Yeah, I do feel this reality has been severely missold. There should be an inquiry.

Not too bad. How are you?

Hello friend! It’s lovely to meet you! :)

I am definitely happy to be friends. :)

I’ve been a late adopter of every version of Windows I’ve ever used - and I skipped 8 too, switching to 10 around the same time you did because my software required it. It does seem the best way to avoid most of the problems: Microsoft has moved on to pulling its old tricks on the newest version, and there are more tools for modifying the old version. So I figure I’ll switch to 11 or 12 when Microsoft is doing awful things with 13.

I’m very glad that my definitely-100%-legit copy of Windows 10 seems to have no idea how to upgrade to 11. It still gets other updates, my hardware is definitely compatible. The thought of upgrading to 11 just never seems to enter its mind. I suspect I’ll be sticking with Windows 10 for a long, long time, until either Microsoft give up on this ridiculous idea in response to customer backlash, or Linux becomes a viable option for my usecase (Nvidia GPU, lots of proprietary software that I need to use for university and future career). It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve held onto an older version of Windows for a protracted period of time, skipping a dreadful iteration or two, and then upgrading when Microsoft have learned their lesson.

If I run into a problem, there is no way I will be creating an account on Discord to get help. It might not be worth the time and effort. A searchable forum is good enough.

I use Discord, but I actually agree with this. It’s a really good platform for small groups of people to communicate with each other - for example, we have one for my class at university, which allows us to keep in contact about assignments, projects, deadlines, etc. What I don’t want to do is join a Discord server for every single game or piece of software I need help with. It’s just not a great platform for having hundreds or thousands of people trying to get help, often asking the same questions over and over, while the community regulars are chatting about their personal lives.

Searchable forums, website-based FAQs and help files, or any other option that makes help accessible without having to download new software or sign up for new accounts, are the most suitable options for making help available.

Yep, the divide between the 90s and now is so huge! Most of our old content does actually work in modern browsers, surprisingly, but we definitely get some weirdness - alignments of various elements just get completely thrown off, for example. As you note, it’s definitely partly due to larger screen resolutions. Where we’re running into problems is basically the older WYSIWYG editors just can’t handle any of the newer web standards properly, so as soon as we try to make things that have… let’s call it the same aesthetic as the late 90s/early 00s, but with adjustments to make it more modern-browser-friendly, the editor can’t render it properly. So I’d been hoping to find a modern editor that knows what the current iterations of HTML and CSS are, but will still let us work visually!

Shockingly, it is possible to get the early 00s versions of Dreamweaver and Frontpage working on Windows 10/11. There’s a couple people in the group with Dreamweaver from back then, and I managed to get the 2003 version of Frontpage working. They just don’t have any clue what to do with CSS that makes, say, navigation easier or the site more adaptive to desktop and mobile screen resolutions. I remember even in the late 00s, Frontpage was struggling with CSS.

I’ve actually tried out the most current version of Dreamweaver, too. I decided to go back to school last year, and the university gives everyone the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite, which includes Dreamweaver 2021. And it does actually do the job it’s supposed to do reasonably well - apart from this bug that just drives me nuts, where it basically just multiplies spaces in the middle of blocks of text and then will not delete them. But obviously even though I have access to this, it’s proprietary software requiring a monthly subscription, so it’s not a viable option for the whole community.

I might buy that argument if our community was trying to build commercial websites that need a lot of functionality. But we’re not. It’s literally just a hobby sharing art and writing, for which we need a functional WYSIWIG editor that isn’t locked behind a paywall, doesn’t try to tie us into a particular hosting platform, and which is compatible with the current web standards.

“Just learn to code” is not particularly helpful advice for a community that is trying to balance an enjoyable hobby (not career) with careers and families.

That’s fine for those of us that know (some) HTML and CSS, but not so much for those that don’t know any. Plus there’s also the fact that we just don’t want to spend our time writing code, because that takes time away from the actual purpose of the group, which is art and creative writing. A WYSIWIG editor handles the code for us and lets us focus on the part that’s actually important to our community.

Thank you! :)

We have actually tried WordPress! I think one person is still using it, but the rest of us had various issues with it, whether that was an inability to export to a basic format, or security issues. The last straw for me was when I couldn’t log in for a week because one random file had an exploit that was being bombarded with attacks, and the security plugins did their job and blocked logins, but that also locked me out as well. My feeling is that WordPress is just so widely used that it’s a big target for attacks.

But thanks for the suggestion! :)

I’d already checked the alternativeto lists prior to posting; sadly all the options either have one or more features missing, or else have been discontinued.

I am a bit short on MPDEWAKEHVHIUCVJTWCJIJ if you still have any? 😁

It’s not quite what I’m looking for, but thank you for the suggestion nonetheless. It’s good to have more options to investigate! :)

Definitely something to be proud of! :D

It’s not quite what I’m looking for, but I appreciate the suggestion. I’d rather look at options that turn out to be not quite right than not have any options at all. :)

I’d prefer not to share my pages, as I like to keep things separate (and also some of the older content from 25 years ago has not aged well but I haven’t had chance to fix it all yet). But yeah, it is really sad that we’re losing tools like this, and how few people have any ability to control their online space. Facebook makes everything so impersonal.

You should definitely make a cute, personal homepage. The internet is better for having such spaces on it. :)

I had already checked the alternativeto lists. Unfortunately most of the options there were missing one or more of the features required, but BlueGriffon, NVU and Kompozer have all been tried, with the lack of maintenance being the major problem - when a bug pops up or there’s a compatibility issue, there’s no hope of fixing it (this is also the reason why we’re struggling to keep using the old versions of Dreamweaver and Frontpage - we can get them to run, but they’re so old that we’re running into compatibility issues).

But LibreOffice and Seamonkey are good ideas, since they’re both still being maintained. Thanks. :)

Yep, it’s really disappointing that most of the options listed as alternatives to Dreamweaver and Frontpage are either discontinued, or lack a visual interface, or are web-based and attached to a specific hosting provider. We’ve actually been looking for the right software for over three years now. Some of the discontinued ones are still accessible and mostly working, but they have bugs that are obviously never going to be fixed.

We do have one or two people using Neocities, as that’s what replaced Geocities - but there’s an understandable reluctance to use free hosting services. We lost quite a lot of content when Geocities was shut down, only some of which we were able to reconstruct. So the majority of us have our own webhosting now - for what we need, the cheapest packages are more than sufficient. It’s kind of depressing how that actually makes it harder - Neocities, Wix, and a bunch of other free hosting options provide page builders, but only if you’re using their hosting. When you have your own hosting, your webhost pushes you to install WordPress and considers their job done at that point.

But thanks for the suggestion of Silex. It’s one I hadn’t encountered in my previous searches, but it looks like it might do what we need. The desktop app and visual interface look promising, so I’m going to play around with it and see if it’ll do what we need. I think PicoCMS is worth investigating further as well - I can install it on a subdomain and poke at it a bit. I’m liking that it’s lightweight and stores everything as text files.

Thank you! :)