Forum slow

[Joanna from IRC]

Is there a way to ban bots altogether? It sounds like the entire forum is being harvested for the benefit of companies that want to profit from other people’s work..

That raises the important question of whether this forum and the overall community of Pascal users loses more from its content being abused or from cutting itself off from a potential source of publicity.

Pascal- or Delphi, or whatever you want to call it- needs all the help it can get.

MarkMLl

Publicity only is useful if it attracts the right sort of people who want to develop applications using fpc and contribute to community. If forums are being slowed down by bots then this is not productive. Likewise if the only new members are people with no intention of ever writing anything in pascal.

Although I agree with you that pascal needs all the help it can get, nobody respects someone who is desperate and nobody respects a community that is desperate for new people either. Desperation is interpreted as inferiority. The first step to building the community is having self respect and giving priority to The needs of people currently using fpc. Let us have our community without caring what non pascal users think of us for once... I think this strategy is far more likely to get new members Than being emotionally manipulated by every troll who comes by to play jokes on us..

After years of trying to get people interested in fpc I’ve decided that it’s their loss if they don’t want to be part of this community. Why waste time on them?

[indydev]

If the AI models get better at Pascal coding, I wouldn't mind them using the forum--as long as they don't grind it down like most recently. 

One of the really annoying aspects of these models is how well they code in Python, Javascript, Typescript, Java, etc. but not nearly as well in Pascal (Free Pascal).

I recently started coding more in Lazarus and am constantly surprised by how much has been added from Free Pascal to Lazarus.  It would take me months to get through all that's here. Having a helping hand (which it can only "sort of" do now) in a model would be great.

Just a thought: maybe a deal could be made where forum members could get some access their pascal AI_bot in return for use of the forum content.

[Joanna from IRC]

I don’t want to talk to bots. If I wanted to talk to a machine I would google. I hate bots that pretend to be people.