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Fate of HTLAL | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4535 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 1 of 178 22 July 2015 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are at least two conversations going on that will have a major impact on the future of HTLAL. One of the conversations is going on privately with the moderators, and another with those who joined up the "temporary/emergency" forum software that was created in the most recent outage.
However, strangely and I feel a little worryingly, there doesn't seem to be any open discussion here on HTLAL about the future of the forum. While there is talk about the future forum being democratic and community run, it seems wrong to me that the fate of this community is NOT being discussed openly by the community here. As it seems that a decision might be made in less than a week (?) over whether there will be a mass exodus from this site, I thought it would be worth starting up a thread here for anyone who wants to chime in or who simply wants to be alerted that such discussions are taking place elsewhere. Edited by patrickwilken on 22 July 2015 at 10:34pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5377 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 2 of 178 22 July 2015 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Someone should buy the site from the administrator. Everyone "wins" that way.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| samfrances Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4054 days ago 81 posts - 110 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 178 22 July 2015 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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The conversation at the "emergency" site is here, FYI:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=68 3 Edited by samfrances on 22 July 2015 at 11:18pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 178 22 July 2015 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
For anybody here that I haven't already spoken with via email, PM or elsewhere on the web, here's a quick status update. The forum went offline on Saturday (as several very prescient users had predicted!). Several moderators sent emails to our administrator, but he was unavailable. I successfully reached one of his colleagues via phone on Monday, who very kindly passed the message along and said the administrator would see it Tuesday. Very early Tuesday morning, the forum was back online. And the domain appears to be paid up through 2019 or 2020. The moderators are working to contact the administrator, in hopes of sitting down and having a friendly discussion. :-) I've really enjoyed speaking with him in the past (albeit very briefly), and he put a fair bit in effort into getting the forum back online after several recent outages. We've offered to help out with the forum and its future in any way we can. Personally, however, I'm don't think I'm ready to discuss HTLAL's future in any serious way until I've heard from the administrator. He put a huge amount of effort into building this community, and sometime around 2012, he put in some pretty long hours to get the site back online after it was subject to some nasty security issues. But at the same time, I understand why a lot of people are frustrated with the forum software. There are definitely performance problems, and when the site goes offline, I always worry whether I'll lose most of my posts. (And if we had newer forum software, we'd be able to put YouTube videos in our logs, and we could have pop-up keyboards with hard-to-type characters, and we could improve the experience in a lot of other ways.) Thanks to the enthusiasm of the community, we have more than enough technical talent and volunteers to do anything we might need to do. So at this point: 1. I'm looking forward to hearing back from the administrator, and hopefully having a short discussion with him and the other moderators. 2. Personally, I'll be hanging out here, and in several other places on the web. You can find me on Twitter, or on my French media Tumblr, or on the emergency backup site. Basically, I'm happy to talk with you folks wherever you might be. :-) 3. I've been experimenting with new forum software, and doing my best to put it through its paces. I have no idea whether or not our administrator would be interested in upgrading the software here, but if he is, I've got lots of useful new data. One more thing that I mentioned while the forum down: It's always very tempting to try to resolve crises in "Internet time". But in the real world, people are out of town, or they need time to think things over, or they're off at a polyglot conference. :-) So often, the best way to resolve problems is to slow things down and do them in "people time". Anyway, I'll let everybody know when there's interesting news. But until the moderators hear back from the administrator, I'll mostly just be hanging out (both here and elsewhere) and studying languages. Edited by emk on 22 July 2015 at 11:24pm 20 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 5228 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 5 of 178 22 July 2015 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yet another reason why I would recommend patience is that some people are still experiencing the DNS hangover of the domain being 'parked' and thus cannot access this forum again just yet. Edit: I hope our well-known Solfrid Cristin won't be upset if I mention she is one of these people. God knows who else or how many people are in the same situation.
I think we should wait until that is over before taking this any further. Edited by mrwarper on 22 July 2015 at 11:40pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4846 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 6 of 178 22 July 2015 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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While it becomes more and more obvious that the whole incident probably only arose
because of our admin's unawareness that the domain was going to expire, it still raises questions about HTLAL's future. I agree we shouldn't decide today or even tomorrow whether to stay here or whether to migrate to another site, but I think it's getting clear that something has to be done. An admin that simply doesn't care about the forum any more, doesn't update the software, and lets the domain expire lackadaisically is a problem for all members of this forum. I really hope the moderators can reach him and get a statement about the future of HTLAL out of him. Compared to other incidents I have experienced on this site, this was a minor one, but it might be the straw that broke the camel's back. I for one am losing patience with this forum, all its imperfections, and the admin. And this is despite the fact that I should be thankful to him for reactivating my account after it was deactivated automatically little more than one year ago. The admin came to my rescue and he has done so for the forum several times, but I think he should do more than just intervene in crises. To wit, he should try to avoid these crises in the first place. It simply can't go on like this any more. Something needs to change and to be done! Perhaps not today, but soon, very soon. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| SladeWilson Newbie Canada Joined 3458 days ago 17 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 7 of 178 22 July 2015 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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This site is acting slow for me again. Does that mean it's finally back in full force and people are browsing again?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5264 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 8 of 178 23 July 2015 at 12:22am | IP Logged | ||
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A few weeks ago, I had my 5 year forum anniversary. When I first joined HTLAL, I only spoke two languages- English and Spanish. With all the advice I received and read here I was able to take full advantage of a multi-track approach and take my Spanish to the next level. Then I decided to learn Portuguese and, thanks to HTLAL, I was a much more efficient learner.
I then decided to learn Haitian Creole and Ladino. It's all thanks to HTLAL. I am grateful to FX for creating this forum and giving us a place to gather to discuss our passion for learning languages. I appreciate the forum rules and moderation that keep the forum a pleasant place to be. What I am not too fond of is the lack of communication from our administrator and the apparent lack of interest in updating the forum. Because I enjoy my second languages so much, like most members here, I like to give back because I want to help others to get the same joy that I have from learning a second language to a high level. So, I spend time trying to help newcomers who show a genuine interest in learning a language. Since the first big outage in my time here, around two or three years ago, the decline in new members and their sometimes inane questions (we all had them) has been noticeable and startling.
This puts into stark reality what I have been noticing over the last couple of years or so- we aren't getting nearly the number of new members as we used to. The forum suffers from lack of attention by the administrator and lack of updated software. This is very troubling to me and it should be to the rest of the membership who care deeply about the forum, too. It means we are talking to ourselves more and more. If we are not growing, we are dying. It's as simple as that. When I started to learn Ladino (Djudeo-espanyol), it wasn't (and still isn't) available in the language list. I was told to email the administrator to get it added to my Studies list" as only FX has the power to do that. I might as well have been told to email my living room wall- no response. I know, it's just a little thing. I sort of found a work-around by putting "Studies: Ladino" as a link to a non-existent homepage. The thing is, I shouldn't have to do that. I should have gotten a response or the moderators should have had the power to add it. When I joined polydog, leosmith added it as soon as I requested it. In the new forum, it was as simple as typing it. Many times, in the technical room, the stock response from the moderators is "sorry, only the administrator can do that and he is absent". That's not a good way to run a forum. The lack of communication is really annoying. When we had "The Week That Never Was", when a weeks worth of posts vanished into thin air (even though we were warned by mrwarper that this would happen) we had no communication or knowledge about what was going on at all. If he would've said "Hey HTLALers, i need to do some maintenance and move the forum to a new server. You can still post here but anything you write will disappear as soon as the maintenance is finished, so back up your posts. I expect the work to be done in 5-7 days". I would've been thrilled to see a post or an email like that from FX. We didn't get it. Many new members are driven away by the slow page loads, the inability to open multiple tabs at certain times and even pages not loading after repeated clicks and sql errors. If we're not growing, we're dying. I, for one, will still visit and contribute here. I like the interface and appearance because, well, I'm used to it. I trust our moderation team to "go to bat for us". They are here because they love learning languages too. So does/did FX. I think we are all on the same page about there needing to be changes to HTLAL to secure it for the future. The difference this time is that people who went to the temporary forum have discovered what a huge difference having an administration that cares makes. The moderators have the keys to the cars and can improve the site. It's nice, so far. There are no printed rules, but everyone seems to be self-abiding by the old HTLAL rules. I agree that we need to open a serious debate about the future of HTLAL. I don't care whether FX still wants to own the site or not. What I do want to see, if he's not going to be involved, is that he will devolve operational power to those who do want to be involved and improve the site to keep it relevant for years to come. Letting the domain name expire- inexcusable, especially since we'd been posting about it for months before it happened. Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result, that's insane. What's different now is that people have had a taste of how much better things can be. The cat's out of the bag now. "How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paree?". I want to be, and will remain, a member of the HTLAL community, but the writing is on the wall. My hope is that FX will respond positively to our moderators and much needed change to modernize and have responsive administration will take place. So, I am willing to give this time, as emk says, in a human time frame. I don't expect it to happen in internet time (instantly). Time will tell. In the meantime I will be contributing and helping people in the new forum as well. Edited by iguanamon on 23 July 2015 at 12:29am 15 persons have voted this message useful |
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