Fireworks Forum Help Page
From 2023 my forum has moved back to being a private community. We are not accepting new members. You need to have already registered an account prior to this transition in order to log in and that account must have been regularly used to avoid deletion. If you have an account and it’s not working, this page offers some help.
Why the Forum has changed
Whilst forums were very popular in the noughties (ours got up to half a million posts), sadly, a lot has changed in the last 15 years or so. Social media has taken over from forums with the “public at large” no longer showing any interest at all in making an effort to register on, or support, a third party grass roots web community. Even a free to access one! Basically, if you’re not on social media, you’re screwed.
To compound this decline in organic traffic, Google took it upon themselves around a decade or so ago to change their algorithm to actively downgrade forum content in their search results. They deemed it “low quality”. They have a point: If someone asks whether you should stake a firework on the front or back and a 15 page argument ensues, how is a human to gather the right answer from this, let alone a search engine? I may be wrong, but I have always suspected that my running independent adverts (retailers paying me directly and me keeping 100% of that revenue) also caused Google to hate me, since they were not making any money from me. If you don’t give the overlords a cut, why should they help you?
The final nail in the coffin was AI. Those swanky answers you get at the top of your search results don’t come from thin air. They come from virtually every website and forum being heavily scraped by Google so it can present our content to you but without actually sending any traffic our way. By the time you’ve looked at the AI results, the adverts and other sponsored content, and all the SEO bullshit that drowns out the genuine people trying to help others, we see virtually no traffic at all these days.
With huge sadness at the way the world has changed, I have to accept that independent communities like this have fallen out of fashion or been trampled on by large corporations who want to own your content, your revenue, your users and even your freedom of speech.
So in 2023, having hung on for probably a decade longer than most others would, I finally accepted the fact that there is no interest any more in forums and called it a day, sort of.
I say sort of, since despite the lack of new people coming our way, those already here are still using the forum – not as much as they used to and less each month that goes by – but still using it nonetheless. These are the people I now devote the time and effort to.
What it boils down to is this: If you don’t have an account on the forum already, treat the situation as if the forum is closed and/or does not exist, since there is no forum for you to access or join. It’s closed to new members and only available to those with an active account.
Which brings me on to those who did have an account, but maybe don’t anymore. It’s most likely not good news, sorry…
Existing member? Cannot login?
If you have already registered a Forum account in the past but it isn’t working, it’s usually for one of two reasons: You have forgotten your login details or password, or the account has been deleted.
Forgotten login details:
The username should be either the handle you registered with, or the email address you used. If you have forgotten either of these, you can’t log in nor reset your account.
If you have forgotten your password you can try a reset. You will need access to the original email address you registered with; if you don’t you cannot perform a reset. Note also that iCloud, most Microsoft/Hotmail accounts and Yahoo! hard bounce reset emails back to me as spam, so you cannot reset those.
If you are not able to reset your account or login, you are unfortunately out of luck.
Closed accounts:
If the Forum does not recognise the account details at all, it is likely the account has been deleted.
Through 2023 in order to move to a more private setting, a number of accounts were pruned out. These included:
- Inactive accounts, for example those with no login for over 12 months (some had not been used for up to 20 years!).
- Zero posting accounts. These were considered not to be contributing anything to the community and given the anonymous nature of these accounts, we decided we’d prefer to remove them. Some accounts had been active for over a decade without a single post in the Forum.
- Accounts subject to moderation.
- Duplicate accounts.
If you had an account previously and it has been deleted, sorry, the account cannot be reinstated (as there is no account to recover).
The forum is currently being maintained solely for those members already registered and who remained active at the time of its transition to a private community, those who were paying advertisers at that time and those who made donations to my running costs.
If you can no longer log in, or your account has been deleted, it’s likely for the reasons stated above: I do not offer any form of account reactivation and there is no “appeals process”.