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Re: [GSAS-board] A forum

On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Paul Wallace wrote:

> * The benefits that I see are pleasing the splitters (ie the post in 
> lighting, not fish crowd), picture posting, and a greater presence in 
> Google.

Why is the presence greater in Google?  Links is links.


> * The risk is that only a small subset would use the forum with any 
> regularity.

Yes, and a certain subset, which enjoy the notification of e-mail but 
otherwise never read forums, will completely lose touch with it.  This is 
not imaginary; this happened with the Dallas-Ft Worth Aquatic Plant Club 
when they switched from a mailing list... traffic dropped to nothing.  So 
you win some, you lose some...

Risk 2: Someone on the list noted that a forum is somehow 'more 
permanent'.  If hosted by some unknown third party, there's the 
possibility of losing the entire database of messages.  Yes, you sort of 
have that danger with me, a single person, being responsible for the 
mailing list archives.  But the archives are mirrored on that bi-yearly 
DVD you guys have.  Forum data, like "gallery" photo meta-data, is in an 
SQL database.  Not so exportable or portable.

> As the risk of offending Eric (sorry), I would like to point out the AGA 
> forum:
> http://forum.aquatic-gardeners.org/

Yes, that forum is my baby.  Actually, the analogy would be that I am its 
mother, but it wasn't my idea to have kids, and Dad skipped town after the 
baby was born.  Some folks in the AGA, a vocal few, really really pushed 
to have a forum.  They promised they'd maintain it, appointed the six or 
so of themselves as moderators, and a system admin.  I set it up -- that 
part was easy.  Then the sysadmin, the guy who was supposed to learn all 
about phpBB and maintain the site, went AWOL.  The moderators don't do 
squat.  Shortly after it went live, we started getting pummeled with spam 
by robots exploiting the phpBB code.  I had to custom code the 'plant 
quiz' to keep the spambots out.


> They have 1000 members internationally and what appears to be a healthy 
> posting.

It's definitely not as healthy as the GSAS mailing lists, in terms of 
posting volume.

Thing about forum membership is it's grossly inflated.  1000 members 
means only that 1000 accounts have signed up in the 2+ years the site's 
been up.  People never get purged from that database.  The membership 
never goes DOWN.  It's fake.  Most of the other boards inflate it even 
further by counting the spambots and other 'unactivated' accounts.

>  I believe there is a kick-back-to-email system that posts as:
>
> "Someone on the Forum
> [AGA-Member]  RE: AGA 2007 Convention?"
>
> arrives in my inbox from time to time.

Yep, that was another thing I custom-added.  It was painful to do.  I 
found a phpBB package called "mail2forum" that does the re-mailing.  It's 
never been quite right.  It's buggy.  It doesn't do exactly what I'd like 
(such as put the actual person's name in the post).  It's probably got 
some security holes that haven't been exploited because no other forum 
really does this.  I dread the day I have to do a major upgrade on the AGA 
Forum, because I will have to re-merge all the custom packages and custom 
coding.

.. point being, I wouldn't do that horrible amount of work again for an 
audience of 100 people (current REAL readership of gsas-member).  The 
fellow 'macker' got it dead-on.

So maybe someone could set up GSAS as a sub-forum on a larger board... 
though my point about siphoning people away from the mailing list still 
stands.


Moving on to the current mailing list:

> At this moment in time it would appear that the post a picture to gsas 
> function is up.  (Can send a PDF follow (low res with link to higher?)).

Not sure what you're saying... I did not enable PDFs yet, just jpeg.  Do 
you want me to also add PDFs as acceptable attachments?

> I would like the ability to search the gsas-members archives from the 
> archive page as I often run queries of my local inbox before posting 
> here (ie dating the last time forums were mentioned on gsas-member or 
> -board) but this function is relatively unimportant.

Done!  I already have a search engine, and it was hooked up to look up 
things in the now-defunct apisto list.  Added the search box to the 
archive page and to www.gsas.org (and modified search.thekrib.com). It's 
rebuilding the database, should be done crawling the lists by tomorrow. 
Guess you'll get that extra "Google exposure" too, as people will now see 
gsas-member posts when they search at http://search.thekrib.com

One final thing about the mailing list and archives.  There may be other 
software out there that will display a mailing list in a more friendly
view.  I have every e-mail in its raw form, going all the way back to 
1999, so it may be possible to rebuild in a new archiver.

   - Erik


-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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