Forum Status and Future Direction

[Greg Amy]

Really? Only half way? I would have guessed we'd be way ahead by now...

No, what I said at the time was "we easily met the halfway mark" which was Mr Webmaster's benchmark before he'd begin committing the time and money for the upgrade.

I had a brief email exchange with him last night, and we've met our funding goals, with enough left over to cover operating costs. Thanks to everyone! Mr Webmaster has purchased the software and is beginning the planning process for the upgrade; he assures me that he's done several of these and is well-versed on the process. We have no schedule yet, but once something is nailed down I'll let you know when.

There will be one maintenance task that I'll need help on. If you go to the user list you'll see that we have something like 15,000 registered users, the vast majority of which have no posts. In addition, you can usually pick out the spammers, which have random characters or obvious advertising in their userID (e.g., "All AmericanStorage" and "plquumber5f"). We'll need to prune all those outta there. No way one person can do it. So at some point I'll be asking the current admin staff to clean these up on a regular basis (no rush, long term process) and ask if anyone else wishes to help.

I'm also likely to purge out old classified ads, ones that have been inactive for over a year or so, clean up the database.

Other than that, we'll get upgraded, add in some challenges to reduce spammers, and move forward.

Greg

Edit: Although we made our 2014 funding goal, please do not hesitate to donate if you've been procrastinating. 100% of that you send, no matter how large or small, goes toward current and future costs of the forum, and is sincerely appreciated. Mr Webmaster is hosting and doing all the work himself without charge, and your administrator staff here is all voluntary.