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Fate of HTLAL | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5782 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 57 of 178 23 July 2015 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Serpent, is that G-search option not just the same thing as searching
"site:how-to-learn-any-language.com + whatever query" in Google? I can only assume the message was for everyone and not specifically addressed to me. It was a bit confusing the way you quoted me at the top like that. Edited by Random review on 23 July 2015 at 3:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 58 of 178 23 July 2015 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I was referring to this. BTW I'm very much against freezing the alternative site until we hear from FX again or until we've had zero reports of instability for a week. Right now this site seems to work fine for me but just yesterday it didn't, and yesterday I was at home while now I'm in Finland, so this might have to do with the difference. And if nothing changes, it'll be only a matter of time until we ask rdearman to reactivate the temporary forum because HTLAL is down again... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 59 of 178 23 July 2015 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It is, and I have it set as a custom search engine in Firefox. although sometimes it returns slightly different results. Yeah, after that I responded to other people's points that I didn't quote directly. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5782 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 60 of 178 23 July 2015 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
He owns the site, mate; that's why I said he doesn't have the right to let the community die just because he started it. Of course he owns the site. That's precisely the discussion, mate: whether and under what conditions the community should continue to use his site (as opposed to moving). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5374 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 61 of 178 23 July 2015 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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A "community" cannot make a decision... the individual members of the community do.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| samfrances Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4051 days ago 81 posts - 110 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 62 of 178 23 July 2015 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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What's the point of this semantic wrangling? Does it make a difference in practice if we characterise a process as making a decision as a community, or as making lots of individual decisions that are heavily influenced by each other, (and the discussions surrounding them)? Edited by samfrances on 23 July 2015 at 3:58pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 63 of 178 23 July 2015 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I can only speak for myself here, not for the other moderators nor (obviously) for our administrator. Right now, I don't even know what options are on the table. There's one person I would very much like to invite to the table before any discussion starts: the administrator. In my role as a moderator here, I am ultimately answerable to him. I'm also answerable to the other moderators, and several of them are travelling right now. I do understand that the HTLAL community would like to have a discussion about the future, and that many people would like to decide what to do democratically, here on this site. But the moderators don't really have the authority to pose those questions, here, unless we speak to the administrator first. If I were to put up a poll on HTLAL today, asking people what they wanted to do, it would be inappropriate for two reasons: 1. The administrator has not given the moderators the authority to run a poll about the future of his site, certainly not without talking to him first. 2. I wouldn't actually know what options to put in the poll, because I don't actually know what the options might be until we've heard from the administrator. Personally, I would love to know what the options are, to see them all laid out side by side, and to discuss them together. I agree with what you've said about democratic organizations and their longevity, and it's a very appealing vision. But: 1. It would be inappropriate for the moderators to start that discussion here at HTLAL without either (a) the administrator's permission, or (b) a situation where we have thoroughly exhausted all our other options. 2. It would be inappropriate to hold that discussion on another site, because doing so would exclude everybody here at HTLAL. At the very least, we need to make every effort to hold a discussion here if we can, for which, see (1). So this brings me back to my earlier point: This whole situation is probably going to play out slowly.
I haven't given up on the dream of a single site for the community. One big challenge here is that several long-standing members are frustrated with HTLAL-as-it-exists-today, and not all of them will necessarily come back if nothing changes here. But we can't change anything here unless the administrator wants to. And of course, setting up forums is easy. Commercial phpBB hosting costs $6 a month, and you can set it from a GUI with a credit card and a few mouse clicks. So the only real way to address people's frustrations is to do our best to tackle the underlying problems, if at all possible.
The moderators are currently trying to contact the administrator. If we manage to do so, yes, we would love to talk with him and offer any kind of assistance we can. Beyond that, I don't know how things will play out. In my role as a HTLAL moderator, I have pre-existing obligations that I need to properly address, and yes, some of those obligations are not really democratic as such; that's just not the nature of how things were set up.
Yes, I definitely want to be clear about this: I am definitely using rdearman's site to experiment with both the technical and the social aspects of phpBB. If—for whatever reason—we ever end up switching to newer forum software, I want to make sure that we have at least one concrete proposal on the table, and that the community has some experience with it. Switching forum software tends to be incredibly risky and potentially traumatic, and attempting to do so has destroyed more than one community in the past. I'll comment more later; I have other responsibilities that await. :-) EDIT: Improve clarity and fix obvious errors. Edited by emk on 23 July 2015 at 4:11pm 16 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| aokoye Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5540 days ago 235 posts - 453 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese | Message 64 of 178 23 July 2015 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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This all could have been mitigated had FX been on top of things. Yes it's the summer and yes he ay
be on holiday - but this isn't the first time serious admin issues have fallen by the way side. I mean really it's not as if FX posts on this website anymore to begin with. The site isn't maintained and what some people appear to be viewing as "flashy" is really what two generations of change in web design, accessibility, and standards changes. No this website isn't that old, but it functions as such. It would have seriously seriously behoved FX to say, "look, I can't maintain this anymore, I need to give this over to someone else" because let's be frank - that's clearly the case. What's funny is that there's still a "update" button where one can give $39.99 a year to supposedly go towards the running of this website in exchange for really basic things like basic search functionality. Where is that money actually going? It's clear no maintenance is happening and it really doesn't cost that much to host a website of this size that gets as much traffic this does. This site is not easily accessible by phone because of just how slow it takes to load. Heck sometimes it's not even realistic to browse it on a smartphone. Blaming the very few graphics that are on this website for how slow it is a joke. Flickr loads faster on my phone than HTLAL. I like the new website. It is functional, doesn't have horrifying latency issues, and is easy to maintain (in terms of the software that it's running on now. In reality what I would like is if FX got their crap together and overhauled this website - something that is long overdue. If that isn't possible then sell or give the admin rights over to the various other people who have offered to do so. This isn't analogous to some sort of geopolitical schism, it's just plain common sense and swallowing your pride. 12 persons have voted this message useful |
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