Your Daily Random Comment

[pumptato-cat]

MorningCoffee, I just took drivers ed and I feel your pain. Haven't even started driving and I'm absolutely terrified

i literally felt this sm! I'm finally learning super late because i was too scared and all my friends are trash drivers
it was after Life360's drive detection picked up me in my friend's car as he drove horrendously that my parents decided that i would not be behind the wheel for a while

which was a good idea but was quite unfortunate

I just know... I just know that I'm going to be awful already...
By the way, this is based off my experience in Mario Kart. I tend to invent new tracks and drive off cliffs every 5 seconds! Good luck with driving... it sounds very hard and I am completely terrified because I'm a literal sophomore and should not be trusted with a motor vehicle because I'll probably drive through my house or over a mailbox.

[pumptato-cat]

i think having a little more happen on strictly forums, as it did in the past, would really improve the activity and bring people over again, but again, that's just an idea! hopefully, it'll get more active on here again and I'll have more time to hop on to see what we can possibly do with this site!!

Do you have any specific ideas for some events we could host on the forums? I know we used to do stuff like superlatives (maybe I should get the ball rolling on that for this year...) but is there anything new you think we could host on the forums to drum up activity?

Good to see you back on the site--good luck with college apps!

Hey! Not MorningCoffee but here's my take on it.
I think that the Discord has replaced the forums for everything. Instead of being a replacement for the forums, I agree with MorningCoffee about having things happen on "strictly forums." I like the superlative idea. I'm probably going to make a bad suggestion here, but maybe remove the "events" channel and move event discussion to here? There's a lot of great info in the Discord but it's just a lot easier to find info when it's archived in the forums.

[jaspattack]

Hey! Not MorningCoffee but here's my take on it.
I think that the Discord has replaced the forums for everything. Instead of being a replacement for the forums, I agree with MorningCoffee about having things happen on "strictly forums." I like the superlative idea. I'm probably going to make a bad suggestion here, but maybe remove the "events" channel and move event discussion to here? There's a lot of great info in the Discord but it's just a lot easier to find info when it's archived in the forums.

Yeah, I think we should have more stuff happen strictly on the forums too! I think some steps we can take are better publicizing incentives for contributing (like collecting those fancy stars on your profile), as well as holding some events and stuff on the forums.

Unfortunately, I don't think removing the #events channel would really have the effect you'd hope. People would just end up talking about events in other channels like #scioly instead of being directed to the forums. I think one of the big problems is that people want quick and easy answers, which is why they turn to a platform like Discord (which is real-time) instead of a forum where it might take a bit to get an answer.

A lot of people are also used to a certain other Science Olympiad server with individual channels for each event, and they often assume we operate the same way and get confused by the fact that we have one general #events channel. People want what they want, and I think it's better to redirect by incentivizing forums use rather than dissuading people from using the Discord (since the latter probably wouldn't accomplish much).

I sometimes wish we could go back to a time where we only relied on the forums, but having a mix of traditional forums and a Discord server is the best way forward (in my opinion). I know for a fact that there's plenty of people who found out about the site because of the Discord, and I worry that if we had never made it then people just wouldn't use the site at all.

There's a lot of "coulda woulda shoulda" in this conversation, but whatever. I'd just like to envision a world where people take advantage of every section of the site, not just the Discord or Wiki.

[pumptato-cat]

Ah, I see! I'll try my best to help promote the forums. It will be a hard transition but I hope it's possible.

[LittleMissNyan]

don't mind me just thanking everyone's posts because I agreed with the sentiment but didn't have the spoons to write out a complete answer to all the questions. let me just dump a few thoughts that may or may not be relevant
- the pre-Discord forums I was here for was great! pretty active but with a lower degree of FOMO than what Discord does with a billion messages a day, and yeah the camaraderie was nice
- which leads into the fact that if the Discord dynamic was around when I was in middle school I would likely not have done much/anything at all here, because of the school filter and parental restrictions. kinda why I keep trying to do stuff on here, help out who the younger LMN would have been as well as the other people without Discord
- but that does bring up an issue I ran up against with the sassy games ahahhaa that's me that's all I apparently can do here nowadays send helppp
- when I proposed the idea of adding the Discord element to the games the forums were deader than they currently are, and I was worried that if I were to just start a new game forums-only no one would see it or care. so then came Discord sassy, and it worked! yippee! but now I notice that all the Discord clue discusion stays mostly on Discord and looks disjointed on the forums. again, younger LMN would have no idea what's going on here
- that script to archive the channel messages does help for posterity, but not during conversation because so far it's only been run at the end of the game. maybe I should start running it after every clue or something? idk
- pumptato how did you get to edit your post 5 times?? I've been getting errors whenever I try to edit any of mine, will test on this post
- edit: OH NOW YOU DECIDE YOU WANT TO WORK WHAT THE PECK
- IRC is currently just SchrodingersCat idling forever + me attempting to do so except the free plan on IRCCloud only lets you be offline for two hours so I keep disconnecting. sometimes other people popping in as well but all still awkward idling. but the cool thing about IRC you could just join with whatever client you wanted and and didn't necessarily need another signup to worry about. it was just there. type a nickname in and boom. until you get that one kid with a billion insulting nicks cussing me out in spanish and getting their entire district banned lmao
- there's something I want to say here about the nature of Discord vs the forums but wording brain just isn't today. do things on both that fit the need they serve or something (immediate feedback vs information storage)
- what if someone made an IRC/Discord bridge bot? I'm in a group that hosts their own IRC server and they have a bot that echos whatever people say in each IRC channel to the respective Discord channel and vise versa. would definitely help the issue of "can't get the help because of filters".
- or would that open up the aforementioned spammer moderation issues. restrict it to one bridged channel?
- actually yeah that'd have to do that since we only have one scioly channel vs that hosted server with all of them. that'd be more managable
- idk just a thought

[pumptato-cat]

HAHAHH i get issues all the time with editing. I just keep thinking of things to add and I end up editing like 6 times
You make a very good point about the people who can't access Discord. I just think it's unfair to restrict them from the main conversations and activity in the Discord when they literally can't control that. I also think it's unfair to request that people move from the Discord to here if they don't want to, and I feel like there's no good solution here...
IRC sounds so sad... I wish more people were there.

[Schrodingerscat]

I swear half the time I try to help by starting water boiling for pasta, it turns out to be a one-pot recipe.

[jaspattack]

I'll take this time to remind everyone about some events happening on Scioly.org this summer!

Scioly Summer Study Session (SSSS) is a resource drive that anyone can participate in! For more information, see the forums thread here.

Scioly.org Event Challenges (SEC) is a just for fun competition by Scioly.org users, for Scioly.org users! Testing closes July 16th, so be sure to sign up soon. Check out the forums thread here for more details.

Scioly.org Superlatives are also back for 2023! Nominate your friends for silly titles and see what people think of you! Nominations close on July 19th, so check out the forums post now!

[pumptato-cat]

Guys vote me for procrastinator pls
Heres proof: its 2am and I'm building a plane for a competition next weekend uhhhhh
I tried but procrastionatinonitis and shipping delays got me in the end :,)
It's really fun but also I kinda wanna sleep!...

[onshape]

this daily random comment would be about ap scores except that you're not allowed to go too in depth about those kind of things