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Home » Public Forums » GMCnet » [GMCnet] The risk of publishing GMC info on Social Media
Re: [GMCnet] The risk of publishing GMC info on Social Media [message #188214 is a reply to message #188189] Thu, 25 October 2012 12:07 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
jayrabe is currently offline  jayrabe   United States
Messages: 509
Registered: June 2009
Location: Portland, OR
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Senior Member

I've been in the community for almost 4 years now. The learning curve has been significant, but I've pretty much figured out how to find stuff that I need. That said, the process is convoluted and inefficient, and every newbie that comes along faces the same learning process. I would like it to be easier. If you're thinking about re-configuring things, here's my 2c:
Two things: 1) Searching the forum is tough. a) Regardless that many of us have complained about it, thread hijacking continues as the norm, so searches take forever and result in pages of posts to filter through to find what you want, if you can find it at all. b) Lots of posts are social rather than informational. No way to stop that. It's a valid and valuable and enjoyable use for the forum. But it does make searches for information harder. c) is there any way to do this better?
2) Searching tech articles is tough. a) Gene has put hours into summarizing and presenting nuggets of wisdom on a given topic to save everyone from searching through dozens if not hundreds of pages of forum posts to find 2 paragraphs of crystallized gold. This is INVALUABLE but so time consuming for him, and we're still left with relying on Gene to be monitoring the forum and responding with his characteristic, "Did you look here <link>?" to point people in the right direction. b) Another 1/2 dozen or so websites are out there with highly valuable tech info, but there's no single index/search site to look at them all. That's what I think we need.
3) The GMCWS site I believe from the look of it uses Drupal open-source content-management programming. I'm not a programmer, but I learned enough Drupal to create a site that I manage for a Portland dance community. It's user-friendly, easy to index and search, looks good, etc. And the HostGator host I use also has SQL that can be used for real database organization, though I'm not enough of a programmer to even understand what the options are.
I agree COMPLETELY with the thrust of previous posts, that the community needs backup administrators/owners for our precious and irreplaceable information resources. But while we're at it, we should make it more accessible. Having it stashed in someone's secure and backed-up site does nothing if you can't find it.

My 2c

Jay Rabe 76 PB Portland, OR



> To: gmclist@temp.gmcnet.org
> From: armand@minniebiz.com
> Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:12:33 -0500
> Subject: Re: [GMCnet] The risk of publishing GMC info on Social Media
>
>
>
> It seems to me there are two basic problems:
> 1. The sites that do exist - maintained by Gene Fisher, Patrick and Bdub - have no backup support. If any of these people is hit by the proverbial beer truck then they and their web sites are gone or soon will be. These people should give the keys to their sites to someone else along with whatever they need to know to keep them up or move them somewhere else - another hosting company - for when that beer truck arrives.
>
> 2. The photo site had the potential to be much more valuable than it is but without descriptions or tags the photos are very difficult to find. Even user names on the photo site (in most cases) are useless because they are different than the names people use on the net so there is no connection. This is what makes Gene's site so valuable - he maintains the info from the net and the photo sites in a useable format.
>
> I think that problem number one above is the sharing of the keys to each of the sites. I have done a redesign of the gmcws site over the past year or so but, since Bdub is the holder of the keys and has an admin id, there is effectively a backup person for it. The site uses very standard software (wordpress) that is easy enough to use that any computer-literate volunteer could pretty quickly pick up the reins. The pre-redesign stuff that Bdub did is still there and linked to on the new site.
>
> Problem number two above - making the existing net and photo sites better as has been suggested is much more difficult because it involves the people who submit the info and photos. I would advocate the use of the forum and allow photos and PDFs to be embedded in the posts along with a discussion of what they are but that involves moving past email and into the late 1990s technologically and there is resistance to that.
> --
> Armand Minnie
> Marana, AZ
> '76 Eleganza II TZE166V103202
> http://www.minniebiz.com/gmcmotorhome
> http://www.gmcws.org
>
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