Topic: Hadn't the Doc asked for...

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

InI, there's no need for cleanup. In one of the recent topics in OZONE board, Doc mentioned that he has recently upgraded his DreamHost plan and now he has a 400Mb of storage, which is more than enough for the Asylum. He also mentioned that Asylum will be running under PHP/MySQL bulletin board software in the near future...

Yah, you can let these things "be" for a while, I see no urgent need to jump into a cleanup (though I thank you for the thoughtfulness!) I might take this opportunity to get an updated opinion from you guys, (I know it's in the archives, but...) What *is* the current best PHP/MySQL forum software for use today? I'd like to install one of them and run it concurrently with this one, now that I have the space to do so. TIA for your opinions on this!

Your pal, -doc-

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

IMHO The most-feature rich PHP/MySQL bulletin boards are the following:

- vBulletin, it's already well known, only drawback is that it isn't free
- phpBB2, starting from version 2, this bulletin board got very mature, has a lot of features, and if there's a feature that you need and it's missing in default installation, there are a lot of ready made modifications (all modifications that appear on official web site have to pass testing by original development team, which insures that they are of the same quality as the board itself, although they are made third-party) and it's free
- InvisionBoard, newcomer on the bulletin board scene, but very feature rich, it's made by original author of the well known IkonBoard, a lot of modifications are available on official "ibResource" website, it's constantly being developed and it's free

BTW I'm currently evaluating phpBB2 and InvisionBoard and have a very hard time deciding which one to use on new web site for HTML Beauty. At this moment, I give a small advantage to phpBB2, but that may change before I release new HTML Beauty and new web site for it...

InI: What might be quite handy is if you archive any threads that you find linked to from the FAQ that way we can make sure all the links don't break (I sweep through and do anything I spot but I'm sure I miss plenty).

Doc: We are using vBulletin in the GN redesign. It has great UBB importing tools (which is important) and seems pretty top of the range although I believe phpBB2 has similar features and its free. Feel free to drop me a line if you want a play with the admin features

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

Urk. I'm giving a try installing phpBB2, but have run into a snag. The forum itself works fine, see http://www.ozoneasylum.com/phpBB2/index.php - but the import of data! I have upgrade scripts to upgrade from UBB6.x to PHPBB2.x, or from UBB5.4x to PHPBB1.4, but no direct upgrade path from my old UBB5.45 to phpBB2.x. Hrmph, double hrmph! I'm guessing that the safest way might be to install phpBB1.4, do the upgrade and import, and then upgrade that install to v2.02. (I don't want to upgrade to the UBB6.x install, that might overwrite some of our existing settings, which would be... bad.)

Your pal, -doc-

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

just the small way along...I'am working on a
theme for phpBB2 (it is for our graphic community)
and it is in purple...I know not much ppl like
this color and thats the reason I choosed it.

If you want to see it... MOSHERS CORNER [no advertising] *fg*

I know the phpBB since it was released...so If you had
problems you can contact me easily, okay?

cu
~Xdreamer.ch~

I gave phpbb2 a try lately... very nice, but customizing any board to feel like the old asylum will take lots of time. (and no, I don't want a PM feature so that I have to check another place to see if someone contacted me...)

And I think you should think about how we integrate this into current and future asylum projects (faq, locator,yearbook...).
This applies especially to the userbase ;-)

so long,


Tyberius Prime

I think the PM is a good feature, myself. I use it constantly over at eyeball. You can configure it to give you a popup window to alert you of a new PM.

*shrugs* I think it would be a good idea, so that when somebody hides their email (I won't name names), you can take a discussion to PM's instead of the forum.

[This message has been edited by Raptor (edited 08-28-2002).]

ahh... I'd much rather have a forwarded aslum-email-address. That would even allow my system to make the ususal copies for my archives...
But I guess we need our own server for that... But then, the hoster I use has been offering them for 49/EUR for a few months now. (big and reliable as well. Coonabibba.de is hosted with them right now.)


So long,

Tyberius Prime

hey, Doc..

how big are the DHTML/JS and the SSS Archives?

'Cause I've been thinking for a while now that if I could send you some moolah, you could probably be a hella nice guy and put these archives on CDs for me (probably compressed).

Whaddaya say?

..and by the by the way- I thought we should archive stuff anyway, not because of space, but because I think that "This thread's run it's course and should now be in the archives" is a logical process that thread should follow. I'd rather trudge thru the archives looking for something than thru back issues of active threads...


Code - CGI - links - DHTML - Javascript - Perl - programming - Magic - http://www.twistedport.com
ICQ: 67751342

Heh... we could sell our archives on CD and make a ton of money =)

"The largest compiled FAQ on web development issues ever!"

It sounds funny, but I don't really think it's a bad idea.

I know that I've talked with a couple other people about doing the Photoshop FAQs and mini tutorials etc. etc. as a CD ROM for distro. In that case, I've been wanting to integrate it as a help menu in PS, requiring the CD, and opening examples in PS when it runs.

The DHTML/Coding archives would be brilliant too.

Oh yeah! I remember I was involved with two other guys to do something like this for Photoshop interfaces (Scott Balay and Scott Hamlin, www.infinitefish.com and www.eyeland.com respectively.) I probably should have stayed hooked up with them, as they both became absurdly successful afterwards, but such is life. They both actually freaked out about the amount of work for the project I was proposing, "100 interfaces" as PSD files, sold on a CD. (I think after I stopped working with them they did this anyway, the i/us thingie, anyone remember that?)

Now we have an interesting situation here. In addition to having several top-name/top-traffic websites in our group here, we also have a huge amount of content, already written out, lost somewhere here, or in the FAQ, or presented at GN and Handson (as well as all the other collections of useful stuff not mentioned, don't freak if I didn't mention your name!) All too often great concepts like this founder because the concept is there, but the content is lacking. I've already decided that from this point on I don't want to do anymore purges of the forum - ever, hopefully. (Except for bona-fide crap, you know the type of stuff I mean, no?) Even if I stayed with this clunky old software (that we all know and love!) I could keep saving things for a couple of years at the rate we're going, hopefully by then I'll get more space again, it's the way of our digital world.

Heh, if I had even half as much organization and ambition as many of the others I've known over the years I'd probably be releasing my 3rd book and my 6th CD by now, and most of my sites would have special "Members Only" sections where you could go to escape the ads, heh heh. ;-) Ah well, that's not me, and probably never will be, thank whatever gods are out there.

What should be done with all this stuff we have here? How should it be organized, how would we *ever* figure out compensations for all the different contributors? Maybe we could set up some kind of foundation which could release works based off of the stuff we have here; the foundation could make money, and also pay anyone associated with creating derivative works based on the material we've collected here. (I'd of course want a cut; I'm not ambitious, true, but also not stupid!) Still, as you all know, I'm not greedy, if I was I'd be rich already, heh.

How to proceed? I'd imagine we'd need a couple of special teams to organize things at a global level; a 'business team' to see what's needed to create an organization that could charge moneys and pay it out as well, and then a 'concept team' to see what kind of projects we could devlop based off of the material gathered here. Once the concept team isolates some good projects that we could/should be working on, we can see about building teams to compile the work and fill in the gaps, we can find and expert or 2(thousand) to provide whatever's lacking right here.

These are details, though. I suck at details. If this idea is going to proceed, we'll need someone to pilot this project, probably one for the business focus group and one for the concept group. Please don't email to me and volunteer though! If this is going to work, it'd have to be a group project, and as such should be debated here. I could set up a new forum for this maybe, like at http://projects.ozoneasylum.com/ or something.

One final note! This is a great idea, should be able to work. Still better ideas than this have faded away over the years, just because an idea is good doesn't mean it happens. If you could get passionate about something like this, then by all means, step forward, you could be responsible for paying all our bills for years to come! Heck, you might even break even. I'm very interested to hear what others have to say about this idea, have at it!

Your pal, -doc-

actually, I was a little worried about this when I asked...

...that's why I was thinking maybe just sending you however many CD's it would take to burn this stuff (buying them myself, like at a store) in trying to detach it as much from being a 'for profit measure' instead of it being a "Hey, while you're at the server, can you help me save myself a 4 trillion year download?". Is this doable?

how big are those sections, anyway?


Code - CGI - links - DHTML - Javascript - Perl - programming - Magic - http://www.twistedport.com
ICQ: 67751342

[This message has been edited by Petskull (edited 08-29-2002).]

I don't know exactly how big it all is, but it can't be more than 300MB total, including the forum software. If I just sent you the archive files, that might be only half of that, but in the foprmat it's in you'd need to the software to access it, I think. Actually, I just checked, and that's not so, they are all HTML. But! All the control links would certainly be busted, they all refer to the Ultimate.cgi file. Bear in mind that before I could do this for you, I'd have to download everything myself first. ;-) If I was going to do this, I'd recommend burning the complete forum files, including scripts (minus the Members file! ;-) and then leting you install it yourself. Given the time involved in this project, I'd want to make sure that more folks than you would want copies too.

Your pal, -doc-

Its a very interesting idea (its easy to tell as I have too many thoughts and ideas rattling around in my head to get them all down in one go).

Concerns

1. This proves a divisive project with people arguing over splits of money

2. And what about the little people? Some people will contribute, a phrase, a thought, a question, etc. which sends us spinnng off on some path.

I think we could deal with the first one with a little give and take. With the second one people probably wouldn't be too concnerned if the pennyworth their ideas contributed went towards upkeep of the Asylum.

How to do this?

I've always thought that GN was a way to distill all the great ideas and talent that bounces off the walls in here. The FAQ has adopted a lower tier role sucking up and organising information from the Mammoths (sp? [Petsk Edit: OK]) of posts that lurks in the archive. More FAQs and more archiving and more work in the FAQ would really help to draw out the information we already have stored.

I see the tutorials as drawing out the kind of information that might be in the archives, the FAQs or our heads and honing it and (often) applying an ethos to the whole thing to give the whole set of tutorials more focus.

I've been kicking around ideas for a 'So you want to learn X' page which would draw together the inforamtion and suggest paths through the tutorials and entry points for people of different skill levels.

Format

I'm not sure why but I see a large series of smallish (not pocket-sized but not the typical doorstops) books very focused on one area probably with an accomanying CD. It would let us stay flexible while addressing specific topics and allow people to pick and choose volumes according to their specific interests and concerns.

Also be keeping the books smaller it would reduce the price and people would be prepared to take a chance with investing in the books (I see people in book shops and computer stores adding it in with some of the other things they've bought - it could be seen as falling in the impulse buy category).

It would also allow us to produce subsections - like the idea for interfaces with the book talking people though them and the CD carrying the PSDs.

-----------------------------
Thats enough for now I'll chew over my other thoughts so I can present them in a more focused way (or throw them away as being a bad idea).

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

I would like to see a subscription magazine of some sort.
More thoughts later if I get the time.


[This message has been edited by warjournal (edited 09-04-2002).]