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Re: [GSAS-board] GSAS Forum
I have been with the club now for almost 14 years now, and I agree with Erik!
-Don
Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com> wrote: Again, I'm not the one to ask or campaign to about these things. That
would be the board. I am telling you why *I* will not be responsible for
maintaining or archiving such a beast, based on direct experience doing just
that, maintaining and archiving a forum, with a national club.
And to borrow your radio analogy, radio is actually very good when you are
a person who doesn't have a lot of time to devote to sitting down and
watching lots of TV. It works in your car and while jogging. TV requires
too much direct attention. We've not been IGNORING forums, we've been
making a conscious decision not to do one since the last time it was
propped.
The reason you're going
to get way more information from plantedtank.net
than you are on GSAS, forum or not, is because there are a bazillion
people on that site. It is one of the two "established leaders" in the
space. Likewise, you're going to get more help on the GSAS mailing list
than you will at the AGA forum, because all the old timers don't like
using the forum, and all the new folks are off using the more popular
forums. But what's very nice about gsas-member is that folks like Dave
Sanford, who's been with the club for 25+ years, can chime in when he sees
something relevant.
- Erik
On Fri, 7 Mar 2008, Bryan Nichols wrote:
> Erik,
>
> I understand the security issues involved with a forum (studying these
> issues in school) however, I think the pros out weigh the cons. With the
> invisionfree forum maintenance is taken care of. They maintain the
> server, they keep patches up to date, they back
up the forums. The work
> is done for us.
>
> As I stated before, I would be willing to admin with the help of some
> other folks (such as Laurel) You wouldn't have to do anything :) As far
> as leaving the keys, it's not difficult to create an admin account for
> you or someone else if there ever came a time where I left or needed to
> retire. Keys are not an issue.
>
> Invisionfree does not allow personal backup of forums. They do that
> themselves.They are however, a reliable provider. My wife is part of a
> forum hosted on invisionfree and she has had zero problems. You can move
> the forum in the future if needed.
>
> I personally get a lot more out of The Planted Tank and Aquatic Plant
> Central than I do the club e-mail. I still enjoy the e-mails but I feel
> much more connected in those forums.
>
> Its not as tough anyone is required to join a
forum. I think that its
> clear some people that are part of the GSAS community think a forum
> would be beneficial. I feel as though other people who oppose a forum or
> aren't sure about one are yelling
>
> "Don't upgrade to television, the radio works fine!!"
>
> It just seems silly to totally ignore something that could be very
> beneficial to GSAS
>
> -Bryan Nichols
>
> Hi Bryan,
>
> Seriously, I understand it's very easy to set a forum up, and as the owner
> of the master DNS records for gsas.org, I could do any number of
> redirects, sub-domains, or other jiggery-pokery. The technical deployment
> was the easiest part of the AGA Forum when I did it 2 years ago. It took
> an hour to install phpBB on my Linux box and get it running. The problem
> comes AFTER that, when it has to be maintained, protected, backed up.
>
> I have seen way
too many folks come and go in these clubs, leaving behind
> their commitments for others to pick up. What happens when the person who
> enthusiastically set up the forum decides to bail on the club a few months
> later? The troubles in the past have been things like 'the librarian
> bailed, and he didn't make any copies of the keys. Now we have to drill
> out the lock.'
>
> My second concern with forums, is that unlike a simple set of HTML pages
> that comprise the mailing list archives, a forum is backed by an SQL
> database. Does invisionfree.com let you pack up the SQL of your forum if
> you want to move the database elsewhere? Are they a reliable provider?
>
> The upside of a 3rd party provider is that presumably they take care of
> spam bots, keeping the software up-to-date, and backups...one hopes.
>
> And finally, (and this is just on a personal level), I really really
don't
> enjoy using forums. I LIKE having the club messages delivered directly to
> my inbox as they happen, especially with the average of 3-6 posts per day
> that we get on gsas-member. I never miss a thing. If it shows up on a
> forum, I never see it unless I'm really bored and decide to check (this
> maybe comes around once a month or two).
>
> "Well," I hear you reply, "you can set up notification preferences so
> the forum will tell you that there have been posts on your preferred
> threads or topics!" Great. Now I can get an e-mail once a day reminding
> me to check the forum. Most of them won't even include the !*&@ text in
> the e-mail itself, which is all I really want to see. That isn't a real
> reason not to set a forum up for everyone else, but it's certainly one of
> those things that keeps me away from plantedtank.com,
> aquaticplantcentral.com and a myriad of
other places.
>
> If the board decides to go with it, they'll probably need someone (or more
> likely a TEAM) to run it...not me! And for now I will concentrate on
> serving the needs of the mailing list users (now that you guys are
> actually expressing them!). Just added Search to the archive tonight, and
> investigating alternate presentations of the archived messages.
>
> - Erik
>
> On Fri, 7 Mar 2008, Bryan Nichols wrote:
>
>> Hi Erik,
>>
>> Since you're in charge of the website I wanted to show you what I did in a couple of hours for a GSAS Forum.
>>
>> http://z9.invisionfree.com/GSAS/index.php?
>>
>> This is just a beta, everything isn't finalized but I think it turned out nicely don't you? Let me know what you think. I can set you up as a admin so you can take a look at how easy it is to manage.
>>
>> FYI: I turned
off the "require login to see site" so that you would have access without registering if you wanted. This feature would be nice to limit it to only GSAS members if we wanted.
>>
>> -Bryan Nichols
>>
>> p.s. we could even redirect this to say http://forum.GSAS.org if we setup the proper CNAME
>>
>>
>> ---------------------------------
>> Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.
>
> --
> Erik Olson
> erik at thekrib dot com
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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