| Subject: Re: By the way, it's official: UIUC Newsgroups getting cancelled |
Author:
Matt H.
|
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Date Posted: 19:38:43 05/12/03 Mon
In reply to:
Dena
's message, "Re: By the way, it's official: UIUC Newsgroups getting cancelled" on 15:17:44 05/12/03 Mon
This forum seems to be working well, especially with the high amount of traffic. As an alumni, this forum is absolutely the best thing to still keep up with JAC. It's great to see how the club is going, and get opinions from the club whom I spent 3+ years with.
Of course, there are more complicated forums out there, but for JAC's purposes and need to save resources and money, this is perfectly fine. I would guess that the memebers would rather spend more on the anime and the JAC experience itself than on the forums for minimal improvements/preferences. It probably isn't cost effective.
The effectiveness of something can be looked at how much it is used. JAC could go to the most complicated forum, with personal information, etc. But if no one uses it (not saying that no one will, but just throwing out the possibility) then it would not be an effective decision. In this case as Dena pointed out, the forums are doing very well. Of course, improvements should be examined, but it's obvious that a large amount of research went into it, so why change something if it isn't broken and successful?
Matt
>Here's my reasoning:
>
>1) It's free
>
>2) It DOESN'T generate pop-up ads like most of the
>other free forums I've seen
>
>3) It DOESN'T interrupt your access to pages with
>eight to ten sizable ad downloads displayed on every
>message and/or force you to click through ads, unlike
>Yahoo Groups
>
>4) It's table-based rather than CSS or DIV-based,
>which means it's accessible through a text-only browser
>
>5) It's very very low on graphics, which means it's
>accessible over a 28.8 modem connection
>
>6) It handles threading much more visibly and
>scannably than the various PHPbb forums out there (you
>can only skim for the latest message in a thread in
>those; here you can see exactly how far the
>conversation has gone)
>
>7) It does NOT permit auto-imbedding of avatars and
>sig files, which is important to keep it low on
>graphics and therefore modem-accessible
>
>and, finally,
>
>8) I spent about 16 hours searching the available
>options about a year ago and decided this was the best
>option I could find.
>
>Since then, we've gotten a lot of use out of it --
>more than we did out of the news groups, in fact; we
>never had more than 300 messages in 6 months there
>(their default cleanout rate), whereas I believe we
>keep 1000 messages in our four archives here and the
>fourth page of the archive contains messages
>significantly less than six months old.
>
>If you want me to consider an alternative, find a
>place that meets the stated criteria above and post a
>link to it here.
>
>But I didn't just pick the first freeware site I
>spotted; I worked on choosing this one. We had a
>discussion involving various hallucinogenic substances
>and neck-licking pigeons about the options available
>several months ago, and the final vote then came down
>on the side of turning off the message preview, but no
>one was particularly vocal about wanting a different
>board (or at least didn't present an alternative).
>
>More than one person is going to have to complain
>about it, and I need to be presented with an
>alternative I judge worth the effort, in order to go
>to the trouble of changing it over and getting
>everyone to move yet again.
>
>Unless someone else particularly wants to take over
>the JAC webmaster job, that is... do I hear you
>volunteering? ^_~
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