Players Forums, anything wrong ?!

Pat · Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 7:34 am Post subject:

Customer Support

Quote:

Your question has been received.
You should expect a response from us within 24 hours.

-- after which they never did get back to me.

so i tried a 2nd e-mail, on Jun.14,
and this got no response whatsoever.

i'm really glad that m_b_metcalf wrote to them too,
and as long as he did get a response, who cares if they ignore my messages?

and we must all thank daj95376 for phoning them

in such situations, a Moderator has no special knowledge, no special powers, and no special standing -- any member encountering an outage could and should report it to Customer Support ( rnmailbox@mailca.custhelp.com ) and/or 1 - 866 - 597 5510

Pat · Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 7:53 am Post subject:

daj95376 · Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 3:25 pm Post subject:

Well, whatever is going to happen had better happen soon. I had problems getting connected to www.sudoku.com yesterday, and I just had several successive failures to connect today.

tarek · Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 5:29 pm Post subject:

Yup,

It started again ....

Thanks to gsf for taking a snapshot of the forum ... knowing that all that info is archived somewhere is reassuring & will cushion the fall if this turns out to be the last gasp.

tarek

allan barker · Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 11:44 pm Post subject: idea

I too experienced the same problems yesterday.

I have a paid website at bluehost dot com, which is a rather large, reliable hosting company. The site currently has little traffic. I would be happy to let the general community use that site and also pitch in with some work on the transition.

I looked into some of the details and the site is designed to support forums and even has easy installation scripts for either phpbb2 or phpbb3. I think there would also be a way to make a public image depository as the site has "unlimited disk space". This would also make viewing pages with images faster.

Connecting gsf's recent snapshot to a new phpBB installation may be a bit like plugging the power cord into a water faucet, but I think that with some work it might be possible to rebuild the forum in a working form. It appears the entire forum is kept in a mysql database and webpages are generated as needed. After setting up a skeleton forum, some combination of scripting, sql-ing, and hacking on the database should allow us to get the old forum into a running state. The good news is that both phpbb and mysql are open source and their workings are transparent.

I can do hacking, probably not too old to learn some basic scripting.

Just a thought for the next time .....

Allan

Gee whiz, look at all the emoticons here, Shocked

Pat · Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 6:55 am Post subject:

allan barker · Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 11:33 am Post subject:

wapati · Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 11:42 am Post subject:

m_b_metcalf · Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 12:32 pm Post subject:

Pat · Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 1:29 pm Post subject:

allan barker · Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 3:00 pm Post subject:

daj95376 · Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 12:18 am Post subject:

Two things come (quickly) to mind.

1) What will installing phpbb2/3 on a new site gain compared to Sudoku.com? In particular, what will prevent SPAMmers from finding the new site and filling it with useless messages as well?

2) Do you really want to transfer all messages from Sudoku.com to the new site? There are a lot of useless messages in there. I have 1000+ messages that could be removed w/o impacting the knowledge content. There are many threads that just need to have the head message and a few key contribution messages saved.

Pat · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 2:21 pm Post subject:

Pat · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 2:46 pm Post subject:

JasonLion · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 4:55 pm Post subject:

I run a forum on swimming pools that grew up after the previous most popular swimming pool forum was having problems. Based on that experience, a couple of things that come to mind.

The big one is trust. A significant number of prominent members of the current forum need to trust the admin of the new forum more than they trust the old forum to keep working. Otherwise no one is going to switch to the new forum.

Copying the entire content of the existing forum is a copyright violation, unless you have explicit permission of the person/company running the old forum. The individual posts belong to their authors, but the entire collection, as a collection, belongs to the current forum owner.

Running a forum well is more work than you might think, and is going to cost something. It isn't all that difficult to set it up and get going, but keeping everything working well on an active forum take time and money. Not lots and lots of time, but it isn't something you can ignore either. Likewise, not lots and lots of money, but not a basic inexpensive hosting account either. You want the forum owner to have some idea what they are in for, or you will just be switching again in a couple of months.

The real key is getting a solid core group of existing prominent members to all agree on a plan. You don't need everybody, but you do need a couple of people that are well respected in the community that others are likely to follow. If you can do that, you can solve all the other issues that come up. Some of the "other issues" take a little work but nothing insurmountable.