Don't let forum & wiki die!

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calcetin
we'll need a private way to communicate with one another

That's the reprap-admin mailing list so far.

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Leaving the wiki open to registration is why y'all have this monster on your hands in the first place

Well, Wikipedia even allows to edit without registration and somehow they manage to deal with spammers.

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Is the server dedicated, or are there other sites running there?

It's a shared one. A plan to (additionally?) move to a dedicated one exists.

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For secure access to the server, how are we to get our ssh keys enabled without exposing the key?

It's the public part of the key which has to be transported, right? I see no threat, but perhaps you can enlighten me.

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And by the way, the idea of any mailing list is so freaking old and tired.

Maybe I'm old, too, but mailing lists are still the most convenient way of communications for me. Possibly, because my mail client works better than any web interface. Possibly, because automates like the server monitoring software send email, too.

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I won't visit any longer.

Too bad. Now all my answers are wasted.

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MattMoses
We should not try to solve too many problems at once

I agree. There's no reason to hurry and no need to catch up a year of lag within a week.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

calcetin Wrote:
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> The biggest problems in converting this POS
> software to something manageable, modern, and
> usable are the inertia from the
> whoever-they-are-right-now admins and the huge
> difficulty in converting posts and users from one
> database to another. Phorum is worthless as a
> large board goes. PhpBB3 is quite up to the task,
> but the job is a monster.

I would not bother converting the posts, otherwise it's like trying to run a race with lead boots on, and the boots get heavier each step.

Transfer the users to a new db, freeze the old forums as an archive. Most threads are a month or two old, quite quickly the new forums will be like nothing ever happened.

Searches may not find posts in the old forums, but google still will, and usually a better search engine than the forum search anyway. If really thought necessary, perhaps old posts can be imported into read-only archive folders in the new forums to allows searching. This could be done over time, instead of big bang approach.

Thanks, I didn't think that would be acceptable, but it makes the job much easier and cleaner.

I nominate you for the list!

Anyone with a good idea gets punished, as usual.

A few thoughts...

A forum to email (or most any communication platform) gateway is trivial to implement. People that have busy schedules need to have as many options as possible in planning and deployment. It allows for contact on a variety of devices over many different formats. I'm old school as well (first time on the Internet in 1989) and prefer to use email as a tool to manage communication for these sorts of projects. I won't be as presumptuous as to assume what works for me will work for everyone else and I think that others afford that same courtesy to those that prefer a different workflow.

I agree with bobc, archive the current threads, move the users (and perhaps create a few stubs of active existing threads) and be done with it. Allow the archive to be spidered by Google and Bing and you'll be OK.

I agree with Markus about not being overly ambitious. Set goals that can be achieved in short order, then move to the next. Define the areas in the most need and start there. There is a potential to focus more on the technology and mechanism rather than the task at hand. It's about the solution more than the technology.

Excellent. Another old fart like me...

Thanks you very much! That's the easiest way out for the server admins and practical!

You're on the list too!

Uhm. If you have a script to convert posts from Phorum to phpBB, what's the point of running it for a small number of posts, only?

BTW., a Phorum -> phpBB converter already exists: [www.phpbb.com] Likely it won't work without some tweaking, but the base work is already there.

Also, keeping old posts in Phorum requires to continue with running Phorum, which is pretty much the point we try to avoid, right?

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

The successful open source projects that I have been following have all seen major improvements in their web presence...

...I know this would be hard, but I think ideally that the RepRap website should be a mixture of phpBB3 for the forum software bridged with the wiki (which Calcetin has very kindly provided us with at metalbot.org and whom I can not hold in higher esteem) along with a joomla/wordpress main website home page to give the community a more integrated and modern feel.

There you could house the RepRap blog right in the center of the page with all of the relevant information pages and external links in a clean layout. It could be quite beautiful...

Case in point being DIYdrones.com... the main page has a beautiful blog in the center and plenty of relevant social information just ONE CLICK away. Their wiki is run by a group called the documentation editors who have editing privileges (removing the spam problem).

As it stands, I feel very little continuity here. The forum category page has a completely different look to the subforums. It looks like very little thought has been given to the home page layout

That being said, I have no clue how one would technically port over all the users from this forum software to phpBB3...

Once above has been implemented we will see a sharp uptick in participation.

$0.02

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bobc
Transfer the users to a new db, freeze the old forums as an archive. Most threads are a month or two old, quite quickly the new forums will be like nothing ever happened.

GIVE THIS MAN A BEER

Jethro.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/24/2013 08:31AM by Hazel1919.

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3D Metal Printing and more - visit [www.metalbot.org] !

Hazel1919 Wrote:
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> There you could house the RepRap blog right in the
> center of the page with all of the relevant
> information pages and external links in a clean
> layout. It could be quite beautiful...

I like this idea, similar to how a lot of tech sites work now. Have some sort of blog on the front page and portals to forum/wiki.

I wouldn't mind a forum migration either, although my view is skewed since I just started here. I'm so used to mobile apps changing their UI every second month, so you can throw whatever format you want at me and I'll still use it. I know there's a lot of users who don't think that way though, so I agree that the first thing is to figure out a format at the high level (NOT technologies) that best suit this community.

Also I will not volunteer as an admin in the foreseeable future because I'm trying to figure out a similar mess for another organization at the moment

I didn't know about the old (and Alpha) converter, but now I'll set up another test phorum and try the thing. I may ask people to sign up and post there so we can get an idea about how well it works.

Stay tuned. Tuesday I'll have a couple of hours to devote to this.

I fully understand the need to upgrade serverside, but can I ask that the appearance and navigation remains simple and
clean, without popups asking me if I need botox or something, cnczone is a good example of clutter, and please please please no social media, lets not go down the twatterbook road.

I fully realise that I am a dinosour and am most likely in a majority of one.

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Random Precision

johnrpm Wrote:
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> I fully understand the need to upgrade serverside,
> but can I ask that the appearance and navigation
> remains simple and
> clean, without popups asking me if I need botox or
> something, cnczone is a good example of clutter,
> and please please please no social media, lets not
> go down the twatterbook road.
>
> I fully realise that I am a dinosour and am most
> likely in a majority of one.

i stopped going to cnczone because the pages are painful to try and scroll through and find what you are looking for,
under chrome i find it's even worse

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-=( blog )=- -=( thingiverse )=- -=( 3Dindustries )=- -=( Aluhotend - mostly metal hotend)=--=( Facebook )=-

I an also an old school follower but the world is changing and certain segments will not be reached without the new social media integration.

HOWEVER I believe that the integration can be done in a delicate, non obtrusive way. I think one directional connection would be more than enough for the foreseeable future. A discreet button to help share posts and blog entries on facebook one day could be nice and bring new visitors.

Having short URLs is also very nice and pretty readable ones is also good idea. Do not put fixed text into the URL let the server figure out what application needs to deal with a URL. Use short sub-domain names (forum, wiki, blog) as before to keep things tidy.

An openID might be an option but I must say I do not use them much because I somewhat distrust all the major players and avoid their services when I can.

Having mailing lists is a well understood way of keeping people involved and used by many successful marketing campaigns and allows occasional push information. It would be prudent to limit posts to an edited page or two of the most popular/important happenings each month or fortnight.

I do not have regular time to offer just now but am happy to assist with occasional wiki editing and maintenance where I can.

I am glad all this has come about and the inertia if maintained will cause continued improvement.

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Kalle
--
Lahti, Finland
The only stable form of government is Open Source Government. - Kalle Pihlajasaari 2013

Last call for participation! So far I've received quite a number of offerings/votes, thanks a lot to all of them. There are only three votes for the person at the top of the list. You can vote with just the name you have in mind, without becoming admin of anything, of course.

I'll close the call on monday evening (european time) by publishing the results.

Here's the template for the PM again:

I'm interested in

[  ] forum administration (web page access)
[  ] wiki administration (web page access)
[  ] mailing list administration (web page access)
[  ] forum software administration/development (shell access)
[  ] wiki software administration/development (shell access)
[  ] mailing list software administration/development (shell access)
[  ] other tasks:

. . . . . . . . .

[  ] please hide the connection between these task(s) and my name in public

I think the best choice for this person at the top of the list would be:

. . . . . . . . .

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

As promised, here are the results:



Thanks to everyone for participating and cheers to the new volunteers!

The person at the top of the list is, well, me. Thank you for your confidence.

To Adrian and those already being admin: I'll mail the spreadsheet behind this PNG to reprap-admin in a minute.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

First a big thank you to all who volunteered, and - of course - to Traumflug for organizing this.

I shall give him root access to the server, and then we can take it from there.

My thanks again. I really do appreciate it.

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best wishes

Adrian

[reprap.org]
[reprapltd.com]

I am new to this forum, like it, and this thread is a bit discouraging. I was a programmer for 30+ years, now retired, so my skills are out of date.

One of calcetin's posts said he needed six weeks to convert from Phorum to another, maybe PhpBB3. I suspect he did not mean this forum would be down for six weeks. Perhaps most of the conversion could be done while this one operates. Use a database backup, let's say the backup started on Jan N, 20XX and completed some hours later. Once the new forum is running, without users, take this forum down, and apply updates to the new forum, basically an audit trail of activity on this forum starting from Jan N, 20XX until this forum is stopped. I am not familiar with forum software, but if this type of process can be done, downtime should be limited to a few hours.

I have participated in sever major software conversions. Doing it little by little always causes more problems than biting the bullet and doing a complete conversion. However, all conversions are painful. The best scenario is for one person, or a very small staff, to do the conversion. There should be several people responsible for testing and quality assurance/control. The unfortunate, but manageable, difficulty with having a quality staff is they deliver bad news to the person or people doing the work, and that can cause tempers to flair. Calcetin, or whoever does the conversion, should be involved in the design of test procedures; the reason for having tester/quality people is to efficiently help with the conversion and that requires coordination.

I imagine that most if not all the tester/quality people could be volunteers without any programming or forum admin training. Their task would be to insure that messages in forums and threads were accurately converted from one system to the other. In other words, they would need to long in to both forums, read messages, and perhaps post/edit a few messages.

The health of this site will not just be about a forum migration. This archaic image reprap holds needs to be shed and that means getting rid of the current home page. We need something very modern, much like the makerbot website with all of the latest functionality but with a blog in the middle.

I would also like to request that this site be more integrated... instead of being a patchwork of random layouts, keep the site banner on all pages (except perhaps the wiki), and stick with a recognizable pattern.

RepRap needs a better image.

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3D Metal Printing and more - visit [www.metalbot.org] !

Hazel1919 Wrote:
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> The health of this site will not just be about a
> forum migration. This archaic image reprap holds
> needs to be shed and that means getting rid of the
> current home page. We need something very modern,
> much like the makerbot website with all of the
> latest functionality but with a blog in the
> middle.


The comparison to Makerbot (or any other for profit site) I think is off the mark. Reprap is a community based project to further the development and use of machines that can self replicate. The self replicating part left the station a couple of generations ago as the requirements to build current designs outstrips the capability of the machine. That said though, the single most printed parts are indeed for building other printers. New printing sites may change that but for now other printers are what is printed the most from these sorts of machines at this level.

The core focus of the project is sharing ideas and support others in the quest to build and operate machines. The perceived image of the site in my opinion is inconsequential. This is an information site, not a marketing site. One of the issues I see with the current for profit sites is that they are meant to sell printers. And as well they should. However, this resource is more like a library rather than a store. More like a university than a mall. I agree that common nav elements and layouts, particularly in the Wiki ,will be beneficial to users, I caution against focusing on presentation while neglecting the core information. Some of the comments seem to be more about presentation rather than content. Content is king. Particularly for a resource such as this.

This is an information resource. As such I think the priority should be on the management of that information as a primary purpose in a manner that is relatively easy to use and easy to find current, relevant information.

... I've made this sort of 'migration' for the German RUG into a complete sub-forum last year with 'storing' the old threads into a sub-sub-forum as 'archive' and starting a new structure.

The new forum is running without referencing to the old threads, but someone interested in the old infos can search through ... but I'll bet nobody did this this year

So a complete new forum (even built on the old structure) will develop to a totally new basis in several weeks ... but I think, this has to come ...

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Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Very well put vegasloki... a bug bear I have had with this site from day one has been a lack of user friendliness. It took me a long time to figure out just how everything was laid out.

Information sites by their very nature should be well indexed with an identifiable structure, and I feel this is sometimes missing.

If you look at websites such as instructables, DIYDrones and Arduino they all have a clear stress simple 'almost' professional layout.

The RepRap home page in any case needs an overhaul. To pick up on your analogy, lets make this a neat university .

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I caution against focusing on presentation while neglecting the core information.

But it has been neglected, and works to make the content more accessible.

And sorry about the makerbot example, I am just slightly annoyed to see that it gets more traffic than RepRap.

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3D Metal Printing and more - visit [www.metalbot.org] !

VDX Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> The new forum is running without referencing to
> the old threads, but someone interested in the old
> infos can search through ... but I'll bet nobody
> did this this year

You lost.

> So a complete new forum (even built on the old
> structure) will develop to a totally new basis in
> several weeks ... but I think, this has to come
> ...

Do not throw away old wisdom. As reprap doesn't evolve on a straight line, it is often usefull to look up old postings. So one hasn't to reinvent the wheel ...

The treasure of reprap is the work of its early masters. To boldly go where no man ...

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Detlef

Excalibur Hotend

reprapclean32.png

reprapzone.blogspot.de

Quote
EdEarl
I have participated in sever major software conversions. Doing it little by little always causes more problems than biting the bullet and doing a complete conversion. However, all conversions are painful.

For obvious reasons, one piece of software, in this case the forum software, can't be changed "little by little". You have to do it all at once. The principle is simple (as you probably know): you exercise on a copy until you have a script that works flawlessly. Then you put down the original, run the script and get back up a few minutes to hours - depending on the script - later.

Actually, the forum software was updated a few weeks ago. People barely noticed it happen.

The other thing people are talking here about is a reorganisation of all the groups and the addition of (mostly spam fighting) features. I see no reason to not do this in small steps, like it was done over the last years (with exception of the german RUG). You can add groups, you can remove groups (by joining them with another one), that's all you need for changing/adjusting the organisation. Spam fighting measures have to be adjusted constantly, anyways.

Nevertheless it doesn't evade me, handling a pile of several years of discussions apparently looks like a huge burden to some. Getting "rid" of it somehow seems to appear as a relief, even if there are no real reasons. At least none I could find so far, databases handle a million messages just as fine as 20 of them.

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I imagine that most if not all the tester/quality people could be volunteers

You can test such a conversion exercise right now: [forums.reprap.org] Have fun

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Quote
Traumflug
The other thing people are talking here about is a reorganisation of all the groups and the addition of (mostly spam fighting) features. I see no reason to not do this in small steps, like it was done over the last years (with exception of the german RUG). You can add groups, you can remove groups (by joining them with another one), that's all you need for changing/adjusting the organisation. Spam fighting measures have to be adjusted constantly, anyways.

I agree with Traumflug that reorganization can be done in small steps; although, it sounds like a huge effort that will take some time, even if several people work on it. Moreover, reorganizing may confuse users, who might abandon this forum if they become frustrated. To avoid user frustration, they should be consulted and empowered about how the reorganization should occur. This process will require substantial communication and careful notification before changes occur.

One feature of this forum that I have not found is an Forum Announcements group (perhaps the information I have been looking for exists and being new I have not investigated fully). Threads in the announcements group should include at least some of the following, but not be limited them:
Forum Rules and Guidelines
Forum Etiquette
Banned Users
How to Contact an Administrator or Moderator
Spam Prevention Effort
Moderator Announcements
Administrator Announcements
Forum Reorganization
User Suggestions

All of the threads listed above, except User Suggestions, should be limited to read access except by moderators and administrators. BTW, I consider administrators those who maintain the forum software, and moderators those who interact with forum users, admonish users for not following the rules, ban users, and reorganize the groups. Perhaps other names are used on this forum.

BTW I notices that I may request to join a contributor group, but I can find nothing that explains what being a contributor means. Should I request to be a contributor? If so, why? This kind of information should be in the Forum Announcements group.

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One feature of this forum that I have not found is an Forum Announcements group

Here: [forums.reprap.org]

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I can find nothing that explains what being a contributor means

If you contribute something, you're a contributor. You already did with your postings. The wiki is open for everyone, too, just create an account and go ahead.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY