Andrew gets serious...

[MikeShaw]

If you read the above posts you'd understand why we need to update the website aswell. Using a better engine means easier posting which if you don't keep it up to date then, then you simply have a rubbish pro. A newer engine will also link to the kike page and our twitter feeds!

You need something in place before you #deletethegroup ideally. Otherwise people will just live in limbo for awhile.

Ill build a demo on Sunday.

[Cathal]

Don't waste your time Mike, you'd be better utilising your skills to do a WordPress skin.

No need for a Unix developer, as that's already taken care of by the WordPress community.

There's no point at all paying for something that we neither want nor need. If we aren't reaching the limits of WordPress as a CMS, a different (and for-cost) backend will not change anything. We need content, not backend.

Sent from my GT-I9295 using Tapatalk

[Cathal]

Oh and Mike, as webmin I do have the say on whether or not we would move the website out of our control and away from C&S.
Don't forget that you really don't get to tell me whether I have a choice or not, as a) you are not on committee, and b) you aren't an admin for the club.

If you really want to help, do a WordPress theme that's Ulkc-specific, that would be a bigger help than anything else backend-related right now.

Sent from my GT-I9295 using Tapatalk

[MikeShaw]

That kind of totalitarian attitude helps no one,

Whether or not you are web admin is besides the point, I will demo what you can do external to the archaic and clunky wordpress engine to the committee as my, professional, opinion. With all pros and cons weighed up. They can then put it to a vote and decide based on the democratic methods to which they were elected to do.

You, of course, as admin can weigh in but if your argument is "I am admin what I say goes, he is not even on the committee" than that is neither a very democratic, nor a very helpful answer.

[CharlotteRyan]

Andrew if you download tapatalk into your phone you don't have to sign in every time it's just there waiting for you and is very easy to use/follow. By the way, great points and great job, I think you're really on the ball with that! Tho maybe leave the page alive for interclub chats/lighthearted chats within the group.

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[Cathal]

Mike, you have your professional opinion, that's fine no real questions about that.

I also have mine, with more experience and time working on many more forums and website back-ends both as a user and as an admin, giving me direct experience as to what is needed and what works in the real world, and a very good idea on how to assess realistic requirements and matching the implementation to those requirements.

I'll glady accept genuine help with things, but there's no advantage to something that is unnecessarily disruptive, without real benefit to the club.

For the purposes of what the club requires, Wordpress perfectly fits that particular brief. Here are some of the current advantages that Wordpress offers.

• The Wordpress installation is currently up and working without issue.
• It's already integrated and working with Twitter and the FB like page, giving a central single point of update that propogates across all the social media that we currently use.
• The current site can still be easily read and used by legacy or low-capability devices and even text-only (meaning that there are no accessibility issues for the visually-impaired). There's no problems with old browser versions being unable to read the site.
• It's easily updated with a WYSIWYG editor both on desktop and mobile platforms.
• There's an app for mobile that allows easy updates on the move.
• There is very good traffic analysis being done on the site traffic already, at a zero-cost option.
• The site is bandwidth light and very fast to use.
• The site can be administered completely from a text-only terminal if necessary.
• Non-experts can add pages and update the news feed with ease.
• There is zero cost to the club for the hosting and management of the current hosting package, and zero cost for the use of the software being used.
• There's direct access to the admins of the hosting site and to the connectivity providers.
• Last but not least, control of our site is kept internal to C&S - we are not reliant on an outside agent for our presence on the web.

Just because something is the latest new and shiny, is absolutely no reason to use it. The real advantages to the club of changing would have to be there to change, and in my professional opinion there are no real advantages to the club at this point in moving from what we have. Your suggestions are to use new tech, but why should we when what we have works perfectly fine. Whatever would be changed to would have to beat those current advantages, and there's nothing out there that does. If something better would run on the club account on Skynet, then maybe it's be worth a look, but there are real disadvantages to hosting off-campus.

It's not broken, so there's no need to fix it.

[DervMcAuley]

Charlotte, I think it's more that with the current board configuration anyone has to sign in to see anything. So a person who's new to the club, or thinking about joining, has to sign in to get information.

Another outside perspective: UCD boards have it set up so that there's a section with all kayaking and trip related topics public, as well as committee announcements, but if you want to see the banter and abuse sections you have to sign in - makes it less embarrassing for future employment, etc. blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, you're not the

greatest club in the world

until you've a swim file . UCCCC 's and NUIG's are always worth a look.

[Cathal]

The current board configuration is set so that only forum members get to see the information in the forum. It's an easy permissions change to allow guest users access to the forums, but previous committees chose not to allow full unfettered public read access to our stuff. If it's wanted again it would be easy to do, but I'd recommend against it. If anyone has a good change of information to add to the notice that forum non-members see, I'd be happy to put it in there.
As the forum use increases, there is a plan to create more sub-forum, and it's fairly easy to those public as needed. It's early stages yet.

The forum was a serious spam target before I became admin again (with something like a few tens of thousands of spam posts per day) so I had to ensure that it became less desirable for spam merchants to abuse it. Pretty much all online forums suffer from that, and it does make it that bit harder to make it easy to use, but there's nothing that can really be done about that.

[AndrewRegan]

I know NUIG pay a yearly fee (not expensive) to a web hoster and I havent once seen spam on the forum since I joined it in 2008. The forum is also publicly accessible.

I wouldn't be overly paranoid regarding what people can see. Never known it to be an issue, just be sure not to publicly defame a business or person on the forum which is obvious enough anyway and if not, have a few admins who can be aware of these legal issues and can moderate as necessary.


Regarding extra content on the website I think stuff like this is deadly and beginners will read it for sure, have a look Keyes et al

http://nuigkc.com/jargon/

http://nuigkc.com/club-house/

http://nuigkc.com/faq/


Also I don't trust skynet... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wlsd9mljiU

[Cathal]

Andrew - in NUIG there is no equivalent of Skynet, which is why I'm very happy that we have that type of resource available to us for free, as the cost of getting that in the real world is quite expensive.

I see the value in having club-private sections and public sections. It was agreed that we'd have a simple layout at the start and as we see the need for other sections in the forum they would be added with the appropriate permissions.

Mike - the forum is perfectly adequate at this point for the cutover for what we want and use. What are the specific problems that you think exist?

[Bekey]

Aside from all the computer talk flying around, I agree we should delete the group! Too many posts on the club page, plus its nice to have different place for carnage videos etc.

[AndrewRegan]

Forgive my ignorance....

But what good is having skynet if you have to spend so many hours of your life constantly getting rid of bugs and spam? The club can't expect there to always be somebody willing to give up so much time (or have the know how) to do this.

[MikeShaw]

But what good is having skynet if you have to spend so many hours of your life constantly getting rid of bugs and spam?

[MikeShaw]

I Must say, I pickling love the forum for doing this ^^^^ kind of stuff

[Ethan]

But what good is having skynet if you have to spend so many hours of your life constantly getting rid of bugs and spam?

we really need a like button!