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Re: [GSAS-board] GSAS Forum
Don:
I have been with the club for barely any time at all and I agree with Eric!
It is my opinion that we are a little too local with too few members to support
a self sufficient forum. I will do a little recon during dinner in the
unlikely event there is a lull in the action with our speaker.
-Paul
On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, DonaldR wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>> ---------------------------------
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>> now.
>
> --
> Erik Olson
> erik at thekrib dot com
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>
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