Dieter was a contented man. His partner of 12 years, Louise, was off for the weekend to Paris at some hen party or other giving him plenty of time to do the bloke thing with his friends.
Dieter relaxed in his car, which was driving him home after some thoroughly enjoyable doubles tennis with his friends and companionable après-tennis at the Club’s bar. Dieter leant back in his seat and thought what he would do for the evening and with whom he would do it. Louise had been a bit distant recently and he needed some excitement. But right now he was hungry, so he ordered the car to connect with his House Computer which he instructed to prepare a small snack for his return.
Back at his house, Dieter threw his tennis clothes into the laundry basket which was immediately scooped up by his House butler robot, sorted, and set aside for the next wash.
Settling into his favourite easy chair in the conservatory, he admired the valeted garden but frowned as he noted that work was needed to clean the lawnmower's refuelling station, thinking for the umpteenth time that he should have bought self-cleaning garden equipment.
The snack arrived immediately, the butler robot placing it on the side table. It was a fish lasagne with a small side salad. Dieter wondered hungrily when he would be able to upgrade the robot to the haute cuisine model.
Meanwhile the butler robot rolled off to get Dieter’s drink. Retrieving chilled glasses from the freezer, one for beer and the other for a chaser, it filled the large glass with beer from the fridge and the small chaser with rat poison from the garden store.
With a sigh of satisfaction, Dieter took several large gulps of beer and then, gleefully crying “skål”, sank the chaser in one go. The last thing he heard as he slid painfully towards oblivion was the butler robot exploding as the assassin virus in the House Computer performed its last function and self-erased. ……. Louise relaxed next to Alfonso’s luxurious penthouse pool chuckling to herself over the fortune that had been harvested from Dieter’s bank accounts that morning. “Computer hackers are the best lovers”, she thought, reaching for her Piña Colada, “and what a well-equipped house he has”.
First I should remark that this is not an urgent matter so we can discuss this at leisure and with due thought: It is a subject that needs to be aired.
So far DnD has existed without funding and Frans has made brave noises about cost not being a problem with his set-up at present levels.
But what if we actually succeed and this is not a 1 year wonder but a continuing effort involving a much larger set of Members. We can hardly expect Frans to be exposed to more and more “little” costs which grow into something intolerable. Nor can we expect him to give of his time indefinitely without some form of help be it active work by us (or a.n.other) or money or indeed dedicating forever to this forum.
The change in Domain name was a minor cost thing, but it had to be done and money had to be raised. It was raised by donation from within the DnD Administration but that is unsustainable over the long term. A subscription has been mention already and probably I and others would go for that but I suspect that would not normally be the case, especially for attracting the merely curious new member. But it is worth considering; the forum has built-in support for some kind of paid subscriptions .
Then there's advertising, but we are not an attractive prospect for that at the moment. Maybe the point where we are attractive will coincide with the critical forum size for sustainable membership. Advertising would have its problems coming from its nuisance quotient and avoiding scams and viruses. Maybe Advertisements could be relegated to its own closed forum section, if a commercially attractive way of doing that could be found. I don’t know, perhaps some of you have ideas.
I’m not suggesting that we raise funds just yet, we have to make this thing a success first, but we need to know where we might go and what the boundaries of the present set-up are. Last but not least we need to know what is the general consensus on this.
Finally please note that the T&C bars people from making money from posting. It’s phrased like that to avoid stating that the Forum itself should not raise money for its own continuation.
Your eager and ever helpful Forum Administration has evolved a new set of custom Terms and Conditions which apply to this forum (see T&C link at the top of the page).
These T&C now apply to new members and in principle are effective immediately to existing members but subject to any alterations which may arise from comments made in this thread. Continued use of the DnD Sanctuary is taken as agreement with the T&C.
If you have comments or questions, please post them here. As interlocutor I will answer them where I can and where I cannot I will collate them for discussion within the Administration, but only at the end of this month to avoid frequent interruptions of the Administrators work during this busy period. I will report back on their resolution. Note that the Administrator has the final say on all these matters.
Please keep your comments strictly on the existing T&C. If needed, the T&C will be updated in late January / early February so I would like comments, please, within two weeks.
All societies have some rules about behaviour, often coupled to religion or custom. Even when dealing with members of one's own culture we sometimes struggle to avoid offence and conflicts but even more so if we live in a multicultural society.
In some countries, blasphemy is illegal, in others not. In the latter case, laws against blasphemy are substituted by laws against "hateful speech" or "incitement". But those laws merely transpose the underlying dilemma because such terms as "hateful speech" or "incitement" are themselves culture-driven, and vary, even from person to person, let alone between, say, different religions or countries.
We can avoid all these "problems" by avoiding communication with everyone, but that's not a viable solution so we have invented this concept of Free Speech and hope the problem will go away.
I use the word "Regimes" to distinguish between the citizens of a country and those who imagine they govern.
Regimes can react in defensive ways to criticism of their actions, pretending that such criticism is "anti the people" or "unpatriotic" or in fact any deflection from admitting that they themselves have become the subject of criticism or, even worse, ridicule.
Which regimes do you think could benefit from.a bit of healthy introspection?
It's been said/offered/promised that the Opera threads can be imported into DnD. Well that's nice, I guess we all have our favourites for one reason or another.We would have the posting history; we would, presumably, be able to search back and see who said what to whom.
But the old threads come with baggage. They inhibit a new start on subjects which are still interesting and which would benefit with fresh thinking, they contain statements which may be libelous in hindsight, some drifted off onto different subjects altogether and lost sight of their original thrust .... And so on. Who owns the material in those old posts? Opera? Opera's new Godfather? The posters? "DnD"?
So maybe it's not such a good idea to import those threads and lay claim to them. After all very few of them will actually be continued from where they left off.
I think there are two reasonable alternatives:
1 Not to import those threads at all 2 To import the threads, but lock them, while allowing anyone to reopen them and start the discussion again (not necessarily the old originator) and start the discussion again.
If the latter option I would propose that only Members, not Guests, be allowed to view them.
I note that Opera has a new Group called D&D which stands for Discussions and Debates, not the other way round. It already has a few members, but I don't want to join just yet for fear of diluting our effort here.
I note however that we have some spies there. .
So can one of those tell us if it looks like a continuation of D&D or a lesser beast?
Have you noticed that we usually debate only the bad things in life.
In this thread anyone can put down current news that they think is good (can be on any subject but not nasty, please, or so controversial that it provokes arguments). We can debate it and then move on when someone else posts some more happiness!
So I’ll start with this gem, which will brings tears of joy to many, I am sure.
For a new forum to grow it needs a secure base of participants, which I am anticipating we will have at least for a while, but it must also attract new members.
The old D&D got a lot of members, I think, from those that had gone into My Opera in search of answers to problems with the Browser and peeked into the Lounge. Also the Blog area would have attracted a lot of them.
I would think that's normal, a discussion forum growing out of some sort of product, be it a commercial item like a magazine or a smart phone, or some "cause" which gets people going. Religion, Hobbies, Politics or Green Planets being examples.
I'm not sure that we could all agree on any of those things (which is the joy of DnD nee D&D). But maybe provision should be made for such to grow.
We have a ready-made group of potential new DnD people who were not necessarily in D&D but were participating in the Opera software/browser area. Some of those will be leaving, with no incentive anymore to comment or improve the Opera Browser as it becomes Chopera. So why not have a parallel area in this site entitled something like Browser Wars or Internatter or something which hosts all the discussions that people would like to have in comparing browsers or other things of more general interest.
We could also have more casual Lounge area where word games or whatever are played.
There will be other areas that might attract members - any ideas?
The downside of this suggestion is that it would increase the demands on the system that frenzie is putting in place and turn his quixotic gesture into a burden. That would not be good and we must bear that in mind.
I was wondering what the overall Forum could be called and the title "Forum at the end of the Universe" came into mind. Of course it had been used before and I found this site which is a pretty exact parallel to this in its initial rationale. Note the cautionary remarks in the second post. That has been remarked upon by many here; we need to take account it it and find a solution.
