Merging the SBSA & SCPA discussion boards

[secretary]

I propose to the SCPA members that we offer to link the SBSA web site to our discussion board.

You can vote on this item if you are logged in, and anyone can comment.

We seem to all share the spirit of having healthy relations between HG and PG pilots, and the SBSA. I realize the SCPA is a club made up of mostly paraglider pilots. However, I think sharing a bulletin board is a good idea. It seems redundant that we post to 2 boards when we all fly together with Hammer and the rest of the divers. We could put an SBSA logo and a link back to the SBSA web site at the top of the discussion board. This seems like a great way of bringing the clubs together, while continuing to let us have our meetings and business on our own terms.

Posted on behalf of SA by SD

This Poll is scheduled configure to be open for last 31 days to give everyone time to ponder. The minimum notification time for an item of substance is 14 days as per association bylaws (http://scpa.info/bylaws/current/set.htm ). The next general membership meeting is schedule for the 28th, but I don’t think anyone is enforcing the math.

[oj]

I'm wondering if merging with them will bring their problems to our table. They get LOTS of spam posts for all kinds of stuff, and from what I've seen, they don't do much to clean it up or prevent it from happening again. As it stands now, the SCPA page has a cleaner look and is better maintained than the SBSA. I guess I need a better explanation of what this merger would do for us.

[SA]

I want to be clear that my suggestion was to simply put a link on the SBSA web site which goes to this forum, and to put their logo in the top right corner of the page. Nothing needs to change on the current SCPA bulletin board at all. The SBSA would just abandon its forum, and pilots would all post to one board since we are all one flying community. Chris and SD have done a fine job setting up this forum. We aren't going to invite any more spammers just by letting the SBSA link up. This is why we require members to log in unlike the SBSA forum, which runs the same program as our old set up. I am in charge of the SBSA web site, and I was in the process of trying to set up the SBSA web site to be the same type of forum the SCPA has going, and it occurred to me how redundant it is for our community to have 2 boards.

Pretty simple stuff. Do we invite the SCPA to linkup or not. If you think this is a good idea select the first option in the poll. I don’t think most people really care what version of front page we use, or if we use sharepoint services. That is the sort of decision we should let the moderator's decide on since they are the ones having to do all the work on the web site. I'm not sure it belongs in the poll, or if most people will even know what it means.

The simple question is do you think we should invite the SBSA to begin using the SCPA board and abandon theirs. As I stated earlier having 2 boards seems very redundant. If you think it’s a good idea click the merge option even though it’s not technically a merge of any software or services. It would simply pull the plug on SBSA’s spam ridden forum, and instead have their forum link go to the existing SCPA forum. The SBSA’s forum has been hit hard with spam because it’s an older program with no log in required. Please don’t think that their spam problem is going to infect the SCPA forum. The SCPA switched from the old program for the same reason…spam sucks. Seems like we should all be able to share what goes on together as one community on one board.

All the best, SA

[Chris G]

I'm voting for the merge but if we do it I'll set up 2 more forums. The General Discussion, Flight Discussion, and For Sale sections will remain the same and shared but I'll add a section for SCPA Business and SBSA Business to keep our business, meetings, minutes, club announcements etc separate but available for all to read.

Our system is good and should be unaffected by the merger other than more users in the memberlist. The requirement for registration, email verification etc will remain to eliminate the spammers. I still have to nix the occasional bogus account but nothing as dramatic as what is going on at the SBSA site.

If I remember this is all hosted by Crystaltech on Truax's account. Is the SCPA contributing to the hosting fees? Would the SBSA be willing to split those fees with us? If so it would save both our clubs a little money.

We'll also add SA as a Moderator so that the SBSA has a way to manage their forum topics and doesn't overload the SCPA moderators..;)

[Aaron]

This is a great idea to merge forums for many reasons! I am no longer a board member on SBSA but splitting the fees might be negotiable. However, SBSA does pay for Debbie and the insurance on all of our insured local sites which is a huge contribution to the entire flying communtiy. I know SCPA does its share of flight community service too, but i guess that can all be discussed between the boards.

P.S. Sweet Forum!

aaron

[dbld]

not sure how to reply to this. i'm pretty conservative so am not so hot on changes. the problem with the sbsa forum is that spammers get on unrestricted forums and post their links. that is a problem. we need to solve that problem. i like the idea of merging clubs/forums. i don't like the idea of abandoning the sbsa forum. it is easy. you don't have to be a member, sign on, jump through hoops..... the scpa has emoticons whatever. i will go with the flow and vote with the majority, if i knew how to get to the vote part??

[Tony DG]

I have mixed feelings about the idea. Initially I thought sure, why not, but after some thought I'm not sure. In a way I think what has been going on has been cool. Two sites. Many pilots read both sites. Myself and Anne-Odile have been reading SCPA for a long time. We don't post much but enjoy reading about other people's flights. I do like having our own SBSA sight. Of course I will go with the flow but I would like two sites.

I kind of compare the two sites to surfing and long boarding. Sure, I will read about both but enjoy reading about surfing more even though I do both. I'm sure the paraglider pilots enjoy reading about our flights as hang glider pilots as well but in the end prefer reading about their own wings and their flights for the most part. Nothing wrong with that at all.

I don't see why we can't have two forum sites and two flight clubs and be connected in our love of flying and take care of our flying sites togethor when we need to.

I'm just wondering how difficult and expensive it would be to set up a site like SCPA has or what our other options are.

[Chris G]

Setting up a site like this one for the SBSA is really easy.

Would it go down smoother if we merged the forums but still had separate topic areas for SBSA Flight Discussion, and General Discussion?

[secretary]

As currently configured, anyone can post. You don’t need to register or logon to post or reply to articles. You do need to register and login in to utilize enhanced functionality like editing you own postings, participating in polls, tracking which articles you’ve read and which are new, ect.

Registration is pretty simple and fast. Anyone can register. Confirmation is automatic via immediate email, so it is possible for someone to register a bogus account, but we aren’t a bank protecting everyone’s trade secrets. Enhance functionality can’t work if the program can’t identify your activity. Example, unlike American Idol, you can only vote once in a poll, and only you can edit an article you posted.

There has been some discussion about requiring logon to reduce spam, but we prefer to permit casual participation without logon for a number of reasons. We currently deal with spam by quickly weeding it out. We currently have 3 moderators, and that seems to work for now. If the spam becomes excessive, then we may choose to revisit our choice of permitting anonymous posting.

The PHP BB program has tools to automatically filter out keywords. We configured the filter to replace obviously offensive words with a placeholder.

As a side note, you can also edit the spam out of FrontPage articles, but the tool box for doing so is not as user friendly. We have always needed to trim spam, but perhaps more so now.

This article was posted to clarify some of the misconceptions listed in responses to the parent posting.

[secretary]

I will attempt to refrain from lobbying the options, but will offer technical support to which ever option our pilot community chooses.

Should the SBSA & SCPA choose to merge the discussion, we could include the SBSA logo and links back to the SBSA web page. We could also have separate discussion headings for SBSA association business, but subjectively, I think a single business heading is adequate because there isn't much business.

Technical issues:

Microsoft FrontPage is the current WISWIG html authoring program utilized to create, maintain, and publish the SBSA and SCPA web sites. Professional web developers that employ advanced techniques don’t use FrontPage for a number of reasons, but it is a leading program used by non professional website administrators due to it’s quick learning curve, packaged solutions, and server configuration support.

New things typically address some issues, but don’t necessarily make everything better. This is the case with the FrontPage 2002 server extensions. The FrontPage discussion forum works better when running on the 2000 extensions. When running on a server with the 2002 extensions configured, you can’t insert line breaks, so everything runs together. Since Microsoft has been aware of the of this deficiency for a number of years, it appears they have abandoned their efforts with the FrontPage discussion forums and are focusing their efforts on other programs (that offer more revenue opportunity) for business project collaboration requiring more capability like Share Point.

The SCPA is now using the current leading open source Bulletin Board application, phpBB ( http://www.phpbb.com ), which offers a number of advantages over the FrontPage forum like: registered authors can edit their own postings, and polling. There are other features like an address book that we haven’t implemented (we are currently using Bob's Book as our official address book). We are running a fairly current version of phpBB, but not the most current due to limited admin resources.

I don’t know if you can have 2 separate phpBB discussion programs running on separate servers utilizing a single data base, but I suspect it would be non standard setup.

We could could modify the the current discussion board home page to display both club logos and links back to the respective websites. We can also include discussion headings for separate club business. I would like to say that we could do this by committee, but Chris Grantham is our current PHP admin resource, so we need to rely on his subjective artistic expertise.

We can give moderator and or admin permission to SBSA volunteers (the SCPA currently has 3, but there is no mechanical limit).

We can also offer support and assistance to the SBSA if they choose to set up their own independent phpBB discussion page running on their own hosting plan.

There are some advantages to running a FrontPage web site on Windows servers. The FrontPage extensions can be installed on Linux servers, but there is some loss of functionality, particularly with server side operating system user authentication. (I don't think phpBB uses the server OS authentication. I think it authenticates off it's own data base, so the above issue is probably moot.)

The SCPA has gone through a number of discussion board iterations and various hosting providers. Our current hosting provider (since January 2006) is http://crystaltech.com . We need at least 1 data base to run phpBB, so we are on the Personal/Business Intermediate hosting plan. The monthly fee is about $9. You can find hosting providers for less, but admin cost are far more than the hosting fees. The hosting fee is currently charged to my credit card yearly. I've been meaning to bill the SCPA, but it hasn't bubbled to the top of my priority list.

I originally purchased and administered the SBSA domain name, but transferred ownership to Gilbert years ago. I presume someone out there has the current admin info.

[Chris G]

Actually I just recently kicked on the requirement for login before posting. We were getting some annoying spam that typically I nailed down before anyone saw it but it was still a hassle. We've had no spam since I turned on the login requirement for posting. The registration process is pretty painless so it's not that big a deal.

[Chris G]

This is a pretty minor issue but for technical reasons it'll be easier for me to add both logos on the left side of the page heading rather than having one on the left and one of the right. I'll stack them on the left side.

Also, I haven't upgraded to the very latest PHPBB2 software because of the mods for threads, attachments, etc we have installed. Next time I get an hour or two and feel like doing something mind-numbing I'll sort it out and apply the update.

[Ramey]

For me its all about diminishing the amount of duplicated work.

This forum is a much more modern version of the one we've been using. Chris seems willing to invest the effort to configure it to our taste and to do any required maintanence. So I think we should do the following as a first step.

a) Ask Chris to make a few tweaks. Currently there are 3 forums here - flight discussion, gear for sale, and general. These could be left the same or augmented slightly to accmodate those worried about group identity. These could be: flight discussion, gear for sale, SCPA Business and Activities, SBSA Business and Activities.

b) Our current SBSA web page - still the very nice original design by Aaron opens up other web pages in a separate frame. The SBSA navigation pane shows up on the left. Hence, though I maintain the current address list on my personal/business website, it seems to be part of the SBSA website because it appears as a page within the overall SBSA frame. The same thing can be done with the forum.

Result of this would be

a) each site SBSA.INFO and SCPA.INFO would retain their current individual characters.
b) maintence effort would be halved.
c) SBSA wouldn't have to fix the spam problem and get a very slick forum
d) Its a very easy fix to make as far as the SBSA is concerned.

So as far as I'm concerned its a no brainer.

Robert Ramey

P.S. Personally, I hate emoticons

[Ramey]

Since the issue has been raised - might as well consider ALL the options.

a) I believe it might be possible to host both sites at the same location for one single fee. Even though each one would have its own domain name. I suppose it depends on the policy of the host provider.

b) This forum is a very nice and complete setup. I would expect that it could/should replace the "address book" that I run on my machine. That would consolidate all the hassle in one single place. My current implementation is more "plain vanilla" but pretty much bullet proof - but since this forum can gather the same information and has a better login control it would be a better solution.

Robert Ramey

[Bo]

I like having two forums. It's no big deal to post to both if you need to. It's as simple as command copy, command paste (at least on a mac).

I read both forums and have really grown to enjoy both and both clubs, each having there own flavor. It's kind of like the talk on the radio - chatter or no chatter. If I'm in a certain mood, I'll tune into 144.250 and kind of know what to expect. But when I want something different, I'll switch to 146.460 or 145.555 or the altogether secret one.

I think the seperate forums allows for certain characteristics that make up this unique community, somewhat divided, somewhat together, always interesting. There can be a thread I don't get into, that sometimes goes for weeks. Maybe I'll try to avoid the whole thing all together and it's nice to have another local option.

I vote for keeping them seperate for the variety and flavor.