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Fate of HTLAL | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| cmj Octoglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5340 days ago 58 posts - 191 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Arabic (classical), Latin, Italian | Message 49 of 178 23 July 2015 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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To jump on the bandwagon of absurd and borderline offensive historical comparisons, what has happened to the forum is something like the opening of the East German border. At this stage, events have overtaken the decision-making process. It is not merely that the new forum has reached a critical mass of members necessary for it to sustain itself, but that it has (probably definitively) exclipsed HTLAL. I did a quick count of the number of threads that had been posted in so far today and I got 23-26 for the new forum vs. 10 for HTLAL. In the language log section, which is arguably the most important indicator of the health of the site, I get 16 active threads vs. 3 on HTLAL. While I appreciate the worries about splitting the community, I think it's a bit absurd to criticize EMK and Rdearman for developing the capacities of the new forum. After so many years of impotently sitting around, hoping for some modest concessions to be dispensed from on high FX, the conditions are finally in place to build the sort of dynamic, modern forum that we have been waiting for, and which would lay the foundations for a renewal of a fantastic community that has been growing increasingly shabby. TBH, I think at this stage, the balance of power has shifted decisively and the problem is no longer that of choosing between forums, but rather that of attempting to ensure some degree of continuity between the old HTLAL and the new one. Hopefully FX recognizes that this is fait accompli and cares enough about the legacy of the old HTLAL to let it be absorbed into its new incarnation, preferably along with use of the domain name.
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| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5437 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 50 of 178 23 July 2015 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Man, you are totally off the chart. If emk hadn't stalked FX at his workplace (and only got a hold of a collegue, as it seems) you wouldn't be able to write your accusations here, not now, and not at any time in the future. The domain was up for sale! You can be sure that there were several attempts by the webspace provider to contact FX and warn him about this irreversible loss of the domain. He didn't react. After the grace period the domain would have been sold to whoever offers the highest amount. Then this forum would be gone. Gone! And you are accusing others to let the domain expire during summer holiday? Gimme a break. The alternative forum was set up so that the community can stay together in the quite likely event that HTLAL would never come back. If there is going to be a split now, then it is because emk managed to avoid the loss of the domain, but didn't manage to get the admin to communicate about how things will be going on. 19 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arnaud25 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 3844 days ago 129 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 51 of 178 23 July 2015 at 12:55pm | IP Logged | ||
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 52 of 178 23 July 2015 at 1:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I view the other forum as a modern extension to this one, like a subforum. Checking
out the other forum in addition to this one is no extra effort, it's like clicking one of the links of the subforums here - actually while I'm waiting for a subforum here to load, I can click through the threads in the other forum. Those who don't want to do that could just use the RSS feed to stay up to date. Here we have specialized subforums the other board doesn't have (and doesn't need given its current number of users), the other board has (potential) features we could make good use of for logs, polls, etc. I hope the moderators will find a way to integrate those two sites. BTW: I have no problem with the forum software here except for the broken url with blanks. The problem is the database or the lack of administration thereof. Make a static HTML version of the forum available at this website, wrap a lucene index around it for full text search, delete every thread from the forum database that has not received any post in the last 12 months. Should make the database access faster and also put away stress from the web server as static archive browsing is almost for free. The search function doesn't really work here anyway, so why keep them in the active part of the forum? Edited by daegga on 23 July 2015 at 1:14pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5785 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 53 of 178 23 July 2015 at 1:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well anyway, I sincerely hope FX can come to some agreement and I'm sure the mods will let us know as soon as they hear from him. It would be so much
better for us to be able to stay here, firstly to avoid the community splitting, secondly for the content and thirdly because FX should be given one more chance to sort things out...it just feels fair. It does leave a bad taste in the mouth (or at least mine) to move just after FX has paid for the domain name for several years out of his own pocket (and his work in starting the community in the first place!); he doesn't, however, have the right to let the community die just because he started it. Talk of the new forum splitting the community is not by any means the worst case scenario; the worst case scenario is that the community continues to gradually drift away and the best contributors continue to scatter themselves throughout inferior (IMO) forums all over the internet. From a personal point of view I don't really want to reach the day where I'm following James29's log on one site, Bakunin's on another, reading interesting discussions from Chung, Iversen, EMK, etc on several more sites and getting advice from guys like Iguanamon on yet another. Let's be honest, no one's going to regularly check in on that many sites. Edited by Random review on 23 July 2015 at 1:16pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 54 of 178 23 July 2015 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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A bit of minor clarification:
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most paying members confirm that the built-in search doesn't work well and they use the G-search anyway (it's on the search page, just switch the tab). -I'm a moderator on the new forum and I can assure you that nobody is talking behind your back. Everything boils down to the same point: we need to get in touch with FX. The only future talk you're missing out on is practical and technical, and non-mods can easily ask for new features on either forum. The difference is that here they have no chance of being implemented until the administrator reappears, in the best case scenario. -The forum software is outdated; if FX is ready to save HTLAL rather than throw money at the problem, he will have to setup a forum from scratch or give emk admin rights and let him do this. If we had no htlal.org, this would involve a lot of teething troubles and experimenting. Right now emk is basically using the other site for these experiments (and some of it has been done earlier by rdearman in anticipation of the outage, for example when choosing the antispam solutions; rdearman deserves credit for a lot of invisible work he's done to provide us a gathering place). -Right now what scares me most is how much we depend on emk, actually. If it wasn't for him, we'd all be at htlal.org now, mourning the loss of this forum. And the previous outage was tougher because he wasn't around. I think it's pretty clear that the updated forum would need 2-3 people with admin rights. Fortunately we seem to have a lot of IT specialists here. I think some don't dare to offer their help because they don't consider themselves experienced learners. But it's more about the time spent on HTLAL and technical expertise than anything else. -Letting the community choose moderators has been mentioned. are there seriously any objections to having people like emk, Iversen, meramarina in the administration? In addition to their experience, they're also the ones who feel a certain responsibility in front of FX, and are some of the most reluctant to make the move permanent without further input from FX. Edited by Serpent on 23 July 2015 at 3:21pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5132 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 55 of 178 23 July 2015 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm actually surprised to hear this. I've not seen a single objection to any of the moderators, at least the ones you've mentioned. I thought we were all pretty happy with them as moderators. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5377 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 56 of 178 23 July 2015 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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FX certainly does have the right to let the site die... he owns it. He obviously has things in his life that he feels are more important for his time and money.
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