Andrew Douglas Pitonyak wrote:
Harold Fuchs wrote:
Following a spate of e-mails to this list from users having problems
registering with the OO web-forums, I just sent the following message
to the
Site Feedback section of the web-forum at www.oooforum.org
<snip...>
I believe the following to be true:
* The forum is owned by a single individual.
* The owner is the only administrator
* The owner is somehow in the hosting business
* The owner covers all costs associated with the forum
* The owner is typically very busy and therefore response times are slow.
* Extra administrators were discussed and agreed upon and then it just
never happened.
<snip>
The OOo community has two options.
1. Accept it and move on.
2. Formulate a plan to move the forum to new systems.
1 is easy, 2 is obviously more difficult. I could outline some of what
would need to be done to make this happen, but in either case,
coordination with the current owner should be done. If I started it, I
would have a strong emotional attachment to the ownership.
Then again, I might be completely wrong on all accounts. For the most
part, I have simply accepted this situation and tell the users "sorry,
but nothing can be done of which I am aware" and then I post a message
to the moderator mailing list and then life moves on.
I also know that a change was put in place, which seems to indicate that
there are other administrators, to reduce SPAM on the forum. So,
obviously I am not as well informed as I might like.
--
Andrew Pitonyak
It's worth noting, in this context, that the difficulties experienced by
registrants are not the only administrative shortcomings.
Last night I found that two posters to Macros & API had made the same post
twice. Each second post was lodged within a minute of the first. From my
own experience I believe that occurred because of the fact that pressing the
"post" button (or equivalent) results in the system hanging. Sometimes it
is also difficult to load forum pages.
The forum has these performance issues. There is a related problem. A
substantial percentage of subscribers are not genuine. They are identities
which have been registered for the sole purpose of obtaining a page listing
which is counted by search engines such as Google. I understand that the
burdens imposed by these registrations could be eliminated by a purge and
prevented by additional registration safeguards.
There is no apparent backup of the forum database. This has led to one user
preparing a backup himself.
It is unsatisfactory to have such a valuable resource, in effect
unadministered. I am for biting the bullet and putting these difficulties
behind us.
I am one of active users on this forum, and we do have an active
community of moderators and advocates supporting the forum, who are
collectively concerned about the situation. However as Andrew P says,
our challenge is that the owner of the site hosts it within a small
hosting business that he runs, and he also owns the oooforum.org and
oooforum.com domains. He used to be active in the OOo community until
a couple years ago when he seems to have moved interests elsewhere.
Certainly over the last last year, he has only posted to the forum
twice. He doesn't respond to constructive emails, and doesn't appear to
do any active administration of the site. We have suggested that he
grant one or more of the advocates/moderators who have the appropriate
professional experience admin access to the site (which doesn't even
require root privilege on the server) so that we can do essential
maintenance and fix some of these issues -- but no response. We just
seem to be the subject of an experiment to see how long an active forum
can survive with true zero-maintenance.
I am concerned that he might just decide to shut down the site entirely,
with the loss of the knowledge base that was been build up over the last
4 years, hence my decision to write a Perl bot to capture the site
contents for DR reasons. However, whilst this is an undesirable state
of affairs, I think that it is still better than the confusion that
would occur if we created a breakaway forum. What we would all prefer
is for a constructive dialogue with the current owner either to allow
active administration by one of us as a designated administrator or to
cooperate with the orderly transfer of the domain and database to
someone who is willing to support and sponsor the community. A number
of us have offered to do this.
Terry Ellison
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