Auroraclubna.com possible temp outages

[Aurora40]

letitroll98 said:

aurora5000 said:

I think we need to exhibit faith and trust in our Administrator and Moderator. WE do not OWN this forum, we are members of the forum. I think that Jim and Bob do a great job. Keep up the good work.

Well who does own it if we don't? It would be news to me if the contributing members don't have a stake in what goes on. And who said Jim and Bob and the other admins don't do a great job?

I and others disagree with Mike's generous proposal of a new forum. I've tried to express this as nicely as I can as no one can fault him for doing extra work gratis. And I'm way too old to have blind faith and trust in anyone, so I will continue to express my opinion as I see fit thank you very much.

Hey Steve,

I appreciate the vote of confidence! However, I would also say you all have an ownership in the board. No forum has any value without good contributing membership. You all are what makes the forum work.

I guess I'll have to toss my opinion out there now. I feel the same as Dan does. Our previous jaunt to a new forum didn't go very well. Part of it was that the hosting company wasnt' good. But that's not all of it. It started out working great, yet many members didn't migrate over. And when it conked out, I bet many didn't migrate back.

My view of our group is that everyone is happy and contributing as long as it's easy and enjoyable to do so, but that any impediments tend to be more than many members are willing to work around. You can see that in the very low turnout in polls on the board, the low readership of forum announcements, the lack of participation in the gallery on v2, the lack of turnout at events, etc.

In my opinion, keeping it simple and easy is the best bet for high contributing membership. There is a year and a halfs worth of info at Proboards, the forum is familiar and has a good flow. It's free, Proboards is expanding so they are unlikely to stop offering the service in the near future. And it's gotten much much better than back in the days we were contemplating v2.

If we want to set up a club type site to compliment this forum, that might be neat. I suspect, though, that in spite of the best of intentions, it will be underutilized and underbrowsed. But at least it won't have any bad side effects like losing members, etc.

I think some of the animosity might be because of how out-of-the-blue this was. It was the same way for me. I didn't know anything about anything until this thread was posted up. But I can say that it isn't my or other staff members' intentions to force anything on the membership. Like Scott pointed out, we recently unanimously voted not to pursue any sort of move from Proboards. It would be stupid of us to ignore that. I hope this eases any concerns over this,

Bob

[omegaic]

I can never figure out why people are always trying to shoot themselves in the foot. I like to think that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It amazes me that someone would consider changing this board. There is so much history and information here. We built ourselves a library of help and memories, it is a testament to the people who contribute. I think our goal is to be as self-sufficient as possible. No offense, but if Apocalypse gets pissed off with ACNA or dies in a horrible accident or something...where will that leave the rest of us? Just my opinion.

[Superdemon]

I knew there was going to be trouble by even suggesting a new forum but I take offence to anyone questioning my motives. I simply got a new plan with my hosting company and decided to donate my extra bandwidth, storage space and, most importantly, my limited personal time. At this point I am considering abandoning the project. It takes a lot of time to set up a forum. I have over 6 hours of work into this new forum already. If this is going to be the overall outlook on my work I discontinue all of my current ACNA projects and accept that I have wasted my time.

Remember it is not up to me as to weather or not the beta forum that I have created is used it is up to YOU. There will be a PUBLIC vote as to which forum is used. Vote the way you feel when the time has come.

Mike

[Letitroll98]

but I take offence to anyone questioning my motives

As well you should. Even though I strongly disagree with this project I sincerely hope I made no personal affront to you or your motives. There's just no way to say "I don't like your work" without offending, but once again, sorry for the negativity.

At this point I am considering abandoning the project.

Yes, I think you should.

If this is going to be the overall outlook on my work I discontinue all of my current ACNA projects and accept that I have wasted my time.

Please don't take offense, but perhaps you should have asked before doing the six hours of work. I like the idea of the extra domain names redirecting search engine results to us and have been asking for same for awhile. Maybe that would have been a good starting point.

Remember it is not up to me as to weather or not the beta forum that I have created is used it is up to YOU. There will be a PUBLIC vote as to which forum is used. Vote the way you feel when the time has come.

I respectfully suggest there won't be a vote as there already has been an unanimous one very recently. I don't think you were around for our suare into v2 and all the bitter feelings, arguments, blame games, and lost members from same. For my part I hope you don't take this negatively and continue working on ANCA projects, we need enthusiasm like yours.



On a side note, I now have major problems logging into and maintaining my password and login ID. It keeps saying it's been changed to all small case or directing me to an error page. Having not had any problems of this nature since we've been back to proboards, I assume it's from these wonderful new redirects?

[Superdemon]

Very well. All current work has been stopped and will be deleted. While my redirecting has no effect on anyone's ability to log in to this forum I am also going to remove the redirect to this forum from auroraforums.com I will not be the whipping boy for some people's inablity to operate their own computers.

For the record I was around for V2 and I took it in stride. I have been a member here for nearly a year now. I thought the people I was dealing with had more open minds but it seems I was wrong. Best of luck to you all, I think I will go back to lurking.

Mike

[Aurora40]

apocalypse said:

Very well. All current work has been stopped and will be deleted. While my redirecting has no effect on anyone's ability to log in to this forum I am also going to remove the redirect to this forum from auroraforums.com I will not be the whipping boy for some people's inablity to operate their own computers.

For the record I was around for V2 and I took it in stride. I have been a member here for nearly a year now. I thought the people I was dealing with had more open minds but it seems I was wrong. Best of luck to you all, I think I will go back to lurking.

Mike

Mike, I don't think you should take it personally. It's really not a matter of whether it's a good board, good content, flashy graphics, or a reliable host. It's a matter of people being content here and not wanting to move. The board here works. From v2 it was apparent that forum features, galleries, etc are not what the members in general care about. They were hardly used at all. All that happened was converastion as usual, and lots of inquiring about how to transfer the ProBoards data, a problem not easily solved.

As to redirects, it's your registration so do with it what you will. However, any cookie problems people have had can be easily solved by using the same url they always have. There's no reason to use auroraforums.com instead of aurorah.proboards47.com. The only goal of that was to make the site more obvious to people who aren't aware of it.

I wouldn't say people are closed-minded just because they don't want to move boards. If they aren't technical enough to know the difference between your site, ProBoards, and the v2, then you should either try to educate them as to why it's better, or accept their opinion for what it is. You can't expect them to either learn everything there is to know about web hosting, or blindly accept that you know better than them.

ProBoards works. It does everything most of us want it to. So don't take it personally. You could make the most amazing, content and graphic filled site that is 100% reliable. The thing is, if it does things no one needs, and ProBoards works fine, why make the move? I'm sorry if you feel like you wasted your time on this. But I think people were expressing their uninterest in a new board to help keep you from investing even more time. I hope you will do more than just lurk in the future.

[Letitroll98]

Yeah, what he said ^. I've done a lot of consulting work over the years and the first thing to get before any work was started was a buy in from all the parties and a clear idea on what was to be provided. Without those conditions I would say thank you very much, please call when you know what you want (in words that they could digest much better than that). Before I learned to do that I would do tons of work to look all prepared and knowledgeable, work that I could invariably just flush down the drain later. I found it best to walk in with just a pad and pen.

So you're not the first person around here to have experienced an unforeseen reaction to what you thought was great stuff. It happens all the time and you should look at it as a learning experience, not something to get upset about. And the initial part of your work was well received by Jim and many other members. With that more modest proposal and the backing it had from senior admins you could certainly win over the digital dyslexics like me. No one wins from the I'll take my ball and go home attitude. Learning to adapt and modify to fit your product, project, or service to the needs and wants of your market is how Microsoft, Google, Sony, Toyota, and all the other gigantically successful entities make it work.

[Aurora5000]

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

[oldsauroraman1]

Arrgh. This is exactly what was mentioned on page one of this thread. Consensus must be developed in a group to make changes. People need to understand what's going on. It was my understanding (see page one), that the "change" would not start another "V2" so I gladly accepted what was going on. There's still a "Fog" bank around this, apparently, for some of us. Unfortunately, Mike put a lot of time and work into what he thought would make for a better board and was encouraged to do so by Administrators (page one). It's wrong and unethical to let his efforts be trashed, for sure, after he was led to believe his efforts were not in vain.

[Aurora40]

oldsauroraman1 said:

Unfortunately, Mike put a lot of time and work into what he thought would make for a better board and was encouraged to do so by Administrators (page one). It's wrong and unethical to let his efforts be trashed, for sure, after he was led to believe his efforts were not in vain.

What are you talking about?

The initial discussion, and all the discussion on page 1, is about owning the domain name "auroraclubna.com". Previously Jim paid to own it for a year, and I paid to have it redirected to ProBoards. Mike can do this for free, and offered that service to Jim. There's no effort involved in that, just graciousness.

Subsequent discussion was about a new forum to replace ProBoards.

But where are you going with "wrong and unethical"? So what's right and ethical in this situation? It seems to me your intent is to affix some sort of blame.

[oldsauroraman1]

Man, take a chill. "Blame"

[SupaStealth]

i'm sort of confused, i suppose i didn't really want to get involved with anything, but what was so difficult about using the redirect from www.auroraforums.com to this forums, to my understanding it would've created no new forum, just a redirect that's all. making it easier to locate for people who cant find it on a search engine, hell, i don't even know what to type in to get here, i just end up going to yahoo.com to find it when i'm not on my computer. but whatever, heh, it seems this is getting heated a bit... or has been anyways.

[oldsauroraman1]

Exactly Supa, that's just what I thought was going on, like what I was told on page one.

It's turning into another language here for me, thus the "fog" bank continues. No heat here. :-)

[TJM]

Admins Rule (that's why you're the Admins). Do whatever it is you think you need to do to maintain or better the club.

I'm sure anything that would be intrusive to the ACNA will be brought to the Club's attention. After all, this is not a dictatorship and if we were all Admins then we would have anarchy.

And, while I personally apriciate the informative intention of the commencement of this thread, I can't help but think that it may have been better posted in the more private ACNA Staff Meeting Room as it has obviously been missunderstood by those such as myself.

It took me 4 pages of reading just to get a clue about THINGS NOT CHANGING.

This stuff is way over my head but I wish to thank the Amins for their efforts in maintaining this board and commend them all on a job well done! Kudos

[oldsauroraman1]

Got me. The new link that was made worked AOK with my computer, couldn't tell a dif.

[oldsauroraman1]

tjm said:

And, while I personally apriciate the informative intention of the commencement of this thread, I can't help but think that it may have been better posted in the more private ACNA Staff Meeting Room as it has obviously been missunderstood by those such as myself.

This stuff is way over my head but I wish to thank the Amins for their efforts in maintaining this board and commend them all on a job well done! Kudos

OK, if things should have been handled by the Admins in their staff meeting room, how's it that they have a "job well done" and let all of this "go" to the point we have a member who has put so much time into improving things that he gets thrashed and then finds that all his time was for nothing - (apparently, from what I can make of things in the fog). Does'nt seem right.

Anyhow, I'm glad to be here and have the interaction with other Aurora owners. It's great, it's fun and pretty amazing.

[JimW]

www.auroraforums.com has been dropped as a redirect option simply because some of the members had issues with losing sign in profiles as a result of a new URL.

With that in mind Mike discontinued the use of www.auroraforums.com.

As it stands now www.auroraclubna.com will still redirect to the Proboards site.

There were no changes, and there never intended to be any. Mike explained to me that there was a new forum software called e107 and wanted to set up a beta version of our club forums allowing ACNA Staff access only to check it out.

I told him right off the bat that there would be backlash to starting a new forum, simply based on our experiences with v2 and then having to come back here. We lost members, and it wouldnt be prudent to create a v3. Knowing this, Mike SIMPLY EXPERIMENTED with the notion of providing the club with something different, regardless of its implementation or not.

He provided us with a courtesy, and for that I appreciate his efforts. Now, in frustration with the overwhelming negativity (dress it up however you want but thats how it reads....) Mike is no longer offering his web services and I dont even know if the latest URL host, or redirect will continue to be offered on his end.

I'll take care of that part, I started it, I'll finish it.

That all being said, it was important that all members (active or not) post some kind of feedback. I did not expect this kind of backlash.

[TJM]

What I meant by that was - I don't really care HOW it works - I am greatful that the Admins are keeping it working so well.

Apocolypse's efforts were not understood. Unfortunate, I know. He took it upon himself to address an issue that none of us laymen even knew existed and perhaps leaving out the details may have been more wise -

"changing our server or domain or whatever for better performance and better exposure"

Fools like me are easily confused by too much information.

[oldsauroraman1]

It sounded like it would be great and given us some more flexibility. Indeed, Mike's efforts are appreciated by this member. :-)

[Superdemon]

The auroraforums.com redirect has be reactivated. If you have trouble with it just don't use it. If you still have trouble dump your Temp internet files and try again. That being said I will offer any support the admins would ask of me. Weather it be hosting, domain registeration or email addresses I would be more then happy to offer my support.


Mike

[JimW]

Thanks Mike, you read my mind.

[Mr. Javi]

Hey Mike, thanks for all you work, I did not mind the changes, I liked the fact that we would of had a nice readable link than aurorah.proboards47.com/, when I send it to people, there probably look at it and say is this some type of fake or junk website, so as you can see I would of liked a better looking link like auroraclubna.com or auroraforums.com, that looks much better. But hey I'm only a member, not the founder.

[Letitroll98]

apocalypse said:

The auroraforums.com redirect has be reactivated. If you have trouble with it just don't use it. If you still have trouble dump your Temp internet files and try again. That being said I will offer any support the admins would ask of me. Weather it be hosting, domain registeration or email addresses I would be more then happy to offer my support.


Mike

Thanks for your most gracious reevaluation of the situation. I think there can be some great things to work on around here, even if we don't want a new bbs forum. For my part I would very much like it if you could make some suggestions on increasing the search engine presence of ACNA. Perhaps a redo of Amanda's old Aurora home page (or a new page) on the lines of Howard's Aurora page, with a tab for "Forums" redirecting browsers to here. You could include all the webby cheat stuff that raises rankings. What does everyone think of that?

[Superdemon]

That is all stuff I could do with little or no problems.

Mike

[95mushroom]

Yes, something needs to be done about the search. It doesn't really work at all for me. I either every post in chronological order or no results.

For older members (not necessarily this board), could we put back up Zincster's web page or make one similar? That included the Aurora's in gmboards within the webpage I believe, would be great to do that here.

[MBowen574]

New suggestion sounds great! A nice redo would be great, but even if that falls through, we do need more search exposure. As it is, before I memorized proboards 20 (V1) or proboards47 (current), a search of Aurora Club, Aurora Club North America, etc., returned us on something like the 6th page!

[Aurora40]

95mushroom said:

For older members (not necessarily this board), could we put back up Zincster's web page or make one similar? That included the Aurora's in gmboards within the webpage I believe, would be great to do that here.

His website is still up: trak.to/aurora

[95mushroom]

Sweet, must have missed the moved from the geocities one. Makes things a lot easier lol. When I was driving to find paint codes, the page would load for a have second before going to the not avialable page.

[Superdemon]

That page has a pretty good layout but those are some of the most annoying ads I have ever seen. Any site I make will be ad free. I am not looking to make money or even break even. Building a forum into the site would be something new to me and would require some research. I might be able to make this forum work with the new site as well but that would require a little bit of HTML wizardry. I will start working with these ideas and see what I can come up with. It will take some time before I have a test site up and running though. I am quite short on free time as of right now.

[95mushroom]

Fantastic. Don't worry though, no one's going anywhere.