Hello MS Community, 

Our new server seems to be sending emails much better than our older one, and that's a bit of an achilles heel. MyBB (our forum software, as many of you already know) is quite excessive with subscription emails out of the box, and literally auto subscribes users to every thread they've ever replied to. This means you'll get an email for every reply that someone makes to a thread you've also posted in (unless you manually uncheck the subscription box when you post). 

That's a lot of emails. Particularly for users who are pretty active.

We're looking into ways to help clean up this behavior (currently you can still enable/disable these emails in the User CP, which won't change), but some of the options might involve unsubscribing all users to all current threads and requiring manual action to subscribe to future threads. We can do this (and it would clean up everyone's email quickly), but I don't necessarily want to get rid of existing subscriptions if there are people who are making use of them either.

We wanted to create a poll to get community input and to allow MS users to help us decide. (Keep in mind that our forum software is pretty archaic, it unfortunately doesn't have any sort of daily digest feature for these things. That would probably be the ideal solution, but we're looking into alternatives due to the difficulty of implementing this.)

Feel free to also comment any additional ideas below as well!

AI Art has grown massively in the past few years. It went from being relatively on the fringe to now being almost mainstream, and even social media filters are taking advantage of it. 

Some artists are in support of it because it's seen as the future (or something that can at least augment the technology that we use for artistic design). Others are very afraid it will replace human artists, and are also afraid of AI's ability to be trained on vast datasets without any accreditation to the artists who created the work that it was trained on. 

What are your thoughts on AI Art? Do you see it growing larger in the future than it is today?

For me, it'd certainly be NYC (been once, want to see again), Los Angelos, Rome, London, and Tokyo. 

What cities are on your bucket list to visit? Which cities have you visited that you would recommend?

As a lot of folks probably already know, SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried) was recently extradited to the US to face fraud charges following the FTX Fiasco. Many customers have lost a substantial amount of money from the exchange's collapse, and it's unclear when (or if) these funds will be returned. 

It's fairly clear that SBF is guilty, and will likely be found guilty by the courts when his case goes to trial. What's less clear is what this means for the rest of the crypto industry. FTX is not the first exchange to collapse in this fashion, and it will almost certainly not be the last. 

What are your thoughts on FTX, and on the rest of the crypto industry as a whole?

EVs are still more expensive than their ICE counterparts, but their prices have dropped significantly over the past couple of years. Tesla still starts their cheapest models at about $47K, but there are other manufacturers (including Nissan and GM) that are pricing new EVs below $30,000. This is still very pricey, but in the USA, the federal government recently approved $7,500 tax credits for EVs, working out effectively to a 7.5K discount. This puts many EVs in the 20K range, and puts some Tesla models under 40K. 

These are still far too expensive for someone like me to afford, but I'm surprised to see them drop in price this rapidly. They will still take years to flood the used market, but for new car buyers, they are starting enter price ranges that are roughly comparable to their ICE counterparts. 

Electric vehicles might be mainstream much sooner than we thought. I wouldn't be surprised if it's only 5-7 years before more EVs are sold new than ICE vehicles are, and I'd give it another 10 years or so before the used market begins to catch up. 

Would you consider buying an EV (new or used) if the price was right? Why or why not?

Thought I'd re-introduce after all this time.

I'm Aerodynamic, from Belgium. Currently 31 years old, married, father of 3 children and avid forum user.

Forum Toplist is a new service brought to you by Admin Junkies. It's a traditional toplist website where you can add your website/forum and get it ranked.

How does it work: When visitors click a button on your website, they are sent to Forum Toplist and a vote is counted for that member, the list is ordered by websites/forums who have sent the most votes. Essentially this is a big traffic exchange. The more traffic your members send to Forum Toplist, the more traffic Forum Toplist sends out to your website/forum.

Not only is Forum Toplist a fantastic tool for generating traffic in and out of your website, its also a great way to network with webmasters in your niche!

We are fully mobile phone friendly! We are still working on plugins, styling, etc. But for now Forum Toplist is operational and ready for you to submit your forum/website on. So I encourage everyone to give it a try!

Hello community. What do you think about MyBB and PHP8 and its addons? I always read about problems with addons and PHP8, do we get them running with PHP8?

Alright, we're gonna do a quick poll for the MS community. We're gonna see how many of us are night owls and how many of us are early birds. 

(or, maybe, how many of us are crazy and deliberately fall into both categories. I'm probably among that crowd, I'm simultaneously a chronic insomniac and an early bird at the same time. And trust me, as glamourous as it doesn't sound, my body absolutely does make me pay for it.   )

Which category do you fall into?

It goes without saying that the bestsellers list isn't a bad place to start when it comes to quickly vetting books that might be interesting. If I'm not lying, most of the books I read are probably either from the bestsellers list, or they are too specific in niche to get that kind of an at-scale audience. They're easy to find, and they're usually pretty good. 

It has, however, also had me wondering about the lesser-known circles of the writing world (a world I know very little about). How many excellent books, fiction or nonfiction, never had the kind of audience to get that level of attention? And of course, a quick stroll through a library (or these days, a few searches on the Amazon Kindle Store) shows that there are far more books that have been written than a Barnes and Noble can really give me a fair comprehension or appreciation of. 

What are some of the less-popular (but heavily underrated) books that you've read, and what makes you recommend them?