You may remember that I created poll couple of months back after hearing from Sivaram about creating forum site and the idea was dropped. I was also skeptical at that time about it. Now I came across the software phpbb3 which seems to be a good replacement for our yahoo group. I imported all our messages to the forum and did some experiments with various available options to see whether it can be used for various purposes.
Earlier I was skeptical because the main difference between a yahoo group site and a forum. The messages will reach you in yahoo groups and in case of forums you have to go there to see the messages. Since we are used to yahoo group site, forum site may not appeal. But after checking the features and importing the existing messages, I think it can be done. We can still maintain the yahoo group site, all messages posted to yahoo groups can be archived here, same time if we post any new messages or replies to existing topics in the forum, then an email can be triggered to yahoo group site which everybody will get. In this case, both yahoo group and the forum will be in sync and both can be used. After a while if we think that the forum site is very good, we can discontinue yahoo group, otherwise we can simply maintain it as a archive site and continue with yahoo group.
Lot more, it is always based on what we need, it is extensible.
Still this is an experiment, based on the usage, maintenance, server load either I will abandon this or will discontinue the current archive site and maintain this.
Please let me know your inputs, since we are doing lot of things recently, we can make this better and present it as a good source for others who are seeking it.
Amazing Thiru. Appreciable work. Hats off to your passion and dedication. I would suggest we need not abandon anything so early. We can have all things in place, so that one or the other gets listed in the search engines and attracts more members.
Its amazing to know that nearly 50% of the members have written in this group. I never expected such a huge number.
I disabled registration for now, the message source is always comes from yahoo groups.
Please go here http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/ucp.php?mode=sendpassword give your yahoo id and yahoo email id (not your email id where you get group emails), you will get email on how to reset the password and you can change your email id in the preferences.
If you still have issues, please send me a private email, I know the default password.
I registered in this website. First i gave other Yahoo ID other than our PS group ID. but it said that ID not found . Then i entered this group yahoo ID, then it works.
Yes, you have to use the yahoo id through which you become member of psvp. If you haven't posted any message to psvp till now, then your id won't be there. Since I took all the existing messages and extracted the user id from it, the list I have is those who posted atleast once. I will get the list of members from SPS and create for everybody shortly.
SPS, please send me the list of members, I will import them which would allow those who haven't posted any message as well.
What an effort? that was fantastic and I think keeping yahoo groups site and forum site in sync is the most important thing. If you could remember I was telling about another effort i was involved, in which we converted a google group to a forum site, that effort failed due to lack sync between the group and forum. People did not like the idea of going to a forum to check the messages posted. So if we could keep the forum and group in sync, people can use groups for sending mails and use the forum can used as a effective archiving tool, which I guess defines us as a literary/historical group.
Yes, I think it is a long way to go. I have done the only 50% of the work, the forum -> group sync is not yet done, will do it and see how it goes. I wanted to have our own site/repository for our varalaatru peravai in our control with all the changes in a single place instead of using yahoo groups which I believe undermines our capability. If you need any help on the google forum sync, please send me a private email, I will see what I can do.
Google started indexing our messages with in an hour, that means our messages are fresh and good in rich quality content. Kudos to our members. Look at the posting link below.
Thiru, Amazing work. SPS is right in saying so. Your contribution is commendable.
I checked the link you had sent. The date of the post shows something wierd...it says Dec 31 1969. Anything wrong with the system date/time? I would not have noticed it if the posting was anything other than the timing by which google indexes :)
The forum is not yet opened for search engines, unless I complete sync and fix few issues I am not going to open it, so google is not yet indexing the forum site, it shows our existing site RSS.
Yes, the date is seem to be weird, thanks for the info, I will look into it.
Yes, Thiru's contributions are fabulous. I was pleasantly shocked to find all messages being made available in web and even google is well recognizing our messages
Thiru, I had one question right from day one: How can we couple few messages together (very easily) and convert it into an article ? For example, we should be able to drag and drop (or otherwise) messages into one text box so that it becomes the first draft of an article. Or alternatively I should be able to select messages, arrange them in a given order and then present it into an article.
If we can achieve something close to this, our knowledge bank will be much more usable.
Google is just technology part of it, in my humble opinion, any technology without human touch is bound to fail. People found treasures in our messages and google figured it out.
About article:
The current site doesn't provide that option, it is merely a replica of yahoo groups. I think we can do that with new forum which provides option to split, merge, copy topics, may not be easy as drag and drop. The forum goes by the date and time and changing the order means, actually changing the date and time, let me see availale options.
To start with we can do that, but my suggestion would be do similar to what you did for Facts, Fiction and Characters, though there were email communications, you removed them and presented as nice article. And I would like to see articles like this or similar, this may not be perfect as I am not a good narrator.
I went through all the email conversation, your article and presented it as third person and provided citation as wikipedia does. I know it is a tedious process to re-write the whole thing, and as a middle step we can do as you suggested and move to perfection slowly.
When I imported the messages to the forum, I purely went by the subject, if the subject is different then it will be different topic, so you won't see "Sethusamudhram under subject Nandhini", but as a side effect if there are two topics with similar it will be merged even if we intend to keep it seperate, it has to be seperated manually, but I believe if the topic is same then the messages should be under same topic.
Another one is removing unncessary quoted text, sometime it is keep increasing as everybody(Including me) just keep replying without removing unnecessary text and it is tedious to scroll through all those, to avoid that when you view the forum now, I by default hide the quoted text and can be expanded manually. This can be avoided in the forum, where when you reply, you have two options, just reply or reply by quote.
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:54 AM, Sivapathasekaran
I tired to register and log in with my existing yahoo ID/ gmail ID. In both cases, I am told user ID already exists, but for getting a new password to my email, it says, "The e-mail/username information submitted could not be found." Pls help.
I used your yahoo id and gmail id in forgot password. You should receive an email shortly with a link to reset password. I will be sending you a private email with default password.
It is doable, but if we get enough response to make it, otherwise there is no point to put in effort which nobody will use it.
On the other note, it is doable with new site where you can copy the topic, remove unwanted posts and merge posts. Only thing you can't do is change the order. It may not be as sophisticated as you wanted, but that would satisfy 85%.