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.