. At least 15 people I knew in the hobby checked out in the last 5 years many of them were vaxed and hunkered. The Rona was a bio-weapon the untested jab you couldn't sue over injuries from, wasn't much better, and Fauci should have been hung a while ago... He ordered the development of the Rona and lied to cover his ass and profit while doing so... He's got a higher body count than the average nazi executed at Nurnberg and deserves the same fate.

As someone who only collects Boomer era stuff* the disdain for them seems silly to me.

*with few exceptions the disposable chicom 80s-2000's crap that was around when I was a kid doesn't do much for me and I mostly didn't dispose of anything I'd miss from my childhood.

Check with Alan at ARF, or post to the forums there to ask about it. He may be willing to add newer tech forums to the content there. At least he is always there with his team of moderators to respond.

Let VK pass. There is so little content here, it's obviously not going to recover, especially when there are a plethora of other (much better) forums available on the internet. Facebook radio & TV groups have amazing membership and content. For those afraid of Facebook, please reconsider.

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I ain't gonna quote that because I hold someone with 15000 posts on a forum to a higher standard, but it really doesn't encourage new members when this is the stuff floated by senior members. ':I

Although the hobby itself is certainly dwindling in numbers, there's still a fairly reasonable level of activity on the Antique Radio Forums and in the various Facebook/other social media groups, so I think the inactivity problem here is site-specific. It is clear the forum admins checked out years ago to the community's direct detriment. When VK started having crawler/DDoS problems some months ago, it was allowed to happen for so long it eventually brought the entire site to its knees...and then after it was restored with a few Band-Aid fixes, the admins went out for milk and never came back! It is patently ridiculous Greystroke was allowed to spam the forum for as long as he did. I don't blame people for leaving, I lurk less and less myself. The Facebook groups and ARF are much more appealing.

I think the phrasing you use here indirectly answers the question of why there's disdain between the older and younger crowds. People aren't generally going to pay much attention to those who think whatever they're interested in is junk, even if there is some objective truth to that statement. There's an ass for every seat, there are communities of people who love and restore Yugos, PT Cruisers, etc... I'm on the younger side and grew up with the sets that a lot of people on these forums call black or silver plastic crap and scrapped/destroyed en masse when the big flatscreen transition was happening. Surprise surprise, they're now worth decent money because my generation has become nostalgic for them. I've never been partial to collecting them myself, but did find some very appreciative and loving homes for the ones I saved off the curb and fixed for fun, and most are still actively being used.

No comment on the preceding statements. If someone brings a 250k mile car to the shop with frame rot, bald tires, low compression on a few cylinders, no oil, no coolant, etc. and it happens to snap in half on the lift or die after the customer starts driving it back home, is that the mechanic's fault?

Let's not bring up conspiracy theory stuff here please, this is not the place for it.