Re: [GSAS-Member] GSAS Forum?

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Replying to the massive thread after being in meetings all morning... I'm 
a bit loopy, pardon me.

There have been discussions before about having a GSAS forum.  One member 
even went so far as to set one up before asking the board if it was OK. 
Because it's really easy to SET UP a forum.  The difficulty comes 
afterward.

Matt and others are spot-on in the analysis, in my opinion.

A few reasons not to do it include: liability, higher degree of 
management, and drops in participation.

Forums are much more visible targets for spammers and hackers. 
Standardized boards like phpBB and vBulletin get boatloads of robot posts, 
because they are so ubiquitous.  You have to install special CAPTCHAs, or 
constantly police all the messages and weed out the spam.  You have to 
continually upgrade the forum software to the latest patches.  You have to 
have moderators and administrators.  You have to back up the database and 
migrate it as the software changes.  Or you pay a hosting service to do 
this for you, and trust that they will do it properly.  And Matt is right 
that if you shut down the forum, you lose the archives.

Contrast this to our list, which does have an archive at 
http://lists.thekrib.com/gsas-member which is just regular static HTML 
files and can be copied onto a disk (it goes on the DVD-ROM's I give to the 
board every year), moved, whatever.  We even archive the image 
attachments, you can view the posts by thread, and the sucker is 
searchable.  There has basically been zero spam on the list in years.  We 
haven't needed moderators beyond the occasional oversize post.  It's very 
low maintenance.


Then you have the drop in participation.  Most clubs I know of that went 
to a forum experienced a drop, not an increase, in member participation. 
This is because most people who subscribe to a forum do NOT set up all the 
extra subscription cruft to get notified of new posts.  And even when they 
do manage to, the e-mail usually just gives you the subject lines of the 
threads, not any of the actual posts.  So you have to click on the links 
to actually see anything.


Other issues brought up: Bandwidth is not a big concern -- we've got 
plenty on the server I use.

RSS feeds -- the couple forums I've played with thus far have been 
dreadful, but I cannot tell if that's user error.  I'm hopeful that the 
phpBB SmartFeed plug-in will do a good job.


I'm not entirely speaking from theory. In 2005, due to another of those 
"mandates", I set up a forum for the Aquatic Gardeners Association.  We 
had a big list of moderators and a system admin (not me), most of whom 
immediately bailed after we set the thing up, leaving guess who as the 
admin.  I went through great pain to set up an e-mail digest of the forum 
posts, yet almost nobody ever bothered to subscribe to the service, even 
the purported moderators and most of the AGA board.  As a result, what was 
previously a low-volume e-mail list turned into a low-volume forum.  We 
also got spam daily, the only way to thwart it was to put a custom 
registration CAPTCHAs that required you to identify photos as being aquatic 
plants or not before you could register.  Now with phpBB 3.0 that plug-in 
no longer works, and we're back to combating the daily spam posts until I 
can engineer something better.


So no, from an IT perspective, I'd rather keep the system we've got. 
Yeah, it's not ideal for everyone, and you sometimes have to filter 
through a bit much on heavy days light today.  But you could always read 
them through the archive like Roy does, or get the digest.  If we need to 
up the attachment limit, that's cool too.

  - Erik

--
Erik Olson                                                        Sent from my 
crusty old Linux box
erik at thekrib dot com
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