Do you use smartphone messenger and if so which one?

Ich verwende Whatsapp 

I use Whatsapp, but a psssss quiet (improved version ), and also Threema 

We're doing some Spring cleaning. Major reorganization is in progress!

We've grown significantly in recent years, so it's time for our layout to reflect the direction that we are moving towards today. You'll notice a lot of things are moving. Some boards will be in new places. Others will be new entirely. Overall, we're working to balance things out and to make room for the popular topics in the community.

How do you guys like it so far? As always, any feedback is welcome and much appreciated. All suggestions will be considered. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Hello all, 

This is for college students and 20-somethings. This will be for general college-happenings, or other things related to the craziness of life in the 20s. Everyone is welcome to participate in this thread! 

I'll get us started. How are you guys doing in this semester with the Coronavirus?

So I've long had an idea (for years, as a matter of fact). One that I would never be able to pull off, but I'm going to share the idea here. Maybe someone can make it happen some day. 

It's called the anarchy forum, but believe me, it's not without order. Rather, the order, structure, and heirarchy come entirely from the members/community. It is self organized, self staffed, and self managed. 

It's self managed.

It would be built entirely around the reputation system. Users with a large amount of reputation would gain extra powers on the forum for moderation, etc. Users with the most reputation out of all members would become the administrators. There would be policies and restrictions in place, of course. New users would not be able to down-rep, and there would be people responsible for making sure that clone accounts, etc. were banned. 

The site ownership would be almost non-existant and anonymous. Administation would be done almost entirely by members who have gained the most reputation. Likewise, they could be overthrown if, by community vote, someone else is put in charge. In other words, the community would be entirely managed ONLY by the most respected members of the community at any given time. 

That being said, there would be a global admin account that would be managed by a few people (and certainly the person managing the server as well), and that admin account would (anonymously) deal with any situations where illegal content gets posted or policies are violated. This account would never post, but would act anonymously to moderate the forum against anything that the community doesn't self-moderate.

The concern is that it would probably wind up along the lines of the 2B2T minecraft server (a server where there are no rules). Ideally, the goal would be to absolutely establish normal rules and order, but to have it self-established. Instead of the administration running everything, the community runs it. In practice, there would have to be restrictions and policies in place, and there would have to be at least some administration outside of the community-centered model. It would never work otherwise.

Nevertheless, it's a unique idea. I've never seen this done in practice before. Maybe someday, it will become a reality.

Discord is an IRC-like chat room server that is built for modern times. Much like IRC, there are channels that can be joined, but Discord adds invitation systems, more advanced user accounts, profiles/avatars, voice chats, and a number of other things. 

Personally, I've never been too much a fan, but it's growing on me. (Makestation does not have its own discord, but a few of us hang out in the Simmania Discord Channel, run by @brian51. )

Discord: (Screenshot courtesy of OMG Ubuntu)
   

Anyway, I much prefer Ajax Chat personally (only because it's much more lightweight). I used to host about 600 of them on Chatcave, running on a tiny 512 MB VPS. Surprisingly it ran like a charm, never overloaded the server or had issues of any sort. Safe to say, it's lightweight. It's a robust and highly efficient chat script compared to many of the alternatives.

Ajax Chat: (Screenshot credit: Official website)

   

For those of us who spend time in various chat rooms, what is your preference? Discord, Ajax Chat, or old-fashioned IRC?

Interchanges must be built manually in Cities Skylines. SC4 players are already familiar with this in the form of RHW (a NAM addon that is an absolute must for any SC4 player). Cities Skylines doesn't give you any other option. Absolutely every highway is similar to RHW, although the interface for it is native and doesn't involve puzzle pieces, which is nice. 

In other words, you have total control. You can make them however you want to, down to very small details.

Anyway, forgive my toaster for a graphics card. Yes, the screenshot really is that bad. But hey, I'm gonna get this thread started. 

   

   

This is an extremely busy interchange that funnels the only direct link from an entire borough of my city into the downtown area where the majority of the jobs are. A single highway with four lanes in each direction funnels the traffic nicely, and splits up into three separate highways (one to the south, one to the north nearby, and one that continues west). There are occasionally jams on the northern highway, but it otherwise works great. 

The auxilliary lanes on the western portion also do a very good job dispersing some of the traffic. The western area goes towards the seaport, airport, and a large industrial area, so quite a bit of traffic is generated.

The northern area is primarily offices, industry, and residential. The north highway itself splits into three separate highways later on, so it is the busiest portion of highway that this interchange serves. The southern portion links to another borough and some residential areas, but is less busy in comparison.

What do your interchanges look like?

Personally, it seems that the MyBB Admin Panel has to be pretty high on that list. It's absolutely riddled with XSS vulnerabilities. That being said, it's not a risk because the user has to get access to the ACP first. Once they have access to the ACP, you're already screwed. They can do whatever they want anyway.  

I'll put my very first PHP project on the list too. It was a project called Filecave. I didn't do very much input sanitization. I just coded it all out and was like "meh, I'll sanitize later." What a decision that was. I ended up cancelling the project over it. 

Then there are all of the government sites that literally store passwords in plain text. No idea who they hired to do these websites, but that's terrible practice. Even random sophomores at my university know better than to try that. 

I would have to say older versions of Windows, at the end of the day. Windows XP is notoriously insecure. They never really got it reasonably good security wise. Even Windows 10 is far less secure than Mac OS and Linux. This may, in part, be because it's the most popular OS in the world. It gets targeted far more often, but I truly believe it is genuinely much less secure in general. 

What are the most insecure softwares you've ever discovered/run across?

So I discovered a new sport today. And it's fun. It's called disc-golf (or frisbee-golf). 

You have 18 full-length holes with a par and everything else that goes along with golf, but you throw a high-quality professional frisbee instead. There is actually quite a bit of technique involved. Many of the holes cannot be reached with a line-of-sight path, so you have to throw it in such a way that it curves along the path and doesn't run into trees. There is also a creek near the course here, so you have to be careful to make sure it doesn't land where it shouldn't. 

Anyone heard of this before? It's extremely fun.

I've recently ordered a new Thinkpad which should be arriving near the end of April if all goes well.
It's more or less a maxed out E595, only things that aren't maxed are:

• RAM, since one 16GB module is enough to get me through the day and I can buy a used 16GB SODIMM for like 50$ on ebay to get the dual channel benefits
  
• Drives, 1TB HDD is good enough because there's room for a second drive, and I've got like 5 SSDs lying around that I can pop in.
  

Here's a poll for the server admins out there. 

• Apache is good for compatibility. It is the most widely used web server in the world. It is installed on the vast majority of web hosts, and is the only web server software that is natively compatible with .htaccess files that are widely used by most PHP applications. 
  
• Nginx is FAR faster than Apache. The perforamance improvements are significant. Most corporate or large websites do extra work to convert their .htaccess files to nginx configurations to take advantage of Nginx's performance.