msumpter

I may be cynical but when I read they want a new system to create 'safeguards against abusive conduct', I really think they mean they want a system to suppress the sudden influx of actual public opinions (similar to that of the rush of traffic Last Week Tonight referred during their segment on Net Neutrality) and not flood out the machine driven comments supporting their decisions.

Another vote for XenForo, my previous employer ran several forums all using vBulletin. IMO the direction of vBulletin 5 was a big miss, and like other commenters have said, the core product manager/developer of vBulletin 3 & 4 left to start XenForo. There was some significant legal drama with the current owner of vBulletin suing XenForo for infringement & theft intellectual property. Those all have been dismissed in favor of XenForo (all from memory, probably worthwhile to search this out just in case).

I've seen some enthusiasm around Discourse but for users who are used to the look & feel of a traditional discussion forum or the workflow of vBulletin, it can be very jarring. I believe there was a decent community split when Ubuntu tried to retire their legacy vBulletin forum in favor of Discourse; I think they are still running both side by side with almost different groups using them. XenForo is a more natural progression from vBulletin and would be my platform of choice.

I had a former sales person who worked for the Berry company (who produced the Yellow Pages) tell me the two biggest buyers of listings/ads were doctors and lawyers. So not surprised lawyers may be willing to overspend a bit compared to how much those very prominent ads for lawyers were in phone books (think rear cover or side binding). I assume they still spend quite a bit on the Yellow pages since that may be all that is available to you while you sit in jail and need legal council.

And I guess I bought my last Huawei device!

It's crazy that they just began sponsoring XDA and then make that kind of move, XDA is now running a regular Q&A with their CEO every Friday, I predict none of the 10 questions they select will have to do with bootloader unlocking, like people on XDA would care about such a thing...

> In addition to launching access to our native global network, we're also launching a public preview of use-your-own SSL certificate, enabling customers to customize and self-maintain their own certificate and create a CDN solution perfectly fitted to their needs.

Any bets how long till Let's Encrypt functionality/automation is built out by a community project?

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think we didn't fully appreciate how much the 'social' aspect of the show was more important than the 'education' we provided. We de-epmhesized the after show social hours and other parties, and instead focused on marketing the education factor, and gradually the fun left the show along with the people. But that's my personal opinion.

IMO the conference market has taken a hit in general prior to the Trump administration. For the previous several years, attendance and sponsorships were trending down, it seemed like most companies budgets were being pulled from onsite training to virtual and sponsoring companies wanted to focus on their own niche mini show around their products only. We had a healthy percent of international attendees that came in every year, I can only imagine with sentiment being customs/immigration is getting worse for travelers, that would discourage attendees from coming in.

Worked previously for a company owning many trade shows/events and we purposefully moved the shows to various destination cities to encourage the tourism aspect, a new city every year was tough so we repeated cities eventually. We never ventured into moving an existing US based show out of country, when we did international shows they were always stood up as separate. But considering the political climate today, it really isn't a surprise to move one north of the boarder.