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Jaybro

Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
Topic Author's Original Post - May 18, 2019 - 07:37am PT
Before the lights go out, this seems like the place for someone to volunteer to, not exactly take over the same mantle / mental, ( mental?) but start a new one, somewhere else,perhaps on a subscription basis.
Anyone?

A bunch of us are over on Widefetish, but I don’t think that’s going to absorb this niche. Too specialized, perhaps too Wild West for the more sensitive Taco aggregation.

So this is the place for someone to announce a new Forum or suggest alternatives

Don’t be shy.
johntp

Trad climber
Punter, Little Rock
May 18, 2019 - 10:53am PT
Seems this is going in a lot of directions and too many threads diluting the effort.

Input from Chris and RJ might help us have a common focus.
splitclimber

climber
Sonoma County
May 18, 2019 - 10:59am PT
I'd be interested in taking part in a new forum that has a similar community. Not interested in whatever this Donald guy is trying to do.
johntp

Trad climber
Punter, Little Rock
May 18, 2019 - 11:06am PT
There are, or more correctly were, several people on ST that are more than capable of setting up an alternative forum. It's not expensive and can be done quickly.

When we embarked on that effort a few years ago (after the revelation that ST was reading our private messages) we were trying to correct some of the obvious problems with this place and I felt we were on the right path - but at that time ST was almost at it's peak in traffic and the effort to get people to come over was significant - in the end more than I personally wanted to take on. Folks like Steve Grossman were all like "but ST is and always will be THE repository for all this valuable info". I hope he's feeling stupid. This - the importance of preserving the historical archive - was the central issue we identified.

It doesn't have to be officially a 501x but could be run as a cooperative to avoid the sort of adversarial situation we have here. Fatty's assessment of the relevant management skills was on point, but of course that was censored. A registered non-profit is not a bad idea in the long-run - but I don't think the YCA could capture what this place is without it being a problem for them.

I do this stuff professionally - For what we are talking about it and the kind of traffic we're talking this is not a big spend or effort. Like any kind of half decent hosting at maybe $20-30 / month and volunteers to deploy whatever free forum software seems appropriate.

What's needed to make this work:

Enough people willing to signup and post to give it a bit of content momentum
Pledges for around $500 total for the first year of operation. First month start up costs are only around $100
A commitment from 1-2 content moderators (don't bother saying it's not needed, been there done that... you do)
At least one volunteer systems person who can handle the forum installation and configuration.
A person or people focused on how to make the forum pay for itself (ads, subscriptions, bake sales)
(optional) A design person who can give it an appropriate visual flavor.
(optional) Someone willing to build a mechanism for content authors to re-post content they'd previously posted here. They still own it and only they can "move" it, but a wee bit of code could make that easier.

If I have to... I am willing to project manage this and can be the systems person as long it's not eating too much time.

One could start with a survey or form to assess interest and/or get commitments? Happy to put one together.

That is the most logical post I've seen here. I'll throw $200 to get it going.
JLP

Social climber
The internet
May 18, 2019 - 11:29am PT
If you can't front $500 and just go make the thing happen, you're not the right guy.

No offense to the Fish, but if he can make a forum happen, then anyone can. It takes more than that to make one actually work.

The crux here is the forum needs a strong leader to replace CMac - moxy, a little history and someone who can gain respect from and tame assclowns like Fatty and Locker. Good luck.

IMO - you tech nerds should be contacting Russ to offer help with Wide Fetish. Free help. Somehow I trust his filtering to cut though all the good but otherwise completely useless intentions.
Bobbleseth

Trad climber
Utah
May 18, 2019 - 12:17pm PT

"and someone who can gain respect from and tame assclowns like Fatty and Locker. Good luck."...



Says the dude that want's everyone to FIT in the SQUARE hole...

and you're right...

GUD fuking luck "TAMING" anyone...


LOfukingL!!!...

;-)



JLP

Social climber
The internet
May 18, 2019 - 12:29pm PT
It's a mostly undeserved and awkward compliment to say this place went downhill after all you as#@&%es were expelled.

I think posting limits similar to MP.com - doled out by someone who commands more respect than RJ or Nick Wilder.

It's the only path to success, IMO.
Bobbleseth

Trad climber
Utah
May 18, 2019 - 12:33pm PT


"this place went downhill after all you as#@&%es were expelled."...

Yep...

:-)
Bobbleseth

Trad climber
Utah
May 18, 2019 - 12:39pm PT


"SHUT UP YOU ASSCLOWN !!!

RESPECT ME !!!!"
...



LMfukingAO!!!...


Poor JLP...

perswig

climber
May 18, 2019 - 12:46pm PT
"deerformed"

Someone had to say it.
('sup, Locker - hope you are well!)


Now that the lights are going out, maybe it's time to start actually climbing again. Cool.

Dale
Surfandstone

climber
May 18, 2019 - 01:11pm PT
I used to think ole JLP was a real piece of whiny shet.

Now, as we near the end, I understand his charm.

Nawmean?!?!

Cheers

DMT
Lynne Leichtfuss

Sport climber
moving thru
May 18, 2019 - 04:06pm PT
Jaybro, wish this could happen....somehow.
johntp

Trad climber
Punter, Little Rock
May 18, 2019 - 05:08pm PT
Jaybro, wish this could happen....somehow.

Lynne, et al. We need focus. It can happen. Just need to stop diluting the effort. Have one thread to keep this campfire burning.
i'm gumby dammit

Sport climber
da ow
May 19, 2019 - 12:06am PT
just curious as to what is the resistance to the obvious answer. (hint-google climbing forum). hell there's a large percentage of us that already have an account there if only for the buy/sell forum
NutAgain!

Trad climber
https://nutagain.org
May 19, 2019 - 10:00am PT
Cmac and RJ,

Would you be able to share how much storage space is consumed by the image hosting feature?

===
Following are my musings...

I suspect that a hosted service for $20-$30 per month is not sufficient to provide the required storage space and network throughput, but I may be wrong. That is the sort of thing that if not planned well, leads to poor performance, user frustration, and service abandonment.

If the site just provided support to link to external images, then the storage needs are very modest and the price seems reasonable. But then, the site doesn’t control its fate in terms of being a historical archive.

I think site-local storage of images should be supported for historical stuff, and rely on community participants to use that mechanism to share stuff deemed to be historical. Sometimes it’s just faster, more convenient, to embed links that display images. One challenge he that may arise over time is that conversations that seem to be casual and unimportant may over time take on new meaning and be co side red historical after the fact.

So a site built with archiving in mind needs a way to make it easy for people to embed links to images, but then have it converted to a locally cached image with updated image links... day-to-day still use the embedded links to external sites to save bandwidth and storage space, but have a way to flip a switch and keep the local cached version when the linked image fails.

That is custom development, and would be a cool addition to an open source forum like phpbb or simple machines forum. Maybe even a wordpress plugin for a forum to enable that to coexist cleanly with a form of historical curated articles, with automatic support for categories and tagging.
BooDawg

Social climber
Butterfly Town
May 19, 2019 - 12:23pm PT
I'm unsure of what your "obvious" answer is gumby, since I feel so dense, please be specific. Thanks.

If it's FB, despite my having both a personal and a biz account there, FB would own the content, and as I've said elsewhere, they are too big and greedy for both power and $$, and there are privacy issues; they already control other major social media sites; they resist oversight, etc., etc.

If you mean the widefetish, like John Gill said, that title and focus is too narrow for most climbers, but more importantly to me, when I checked it out, there were all sorts of personal attacks, profanity, and other disrespectful behavior that has been one of the downfalls of ST here.

The list of suggestions that was posted above has been deleted, so that's not easily accessible now.

One problem will be participation which might take some time to build, but we know what is said about Rome...

If nothing better and more community-minded and democracy-friendly appears, I'll post my content on my own website which I already do and place links to it wherever it seems appropriate, which I already do.

http://yosemitecloseup.com/stories/storytelling/

NutAgain!: How does your vision dovetail with mine?
jogill

climber
Colorado
May 19, 2019 - 02:45pm PT
Nothing's going to happen. Some will migrate to FB, some to a few other sites, others will forget about it and live their lives. RIP
Lynne Leichtfuss

Sport climber
moving thru
May 19, 2019 - 02:54pm PT
Oh, I don't know. That's what I love about life, behind each hedge or boulder lies a potential. I think someone may pull this off. But for the in between, I hope people merge to FB. The planet already knows about us, what we eat, drink, wear, believe.....I mean is anyone here so important that we will be tracked for our fame, fortune and favor. Not me. Hope to see you on FB until we find a better solution. Climbers don't give up.
Jaybro

Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
Topic Author's Reply - May 20, 2019 - 05:16am PT
Run with it, Nutagain! We’re behind you!

I just don’t have these skills or know what to look for in others that!
Gunkie

Trad climber
Valles Marineris
May 20, 2019 - 05:39am PT
Heck, I'd be happy to do this, but I'm swamped with business right now. I'm currently hosting a bunch of sites in the AWS/S3 realm. Easy to do and pretty darn inexpensive when no one likes you and no one visits your sites. However, at work, we leverage Databricks/Spark Apache in the AWS cloud and leverage many S3 buckets. My DevOps team ran up a bill for $12k last month and we're like in 10th place for team's DevOps bills in the company. What I'm saying is, costs can ramp up quickly depending on what features are leveraged.

AWS provides a TCO dashboard to show running costs. Maybe publish that and ask for donations to cover those costs?
Messages 1 - 20 of total 23 in this topic << First  |  < Previous  |  Show All  |  Next >  |  Last >>
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