Lots of snipping and paraphrasing....
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.
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...
In either case, a solution should be done in concert with the current
owner...
... more than just user and registration issues ...
... same post moments apart ... pressing the
"post" button (or equivalent) results in the system hanging.
Sometimes it
is also difficult to load forum pages.
...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.
.. doesn't appear to be any active administration ...
... 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
WOW, WHAT AN AWESOME STATEMENT STARTING HERE
...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.
I will see what the owner has to say.
--
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
My Book: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/oome.htm
Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
See Also: http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/index.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
