RIP to WATMM Discussion thread

That's a pity! I joined recently but I learned a lot about different topics discussing and sharing info with you guys. The forum Itself has accumulated a lot of stuff, thought 'now playing thread' would reach 1000 pages. I think this virtual place is a nice place as a gathering point for WARP fans and similar acts.

Joyrex did a great job but maybe he is tired and don't want to carry on anymore which is totally respectable, we must thank you for the service all these years.

Maybe we can find a new leadership for this site or there are some alternatives..

  On 1/29/2025 at 6:21 PM, Ski Nell said:

Discord is too trans-y

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dumbass

Fredd-E and Joyrex making plans to continue the forum until BoC comes out with a new album with all the new pledges...

  On 1/30/2025 at 7:18 PM, aencre said:

Yeah, if we're going the start-a-new-forum route, Discourse would be at the top of the open-source solutions I'd like us to try. But as @Satans Little Helper pointed out, the ideal outcome to maintain the community as a whole would be to keep the actual forum, with its users and archives, instead of asking everyone to migrate.

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I really only bring it up since this forum has been around quite some time and might be quite a bit more effort to maintain. Like working on an old '56 Mustang vs a 2015 Toyota Corolla.

  On 1/29/2025 at 7:56 PM, dr lopez said:

Ok 5 pages now. Brass tacks.

There is no credible reason beyond simple hubris for Joyrex NOT to pass this active and beloved site on to a new caretaker, individual or collective or otherwise.

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agreed

  On 1/30/2025 at 7:26 PM, jules said:

Fredd-E and Joyrex making plans to continue the forum until BoC comes out with a new album with all the new pledges...

 

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Meanwhile, Rich is reading all of this and waiting to release his next triple album in July just to fuck with heads. 

I can see there's quite a bit of talk about "what technological tool to use to host the community" and I can't help but fart out some thoughts:

I think the linear style forum format is ok if kept to something like 10 pages max per topic; after that it gets hard to follow, hard to search etc. Depending on the activity, other alternatives are more suitable; for example, if there's a live webcast, a discord-like chat would be better; for organising a community event like a compilation or a social event, I'd prefer a "wiki" + forum + chatroom combo; for dank memes, some forum + gallery combo; for an AMA session, really the best option would be a reddit-like tree structure.

I hope you catch my drift.

Really what's important at this stage though to my view is that there's a lot of people that just want to keep the community going on.

  On 1/30/2025 at 7:44 PM, IOS said:

really the best option would be a reddit-like tree structure

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ew

To everyone saying that Joyrex has an obligation to do this or that, and that this place somehow belongs to the members, while I agree with the sentiment, the argument is flawed in that the facts are Joyrex can do whatever the hell he wants.  That's the reality.  It's his creation, he owns it, he's been the primary manager for longer than some members have been alive.

I get it, we've all contributed to what this place is, but saying Joyrex has an obligation to do anything is wrong as we all joined and posted while knowing that papa could pull the plug at any minute if he wanted to do so.  It may just be semantics, but we should all be making a case as to why we feel that he should do something, not saying that he has to do anything.

Maybe I'm being too sensitive and if I am, I apologize.

  On 1/30/2025 at 9:00 AM, d-a-m-o said:

As stated by Lopez and a few others, I don't understand why this place should go down because of Joyrex loss of interest, there's got to be a way to keep this forum alive, and don't talk to me about reddit or shit like that... 

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ya give me a break.  hand over to someone else.

  On 1/30/2025 at 10:19 AM, usagi said:

sorry but this is a failure to understand what makes this place a community. the site or platform owner does not make the community, they provide a space for people to come and build it up with their individual contributions and personalities, without which it would be nothing. yes, the often thankless work it takes to create and maintain that space deserves respect, all other things being equal. but saying that the community has to live or die on the unilateral decision of the owner is wrong, it demeans the place and devalues what makes the community special and worth having. especially going forward where everything on the internet is aggregated and click-driven and soulless and impersonal. these spaces are vanishing.

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agreed.  places like this are quickly dying as the internet is consolidated between massive capitalist websites.  watmm is a real life thing.  joyrex thinks he can just kill the website rather than hand it over to someone.  he hasn't been thinking about this for the past 10 years?  at the final moment he just says "time to kill it".  you had decades to find successors and appoint admins.  if it's a matter of money, then post the numbers and let's get it figured out.  i'm very certain watmm users could cover the cost of hosting. 

  On 1/30/2025 at 1:38 PM, zazen said:

Ok true. But asking joyrex to transfer ownership is asking him to do work, and he's done doing work.

We could just start those threads again

Or ... What are the implications of scraping some of the best threads as static html and hosting them elsewhere? who holds the copyright to all this stuff, officially?

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he holds the keys to the castle and doesn't want to bother getting them out of the vault to give to someone else.  instead he will let it shut its doors and rot, leaving all of us who used to live there shit out of luck.  sorry, but even if he technically can do this, he can't expect people to take that as a good answer and be forgiving of it.

  On 1/30/2025 at 12:01 PM, EdamAnchorman said:

I agree and I also feel that this is how things should be, but we all know the reality is that Joyrex can do whatever he wants.  Everything is under his control.  Any actions beyond just shutting it down would be altruistic, beyond who knows how many altruistic acts that we don't know about over the years.

Perhaps we should've asked about community control and ownership a while ago, but that ship had sailed.

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digital is forever, and this dude wants to wipe the hard drives

it borders on malicious

funnily enough, if you visit some ekt topic, you see this double banner:

For a second, I thought joyrex changed his mind and re-enabled subscriptions heh

  On 1/30/2025 at 6:10 PM, aencre said:

100% behind this, thanks @purlieu. Discord servers are fine for a variety of things, but even when setup forum-like, they aren't as open from afar.

The way I see it, our two options for continuing this community are:

1. We convince Joyrex to pass over the controls to a board of rotating responsible elected members, and WATMM continues on, with the same adress, the same software, keeping its archives, and primordialy its users.
   For that to work, we'd need to see the actual numbers of the financial setup so that we can see what we'd be getting into. How much is that Invision bill, what's the income from subscriptions, the ads? Would J. want payment or reassurance? It's a little work, but it's to get take of a big burden.
2. We start anew (I like @dcom's "WATDD" name idea) under the same premises of a shared, self-managed forum.

We care about our place. People (including, this is important, lurkers) have already come forward with proposals for no-strings attached financial support. And previous calculations (done without access to the books) point to this being very feasible just with some members subscribing. What we need now is to organize. Who wants to put their name in the bag to do accounting, IT, research of software and hosting options?

edit: just realized there could be a third, middle option in case Joyrex doesn't want us to "spoil his legacy" : the present forum gets passed on, on the condition that we change the name to mark a division.

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show us the bill @Joyrex and stop being funny about all this.  funding will be ensured

Ok, fine. He has no legal or financial obligation to pass it on to someone else, I guess, but I would argue that he does have a moral obligation to not flush a resource as rich and fun as this down the drain, never to be read or interacted with again, and that's purely from an archival standpoint. As many have already mentioned, this is indeed the greatest neighbourhood pub on the internet, a great and diverse community of shit posters, assholes, crate diggers, lunatics and truly lovely and creative people. I don't necessarily like all of you, but I love you. Braindance is the spice that binds us together in this stew called watmm.

Unfortunately I'm not much of a wordsmith, if I was, I would formulate this more eloquently, but I'm just a dimwitted bloke from Norway. 

  On 1/30/2025 at 8:19 PM, Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo said:

digital is forever, and this dude wants to wipe the hard drives

 

it borders on malicious

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Not arguing with you, just being as pragmatic about it as possible.

Any one or more of us could've gone to him over the years and offered to take some of the burden.  I don't know if that ever happened or not, but I know I never thought to do it.

Joyrex is obligated to pass WATMM down to his first-born in his will.

Just gotta chime in on the subject of whether anyone reads old posts:

When it comes to the featured artists, music discussion and new releases forums, YES of course the old posts still hold an enormous value. People, myself included, absolutely do go back and read this stuff. Either we are looking for something specific (and often find it here) or just engaging our own fandom to see what else has happened on the internet around our favourite music artists/releases/labels/genres etc. This site is a hub for all this stuff. It is a huge archive of history where not only are interviews, videos, reviews etc compiled by users but also the actual conversations people had here about it, which we all know is often more comprehensive and "accurate" (ito real people's experience with the music) than reading a review by some tired journalist somewhere.

As a nearly-lifelong Autechre fanboi I can say that one of the most delightful things about Ae is discovering all the "that bit at 5:06" moments in their music. One of the things I have enjoyed most about being part of this community is being able to read threads where other fans are talking about those bits and moments, pointing them out for others to find. (This is more important than ever when we're talking about 90-minute long live sets with a million things going on at all times lol). It is fun and rewarding to see these bits pointed out and go and find them, and be able to share the ones I've found too. Is this super nerdy and fanboyish? Yes of course lol but that's why places like this exist, so don't be a snob about it - you're here aren't you? I don't get to do this in real life. I have approximately one real-life friend who is into Autechre, and not nearly to the extent that we are here. Without WATMM I have no one to ask whether I should listen to Krems or Dublin next, or to find out which of the 14-15 sets have hidden unique sections in the final quarter. This is important, especially when the rest of life is a bit bleak.

And that's just speaking of Autechre. Never mind all the hundreds (thousands?) of other artists/albums/labels that have been posted about and discussed here over the years. I've discovered tons of my favourite music from this very site, and continue to do so from old threads, not just new ones.

So I say if the archiving aspect of keeping WATMM alive turns out to be a burdensome amount of work, I would vote to archive the featured artist forums, Music Discussion and New Releases forums. Genban is legendary too, of course, but not nearly as important to archive, at least in the context of what this site is really all about and why it should be kept alive.

  On 1/30/2025 at 7:54 PM, EdamAnchorman said:

To everyone saying that Joyrex has an obligation to do this or that, and that this place somehow belongs to the members, while I agree with the sentiment, the argument is flawed in that the facts are Joyrex can do whatever the hell he wants.  That's the reality.  It's his creation, he owns it

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The socialism thread may have been the beginning of the end, but WATMM is now learning an important lesson in private ownership.

Cast off your chains, brothers! You have nothing left to lose!

Also sorry but @Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo you need to stfu, we are all upset but we're trying to be constructive about it here

  On 1/30/2025 at 8:15 PM, Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo said:

he holds the keys to the castle and doesn't want to bother getting them out of the vault to give to someone else.  instead he will let it shut its doors and rot, leaving all of us who used to live there shit out of luck.  sorry, but even if he technically can do this, he can't expect people to take that as a good answer and be forgiving of it.

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He's done 26 years, he has repaid any debt he ever had to idmsociety

There's a reason there's no forums around any more - keeping them online is fucking hard. upgrades, hack attacks, database failures, hosting quotas exceeded, bills to pay, moderation. Everyone talks about the golden age of forums but the truth is they used to just go dark suddenly with no warning. Almost randomly Joyrex ended up being responsible for keeping the leading electronic music message board online and even as his interest waned, he did it for 26 years and thousands of people enjoyed it for free and many of them took every opportunity to complain about things he did (including me, back in the day). He's spent a third of a lifetime on this, he's done, thats his perogative.

Amazingly he has given us five months warning which is plenty of time to get organised and archive/copy stuff that we want to preserve.

If you think this community is important and that the content is important we've got plenty of time to go and be a community somewhere else and copy over the important stuff

I haven't really thought this through, so I might be talking nonsense but here it goes

How about we propose a scenario to J-rex where, he gets to keep this forum going for a few more years. He's still the site admin, but he doesn't have to visit as much (maybe a couple of times every 6 months); he appoints one or two trusted "business account" holders, who manage the payments and subscriptions; also keeps all existing moderators plus maybe a few new ones, plus a volunteer tech frontend/backend person. A subscription becomes mandatory for all users. Joyrex makes a bit of money out of that to justify him keeping the site going, Also, all site costs _must_ be covered otherwise everything gets shut the fuck down instantly.

In the mean time, _some_ data harvesting and backing up could happen (by us users, over a long period of time, it'd take months), so as to smoothly transition to another platform and preserve important material. I don't know what or how on this one; for example, the Autechre AAA basically has already been exported to a spreadsheet; the history of "new releases" could also be exported; entire threads could probably be extracted to text if needed. Obviously it wouldn't be 100% perfect.

  On 1/30/2025 at 8:56 PM, toaoaoad said:

Also sorry but @Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo you need to stfu, we are all upset but we're trying to be constructive about it here

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how about you do you, theres multiple ways to be constructive

  On 1/30/2025 at 8:52 PM, toaoaoad said:

Just gotta chime in on the subject of whether anyone reads old posts:

When it comes to the featured artists, music discussion and new releases forums, YES of course the old posts still hold an enormous value. People, myself included, absolutely do go back and read this stuff. Either we are looking for something specific (and often find it here) or just engaging our own fandom to see what else has happened on the internet around our favourite music artists/releases/labels/genres etc. This site is a hub for all this stuff. It is a huge archive of history where not only are interviews, videos, reviews etc compiled by users but also the actual conversations people had here about it, which we all know is often more comprehensive and "accurate" (ito real people's experience with the music) than reading a review by some tired journalist somewhere.

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I absolutely agree, I can't even recall the amount of old threads I read. Every single release I enjoy that I wasn't around for to talk about it love here I have read the thread of. I love going back and seeing how everyone was thinking and interacting with each other. It holds great value and I genuinely gain new insights from you guys sometimes. Can't count the albums I found out by just browsing this site.

Sometimes I like to bump old threads to see if people want to make a renewed comment on something, it's fun imo!