Quiet innit!!

Not much acivity on here at the minute is there? Plenty activity on the Forum. Does that say anything???

Reply to
Charles Hamilton
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Yes. Empty vessels make most noise :-)

ttfn Roland

Reply to
Roland Craven

Its very quiet and embarrassing as I still have to find time to finish a simple bush for someone.

Martin P

Reply to
campingstoveman

If there's a forum, someone should really gateway between it and usenet. Sometimes it's frustrating missing out on discussions, but I really cannot stand web forums... :-)

Reply to
Jules

"The Forum"? I thought there were several, none of which I look at regularly (IF occasionally) as I find the format difficult to get my head around. If it is possible to condense them and gateway to usenet as Jules suggests, that would be ace!

NHH

Reply to
NHH

As most forums are web-based, it is easier for most people to get online with them than with Usenet. I always have difficilty with getting onto the newsgroups while I am overseas, mainly due to the hoops that BT and Yahoo put in the way, and I don't particularly like using Google for newsgroup access.

There is also the possibility of posting images as part of the messages and so on, and the Forum is currently looking at providing engine insurance for its members who do not belong to a club.

The Stationary Engine Forum has just over 1500 registered members and over 450 active members, who have posted over 50,000 message in over 7000 threads.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

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Reply to
Peter A Forbes

Never mind the quality - feel the (band) width :-)

ttfn Roland

Reply to
Roland Craven

There's a mixture, just as there are on all forums.

If you look at the larger forums such as:

Smokstak: Threads: 62,767, Posts: 448,426, Members: 26,426 LandRoverNet: Threads: 171,856, Posts: 1,369,050, Members: 45,264

You will see that the Stationary Engine Forum has a while to go yet, but it attracts quite a few serious engine people as well as the youngsters, and if it brings more youngsters into the hobby then that's OK with me.

Since January, nearly 800 new members have joined, so there must be something there that is of interest.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

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Reply to
Peter A Forbes

That too though I was aiming at the mindless inane drivel. Mind you I may join the latter as A.D. slowly degrades the brain. I also mind that a onetime (ex US Marine colleague) referred to it as "pooling ignorance" :-) It was amazingly effective as long as one's brain could filter dross from Silver :-)

Bah Humbug to all self-aggrandis>> Never mind the quality - feel the (band) width :-)

Reply to
Roland Craven

Well done Roland - I was too afraid of the cries of 'Luddite' to say that I appreciate the efficiency of usenet in the face of the headlong rush to more and more content (mostly just eye candy) by web based fora.

NHH

Reply to
NHH

Yes, we have a few Onan's as well :-))

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

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Reply to
Peter A Forbes

Nick:

How many times have you said that it would be nice to have had a picture of something that was being described on the newsgroup?

Most Forums run on Vbulletin or SMF, and posts are purely text-based apart from those that have pictures either added to the post(s) or referenced from another site, which is easily done.

The only downside is that sites such as Google and Yahoo trawl for content which they store and index, although that is much the same for Usenet, so the originals get propogated.

Apart from one weekly backup, the whole forum at present uses just under 0.5gb of server space.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

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Reply to
Peter A Forbes

indeed...

bloat too much eye-candy inability to archive messages on local storage lack of even rudimentary message threading inability to choose preferred client with preferred feature-set

Not all forae exhibit all of those, of course - but they all seem to manage at least one (not least because the layout is chosen by the site maintainer rather than the user, and there's no practical way of really changing this - usenet separates the presentation from the data, the web munges it all into one).

The ability to have pictures is the single thing that they *do* offer - but I think in 15 years of using usenet I can count the number of times I've wanted to include pictures in a message on one hand. It's just not one of those things I find happens often - and when it does it's not exactly a hardship to throw them on a site somewhere and link to them. To me, the one benefit just doesn't make up for all the negative points - for discussion, it's just the wrong tool for the task :-(

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules

Gentlemen,

It has been a pleasure to just sit and lurk this week as a few of the old timers have reappeared for a gentle amount of sparring, long may it continue. Off to bed for an early night as I have a busy day tomorrow.

Martin P

Reply to
campingstoveman

You certainly want a lot for your free access! :-))

What is bloated? posts are no larger than a typical Usenet posting and all posts are editable or deletable by the site administrator and moderators.

Eye Candy? Just engines, which is what it's about.

Why would you want to archive messages locally? Either Usenet or Forum?

All threads are under section and subject headings and all Forums have very good search and advanced search facilities. You don't need the same threading as used in newsgroups.

Not sure what you want in the last line.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

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Reply to
Peter A Forbes

Jules I tend to agree with your strictures though my main point has more to do with the content than the medium. Emphatically and oft repeated crap is no substitute for a brain. And quantity is not a substitute for quality; hence the expression "Eat shit - three trillion flies can't be wrong :-)

Sleep well all Roland

Reply to
Roland Craven

:-)

The text might not be, but HTTP tends to be pretty heavyweight - it'd be easy enough to work out the 'overhead' of posting to the forum, although unfortunately I don't have an easy way of doing the same for NNTP (usenet).

(there's a side issue here that my usenet client's running in 20MB of memory and the web browser's running with 105MB - that's over a fivefold increase for "the same messages")

Well I didn't say all web forums were guilty of everything in my list ;) There are an awful lot out there that fill the screen with layout images, or posters all tack their own little avatar images onto their messages or at the end of their posts, and all that's just a distraction for the important stuff...

Because my experience has been that data comes and goes - the maintainers move onto other things, or the data simply gets lost, or access isn't possible (either because of network issues, or simply because the person who wants to access the data is on the move). If it's on the user's local system, then it's at least under their control.

Well, lots of forums are terrible there - they don't allow easy selective quoting of a message in a reply as we're doing here (it's either all or nothing), and they don't show who is replying to who (all messages get shown as a reply to the original initiator of the thread as a flat list).

Again, not all forums are like that - it seems to be down to the choice of forum software - but the ones that fall foul of it make it very difficult to follow the 'conversation' when there are lots of interactions between different users.

Well, I can pick from a choice of web browsers - but a forum still essentially looks the same according to how the site maintainer has set it up. With usenet, I get to choose from any number of clients, all of which have different ways of displaying the messages (and different features to interact with those messages) and I can choose the one that suits my needs best.

Phew. I know that all may sound a bit 'ranty' and for that I apologise. I can understand the reasons that people have forums (over and above the posting-of-images case) I think, but it also frustrates sometimes that usenet is still around and is a prefectly good means of communication (and, IMHO, superior :-) in the vast majority of cases, yet so little is done to promote its use.

It's also a shame when discussion gets spread across multiple places, because people often don't have time to check everywhere and so can "miss out" on information (which was why I'd mentioned that it's a pity that there wasn't a way to 'gateway' forum messages with this newsgroup and vice-versa - then people would be free to use whatever access method they wished and yet see all the messages regardless of origin)

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules

:-) I think any group - particularly with a "niche interest" - needs some sense of community, though; it's part of the nature of being human and with it will come some banter and "off topic" stuff and general crud. I've seen discussion areas that were strictly policed die out before when people felt stifled.

Plus, of course, there'll always be newcomers (hopefully!) who ask the same things that have been asked before - I've done it myself many a time I'm sure, but there are also times when I've enjoyed passing on things I've learnt that could have been read elsewhere, purely for the joy of sharing information or an experience.

I've got five hours to go here yet :-)

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules

Jules wrote (snip):

Rant or not, I think you have hit the nail (or perhaps a whole bed of nails) on the head. Unfortunately we are on to a loser and usenet will soon be as obsolete as the engines we cherish, it's good points being forgotten in the headlong rush for 'progress' - maybe we can hope that a few die-hard preservationists will remain to demonstrate to future generations that there was some merit in the 'old ways' ;-)

As an illustration, it is my habit to check this group when I awake (sad I know), this morning the PDA's low battery light blinked on shortly after I had synchronized with the server and, as I reached down to switch on the power supply, I accidentally switched off the router. No problem, all the new messages were already downloaded so I could read them and compose replies while the router got round to re-booting - try that on a web based forum!

NHH

Reply to
NHH

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