Ok, now I understand why the forum didn't load at all and I just got a cloudflare error... Damn. This seriously needs to be dealt with. I mean... Only a matter of time before people start doing this to follow this guy's example. At least he's now banned, but there's still over 1100 topics.

As of my last check, the first good topic was on page 37.
Too bad they disabled topic deletion.
Even if they have to temporarily enable it to make this troll delete each topic one by one, then so be it.
I realize the admins can do this, but they shouldn't have to clean up multiple pages of someone's mess.
@20, Good luck accomplishing that without being an admin or mod. Please let me know how it's working out for you.
@23, I agree with post 26 on this one.
Like it or not, people need to realize that change eventually needs to happen, and if they care that much about being part of this community they'll learn how to work it.
I'm not saying that we should just accept it if they give us an inaccessible mess of a forum software, but I am saying that sometimes we need to learn new ways of doing things, and until some people grasp that concept they won't make it very far in life.

Well shit, someone pulled this shit... again. Topic room is now being spanned by webber, who ever that is... with topic's titled the i am in bed game... For fuck's sake. This is getting annoying, and uh... We cant use the forum for shit with jackasses like these doing this deliberately. This getting ridiculous.

If you hate infinite scrolling and hamburger menus then you'll hate discourse.
Whatever we end up moving onto we should probably aim to preserve the nice comfy web 1.0 feel we have here. Infinite scrolling is  a fucking nightmare that can and will end up breaking somewhere down the line because google fucked up chromium or whatever.
The fact that google has screwed up chromium a few times over the years but this site just kept trucking speaks volumes for it's usability, current issues aside.

And we thought we had it bad when Slover or Donaldsj or whatever their name is was spamming.
This almost makes what they did look like nothing.

My only issue with infinite scrolling is when I get to a certain area of a page and, instead of just putting more at the bottom of the page and waiting for me to get through that, the content just starts scrolling slowly without any input at all. Anything I was trying to read gets replaced with the new content. The focus doesn't change, only the content. That makes things extremely frustrating to navigate. I still don't know what that's about. The only way to get it to stop is to fight with it by moving back up the page. Unplugging the keyboard or switching away from the window pauses it, which is even more strange. It happens only if I'm trying to navigate with anything but tab. I don't know if that's a common issue with infinite scrolling and screen readers or if it's just me.

yeah so I knew this spam stuff was gonna happen somehow, some time. And its a bit appalling (but expected) that no real new alternative places were successful. I remember asking several times on these "oh lets make a new forum a new audio games place waaah" crying topics for ideas, for starting points, for at least some discord or whatever, and guess what nothing. Because this is essentially unpaid volunteer work and of course it shows for years on this site that there is little of a desire to do stuff for free from pretty much every one here (and yes, this time generalization is the right thing to do to get the point across). Also, with the abundance of superiority complexes that one finds here, a technical solution could have been implemented in people's sleep and very simply done from the database or the server... topics with similar titles (say a 90% match) should be rejected, simple conditional reg exp boolean things plus a no more than 5 topic creations a day or something (who really needs to make 5 new things to talk about anyway if there is even a monthly chat?) (and yes this comes from someone who is not a programmer at all) but alas, I digress too much for my own good.
Its a bit disturbing the website has kept going on at all. Remember last time what a great smooth experience it was to contact the webmasters of this thing?
or the countless times any topics have gotten out of hand.. when noble ideas stop being cared for at all this is the glorious result.

So, the Space Battles family of forums seems to use a mostly web 1.0 UI without any of our problems. Of the three I'm familiar with, this one has the most permissive rules relevant to recent drama (you can ignore how much detail they go into about NSFW content; it's relevant to why they spun off from their parent sites).
I have no idea how feasible it would be to migrate the database to that forum architecture. I do know I have heard nothing about any of the SB family having issues with spam attacks. I've mostly only heard complaints about moderation styles, hence I linked to the most permissive one.

@42: but why though?  In terms of UI, this forum is the least annoying I've ever come across. Do you have a recommendation for a modern format that isn't bloated / laggy / requires additional whatsits for accessibility? We need simple, and it seems like trends have been toward needlessly complex, and therefore slow and cumbersome. In the past month or two, I've seen specific mainstream sites improving on this, but none of those have been forums.

@43, because Discourse may use JS and such but it also has very good moderation tools. It's also not that slow or bloated. This forum software is absolute shit nowadays, and I'm pretty positive the fact it's in PHP (and very bad PHP at that) doesn't make the idea of fucking around with it by the admins a task that they'd want to do just because when you have bad/messy code like that, it can be very easy to cause a cascade failure.

@46, I don't propose the change to Discourse because "Hey this is just a good idea" or something similar though. Discourse generally has much better tooling/moderation systems/whatnot, email replies for those who like that sort of thing, and it also has a vibrant community. The fact that it's not written in PHP is just a side bonus (maybe), but I'm not just advocating for the switch because "hey this is a modern cool thing". Sure, this is one of the smoothest for the blind community, but it lacks a ton of features that people have wanted implemented that Discourse already has (or could have, given it's community), and thus far, the mods haven't shown an interest in updating the PHP code to incorporate those features.

@48, couldn’t you just delete the users in question? I believe there’s an option to delete a user and all their posts / topics, though I may be wrong. I don’t get the impression that either of these guys were particularly good contributors to this place anyway.