Rah! Rah! yahoo

[CarpeyBiggs]

there is a mod for phpBB2, but i am not sure if it works on phpBB3. i asked the question up in the "bogley support" forum, we'll see what 'beech and acca say.

in the phpBB forums, sounded like there had been a few issues implementing it.

[accadacca]

The benefit to using Yahoo is that they handle the nuts and bolts. The benefit to using Bogley as Shane mentioned in another thread is that we handle the nuts and bolts. I have had many long nights with white knuckles on the keyboard keeping Bogley running for 5 years. It takes a long term commitment to keep these types of sites running and it can get very complicated. Many times my wife wishes I didn't have this burden, but I love helping facilitate the sharing of outdoor information.

Luckily I do this for a living and I know people that can help me manage Bogley. Of course all the moderators help manage their respective areas and Sombeech does quite a bit to piss everyone off. Nah, beech does a lot behind the scenes to help maintain this site and he has been a HUGE help. He has spent many long nights with me trying to solve problems. I also pay a server guy, he helps me maintain and configure the server. Bogley has been moved to 5 different servers (hosting companies) in 5 years. It took me 2 weeks to get the site moved this last time. Migrating all the data and making sure everything gets moved and is running properly = major pain in the ass. All of this really takes dedication and can eat up your time and patience. Especially when you have a problem and everyone starts breathing down your neck to get it fixed. Not fun. I am also in charge of keeping all the data and content safe and backed-up. Imagine if we had a hard drive crash and we lost all this data. Disaster. I also have access to web developers, database administrators, graphic artists, frontend engineers and user interface designers to name just a few. All of these resources have helped over the years. With all this considered there are nearly 20 people with their hands on bogley on any given day. This could be a typical moderator or on the technical spectrum it could be a developer editing code or my server guy optimizing the queries.

We do our fair share of making fun of the Yahoo Groups, but the truth is there isn't much for the owners to worry about. The code, servers, etc is all maintained and handled by Yahoo. All they have to do as owners is manage the content. It is a completely different story managing your own forum software. I understand the politics behind the canyoneering community. Let me just say that anyone is welcome on Bogley and we will accommodate, but the owners of the Yahoo groups are of course free to do whatever they think is best. Bogley has very good traffic and is running very strong on a newly installed high-dollar server. We have 5 years and counting of archived canyoneering content and we aren't going anywhere.

[tanya]

KUDOS to Scott and Beech for their countless hours of work to keep us all addicted to the internet!!! Serious! You guys rock!!!



I have had 3 yahoo groups (Zion, Grand Canyon, High IQ - no politics allowed for good reason! lol) for about 10 years or more.. (actually had one more that got buggy and yahoo could not fix it so it was deleted after being very active for years - a politics only group - it was good it died. It got hundreds of posts a day and I deleted it after the war had began) These groups were clubs prior to being groups and clubs were so much more active!

There is a lot of work to having a good one. I already explained the extremes RAM goes to so his stays active. Yahoo Groups are not as easy to find in a search engine as a BBS so therefore the moderators have to do invites and find people to invite - usually they do not know these people. Bogley had a great base using off-line friends of Justin's and Scott's and then Rock and Shane joined and added their canyoneering fan club. I spent a couple of years or more doing invites every single day and posting news articles as well as getting conversations started - this was while pregnant and having 4 of my 5 kids. I assume Shane was probably doing the same thing with his yahoo group (not the pregnant part lol). Now, I have left the groups to survive on their own via just posting and hoping those there keep them going.... I am no longer going to spend the time to do it.

Then there is the spammers -- have to deal with those, but yahoo did add spam filters that help and all new posters are moderated.

All that said.... once a yahoo group has posters, there is nothing to keeping them going, but for them to thrive you need to do the constant invites. (anyone want to do that for me. lol)



Again! Thank you Scott and Justin!

[asdf]

I understand the politics behind the canyoneering community.

As if thats even possible