Forum's Back-Up

[Darrel Taylor]

WooHoo! The forum's back up.
That always scares me when it happens.

Thank you Lester!
and Happy New Year.

[mackrackit]

Was the cat playing with the cord?

[lester]

Sorry guys, the DNS failed and the backup got a little lost up its own lookup table !

Anyway look out for something new in 2010, we'll move to Vbulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite for the PICBASIC forum.

Features...here (http://www.vbulletin.com/index.php?do=features#cms-features)

Screen shot (http://files.vbulletin.com/images/cart/screenshots/CMS_home.png) generic front page layout.

New forum format (http://files.vbulletin.com/images/cart/screenshots/forum_main.png)

New forum article features (http://files.vbulletin.com/images/cart/screenshots/vertical.png)

Comprehensive forum article entry (http://files.vbulletin.com/images/cart/screenshots/article_inline.png) forms

The downside is that it will require us to ask for some of you to contribute with articles and help moderate the new site.

Sites.picbasic.org didn't workout too well...hopefully VB4 will fair better!

[Acetronics2]

The downside is that it will require us to ask for some of you to contribute with articles !

Hi, Lester

Could you explain that a bit ??? ... I do not understand at all why ... Only for the new " article " features ???

Alain

[lester]

The downside is from the perspective of those that generally want to put in little but get a lot back.

We cannot expect the new system to work really well without user contributions of good articles.

Automated scraping of some web site will allow us to ensure that you see up to date content in respect of industry news and new devices etc, but user generated articles with well behaved moderators managing the site would generate a comprehensive resource.

Correctly cataloged Articles are by far the best way to archive the massive amount of information imparted by the users of this forum. Unfortunately the forum format does not provide the best platform for storage and retrival of consolidated information, though it does hold a lot of posts that provide invaluable information for both new and seasoned users.

If we make use of the features in VB4 and generate articles based on forum entries and even new articles instead of some forum entries, we'll end up with a better resource than the forum alone.

It's a self help forum, so although Crownhill is happy to invest the resources required to provide it. We rely on people like Melanie and Darrel to manage it and in future we will require users to generate articles and some other usres to assist in moderating and managing some of the new sections.

This resource will only ever be as good as the users allow it to be. The upgrade to VB4 will also bring other benifits in the way that we manage article presentation, anti spam etc.