Forum Status and Future Direction

G

Greg Amy

Administrator
I've been having emails conversations with the owner of this forum, Bill Sulouff. Many of you know Bill, he used to race VDubs in ITB. The topic of our conversations has been the future direction of this forum and how we were going to handle the ongoing invasion of spammers. We made a short-term change to the forum a few weeks ago by blocking new registrations, but obviously that's not a long-term growth strategy.

I offered to buy the domain name and take over the expenses and management of the forum, but Bill did not want to sell. However, he has offered that if we were to have a money drive and come up with the funds for it, he would upgrade the forum to the latest version of the software and give to me full administrative access to it. From there I can perform and/all management of it as well as distributing the administrative load.

An alternative offer was made to incorporate this forum as a sub-forum to "the brown board" (a.k.a., RRAX) but persons on both sides of the idea have some reservation (persons here did not like the brash nature of discussion there; persons there did not want to deal with the pedantics of the persons here). However, it is possible to create a discrete forum on that same physical location, but it would mean a complete break from the current forum and we would not have access to the host name of "improvedtouring.com".

Of course, one option is to just remain a close community with no new registrations, or re-open the registrations and deal with the spam. However, if you choose that last point - no changes but open registrations - I'm personally not going to take time deleting posts and banning users, and this place will revert into a spammer wasteland.

So I'd like to get some feedback from you, the participants of this forum, thoughts on where you'd like to see this place go. If you have other ideas, pass them along.

- GA
 
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It sure seems that most of the traffic is slowing down on this board as most have migrated to the brown board anyways. I see no reason to not have a sub-forum over "there".

I would think it would be cheaper to join forces than to pay for new software, etc
 
I would prefer to keep this site separate from others. It has its own identity, and even though it doesn't see the traffic some other sites do, the discussions here tend to be more relevant, and in most cases, more helpful than those on other boards. More civil too...most of the time.

I think Andy's question is a great one; if we could set it up so new registrations would require an admin's approval, that would be ideal. If not, I would be willing to chip in for the upgrade. How much $$$ would we need to raise?
 
Not on the Sandbox. That purpose is to be more of a closed environment and not on search engines whereas I'd hope this to be open to the public.

VB isn't that expensive. A new license is $249, an upgrade is $209.

VB does offer different ways to reduce spam such as the registration process. I started to incorporate a VB forum on my site, but never moved forward it for whatever reason. Can't even recall why any more.
 
stay here, do upgrade. get some paypal address and I'll send money. if 20 of us do that, we're golden. I think we can all list 20 people active here who could and should help.
 
Maybe that's the direction Bill needs to take. He's had several of us as moderators on here for many years now. It's not like we're talking about this massive forum where he's earning a significant amount of income.
 
Note part of the current idea from my post #1 is for us to fund the upgrades and I get full administrative control. Have no clue what I'm doing, but I'll have access to eff it all up.
 
Greg Amy said:
Not yet. Let's discuss this out first. I'd like to discuss this thoroughly before any money starts changing hands. - GA
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If the upgrade allows a new user registration process to be implemented, then it's easy-peasy. We pay and tGA does ALL the work. :happy204:
 
Not a fan of combining with the "other" site............... I think we would lose credibility.

Do the up grade. I will kick in money. :023:
 
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