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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Rhian Moderator France Joined 6497 days ago 265 posts - 288 votes  Speaks: English* Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 48 21 August 2015 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Firstly thank you so much for the patience you have
shown! Sadly, we have not heard from FX. So here is the Mods' statement: For the last few years, we've been hoping to get in touch with the administrator of the site, so that we can offer to help him keep it online, and to upgrade it if necessary. The few times that we've been in touch, it's always been a true pleasure to speak with him, but he has declined to talk about his future plans for the site. So barring a change of course, we predict that the future will look like the past. The site will remain remain online, except for occasional outages. When serious problems occur, the administrator will almost certainly continue to invest the time needed to get it back online. But in the long run, new signups have been declining steadily since 2012, and they now rest at about around a quarter to a third of their peak. New posts are down by half. Part of the problem seems to be that the sign-up system is broken—we've heard from some really interesting language learners who've been trying to sign up for many years without ever making it past the spam filters. If current trends continue, some forum regulars will continue to drift away, as people do when their lives change, but fewer and fewer new users will arrive to replace them. This is an amazing community, but the long long- term decline of the forum isn't good for anybody. In the past, whenever the forum has gone offline, somebody has usually set up a temporary forum for a week or so until things got sorted out. Afterwards, the temporary forum was always shut down. This time, we left the temporary forum up, hoping to use it as a test-bed for possible upgrades to the main HTLAL site. It turns out that we have several people who are able to contribute money, time, and technical talent—more than enough to either upgrade the current site, or to create a new one. But we didn't hear back from the administrator, and at the request of many forum members, we set a deadline for making some actual decisions. The facts on the ground are these: 1. We have an existing forum, which we expect to be around for years to come. Lots of folks like it, and are happy to remain there. These folks include several very active and widely-loved community members. 2. We have a new forum, where many community members are very happy, and where several long-time HLTAL lurkers—some of whom have been fighting with the signup system for years—have started some really great logs. The folks using (2) have been waiting in limbo to see if there's any way we can use the technology of the new forum to upgrade the existing one. We chose to put an end date on this waiting process. And so the time has come to admit that we can't roll the experimental site back into the existing one, and we can't shut it down, at least not without leaving some great new users homeless, and not without disappointing long-time users who have been asking for a roadmap for the future. So going forward, this community will have two sites. Anybody is always welcome to post at either or both, as they wish. The rules will be consistent between the sites. For those folks who choose to use the new site, some changes are planned for the immediate future: 1. The domain name and the new site title will change. (Old links will continue to work for a while.) 2. The new site will undergo several technical and visual upgrades in the coming weeks. And since we have more technical control over the site, the community has been actively discussing ideas like new language profiles, open source tools, and possibly even some sort of group blog where forum members can republish their most popular posts. It's all still very much up in the air, of course, and it will take us a while to discuss the ideas and see who volunteers to make them happen. 3. We do not want the new site to have any "single points of failure". We currently have three programmers working on the new site's software. We plan to make sure that neither the domain name, nor any other technical assets, are dependent on a single person's availability. We're still working out the administrative details of this, and we hope to make further announcements in coming weeks. Right now, we're actively investigating setting up a non-profit and getting professional advice on how to do it right. For the immediate future, the sites will have the same rules, and the same moderation policies. The existing setup has some faults, but we'd prefer to move cautiously, and to not tinker too much with something that usually works fairly well. In a time of change, one big danger is trying to change everything at once. But things will change, cautiously, and—we hope—for the better. Of course, if you're happy with how things are now, there's no need to change anything—Iversen will still be on HTLAL, still continuing his log. The moderators have all offered to stay on. Honestly, this isn't the outcome we were hoping for. We hoped that we could offer to help out with the existing forum's software, and that we could help with a plan for its future. But there are some good things about the current plan, too. The existing site will be here, and people will continue to use it. But the community now also has a second home, with a smoother signup process for new users, and we're working to make sure it never relies on any single person to keep it running. And all forum members are always welcome to post on either site, or both. If the existing site ever goes down, everybody is welcome to hang out on the new site for the duration. Think of it as the community owning a vacation home in another country, perhaps. :-) For those of you using the second forum, we will have more technical and organizational announcements soon! Emk, Rhian, Meramarina, Jeff_lindqvist, Iversen and Fasulye. 52 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6105 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 2 of 48 21 August 2015 at 11:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Massive thanks guys, for all the hard work you've put in to keeping the community going. Thanks also for the clear and understandable updates.
10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 3 of 48 27 August 2015 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I think a separate, prominently visible notice (sticky thread like the others we have) should be put in place stating the problems with the sign up process and so on, so potential new users of this old site have a fair chance of knowing what to expect and decide for themselves whether to try and join the community here anyway or head for the new forum.
Edit: I see this is now an 'important topic' at the top of the general subforum, so maybe all that is necessary now is some background information for newbies in the first post, like 'FX = site founder and admin', links to the new forum, and possibly some other minor details. Edited by mrwarper on 27 August 2015 at 12:10pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 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 4 of 48 01 September 2015 at 7:28am | IP Logged | ||
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In case anyone didn't notice, this forum was down again for a few days last week. Nobody knows why.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| KingM Triglot Senior Member michaelwallaceauthor Joined 7191 days ago 275 posts - 300 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Russian | Message 5 of 48 11 September 2015 at 1:25am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm one of those people who drifted away, and haven't posted for years, but I'm hoping to get working on my languages again and was glad to see that the forum is still alive.
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 48 11 September 2015 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Alive yes, but awfully quiet compared to what it was just a few years ago.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 7 of 48 06 October 2015 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I guess I am one of those who drifted away, although it was more due to personal
pressures than anything to do with the forum. Where is the new forum please? Thanks. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6105 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 48 06 October 2015 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Here: Language Learners' Forum Edited by Mooby on 06 October 2015 at 5:22pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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