Wow Aaron,
Sorry to hear that. It has been great having the mail list mirror site.
I was using it almost exclusively, as it made following threads really easy compared to Emails or bundled emails.
And to have all the information stored was invaluable.
So is it over? Is there any way we can still keep it afloat?
Any Ideas... Donations, Ads, web help?
Whatever the outcome Aaron, thanks for your efforts in supporting OUR mog community.
Best to all
Tim
Mostly it would be helpful if I had some administrators well versed in drupal cms management, which is what drives the backend of the system. I simply need to "turn it on" again, (it's a virtual machine cluster) but I simply do not have the time to manage the user requests, and synchronize accounting between systems, keep plugin modules current, all sorts of other things.
Mostly it would be helpful if I had some administrators well versed in drupal cms management, which is what drives the backend of the system. I simply need to "turn it on" again, (it's a virtual machine cluster) but I simply do not have the time to manage the user requests, and synchronize accounting between systems, keep plugin modules current, all sorts of other things.
Most importantly I would like to say thanks for all the hard work that you have put into the Mog Message Exchange from the beginning. You really stepped up when another here today-gone tomorrow newbie was trying to pimp his own forum and threw down the gauntlet by saying that you couldn't integrate the mailing list and a forum. You managed to do that in a very seamless manner. I don't know how much work goes on behind the scenes but as a career geek but I can certainly guess it was not an easy task to create and maintain. Keeping up with security, modules and version updates on a system that has been customized is always a fun chore.
But I have to ask, why the change to Drupal? The forum based MME seems like a more straightforward and logical interface to the current mailing list and archives than a CMS. Although I prefer the mailing list for keeping up with the list, I often referred to the MME for topics that were in the near past as well as in the archives. I find the interface with Drupal a little funky and not as user friendly as the old MME. But you are the mad scientist on this experiment and if I can do anything to help, let me know.
The old site was based on phpbb 2.xx code, which is very old. There are a lot of documented exploits available for it and while I plugged as many as I could with customizations, I still had people performing buffer overruns, malicious content downloads (scripts that just would keep downloading to kill performance), sql insert attacks, and other nasty things that bored kids like to do to "hack" websites. Folks never saw anything wrong because I ran concurrent multiple copies of the db and website on a cluster of virtual servers. When one server went down, (or "bad") it automatically switched to a trusted copy. The frequency of this was increasing and I was tired of maintaining a dead source tree (since that was the last that the mail list mirroring code was stable on for that version of phpbb)
Drupal has almost the same sort of mail list integration with an active development community, and the way you integrate functionality through modules is much smarter, maintainable, and secure than hacking phpbb code together to accomplish the same thing.
I'm still convinced the drupal cms system is the way to go - but there just isn't enough inertia from users. I wanted to see more participation from forum members but instead all that happens is it becomes a fancy reader page for folks - that's fine but not my interest or intent.
I've easily got the computing resources to provide unified cms dedicated to unimogs. Terabytes of storage, and a lot of bandwidth - but I don't think the interest is there. Folks are pretty happy with eddie's email list, and as a little appendix off the benzworld forum so, I just don't see a sustained future with interesting content through the drupal cms for unimogs.
If I rounded up a number of creative folks - say people like truktor contributing photos, coach consolidating howto's and writeups into articles, other folks carving out their own project pages and contributing to an active non-mail list dependent community I would be very excited. I think there are a lot of folks out there who want to do it - I've seen people pitching their own idea of a community site to the folks on the mail list but it's met with a resounding "meh".
The day that we can get people contributing projects, news, and other content on a daily basis is the time that there's critical mass to do a forum like that. Benzworld has enough contributors right now, and only so many people to keep the pot stirring.
If you want to run it again but simpler? go back to phpbb and set it to NOT allow any new members by dissalowing any new members with the name ***** which of course means no one could join.
then to join.... they have to email to get permision and have one of use do it for them.
Been there done that. It totaly stopped all spam cause it was usable by select members only.
really sorry it got that way. Feel your pain. Till I did the above work around on the site I was Co-Admin on I was removing at least 500 spam messages an hour manually ontop of the thousands caught automatically.
If I rounded up a number of creative folks - say people like truktor contributing photos, coach consolidating howto's and writeups into articles, other folks carving out their own project pages and contributing to an active non-mail list dependent community I would be very excited. I think there are a lot of folks out there who want to do it - I've seen people pitching their own idea of a community site to the folks on the mail list but it's met with a resounding "meh".
The day that we can get people contributing projects, news, and other content on a daily basis is the time that there's critical mass to do a forum like that. Benzworld has enough contributors right now, and only so many people to keep the pot stirring.
Hi Aaron,
Firstly, a big vote of thanks for the support that you give the community. For people half a world away, Forums like these are the only way to learn and participate.
I expect that there are many who could and do contribute to articles but projects can take a long time and so they make for a fractured topic. All the forums also act as a conversational link between groups of locals and in that sense there are always locations that are on the outside of the conversation in place.
My camper project is progressing slowly but the build phase is a yawn to most, my MOG is running well and there aren't any more changes planned. Worthwhile aspects of the MOG restoration were placed on the Forums as was all the myriad of camper design questions. I'm at that phase where I have little to contribute but that doesn't mean that I don't visit almost daily.
I think that the two forums / lists are essential as, at the risk of offending someone, they seem to cater to two different groups. As an Auslander, Benzworld has an American flavour whilst the list/MME seems more European in content. In essence, the community would be the poorer without both.
What's the status of ALL the old archives ?!?! It would be unconscionable to loose them ! The above link only goes back to 2004.
X2! IIRC The archives went back as far as 1998 (maybe further?) and are no longer accessible. The wealth of knowledge there should not be lost, and the ability to do a keyword search of the archives would be invaluable.
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