Good morning everybody...well, almost noon now.
I thought I'd drop you all a quick line or three and let you know how much I have appreciated all of the help I've received from you. There have been a large number of very, very good suggtestions here...and I am looking into all of them.
I apologize that it has taken me so long to get back with you...this has been a very big week. In addition to the FlyerTalk bulletin boards I have a number of other fairly substantial responsibilities...not the least of which is assisting our in house editors with making portions or our magazine "InsideFlyer" available electronically.
I won't go into all of the details at this point in time, but as you can see we have the United forum up and running again...man, has this ever been a fiasco. Randy has been an extremely busy man and it's sometimes difficult to move forward on "controversial" solutions without his approval and this is compounded when you are unable to get ahold of him long enough to explain the situation and it's various remedies. I'll post more about these solutions as time goes by.
Suffice it to say that a couple of the gents from InfoPop had to remove and backup a sumstantial portion of the United forum in order to get it up and running again. It seems to be working fine at the moment which seems to bear out our observations that the hardware and software are not up to the task of handling such a large load. We will probably be doing the same for the other 3 or 4 largest forums on our boards. Randy is adament about having that data available to our community and although I agree it's been very, very trying accomadating such a demand within the limits imposed by the conditions.
I apologize if I have offended anyone by not giving out the hardware specs but I haven't had the chance to clear it with my systems admin...I don't see a problem with releasing such info nor do I believe that he will, but since I'm not all that systems savvy I thought it best to wait until I can discuss it with him. You all of made some pretty close gestimations and I think that, that is something that you should all applaud eachother for...pretty amazing really.
As for alternative BB systems...I have been looking into them for sometime now. I've even setup and tested many on our local server. The list includes "WWWThreads", "vBulletin", "WebCrossing", and a number of other less reputable boards. "Jive" came to my attention through a personal email from an individual who I found very warm and knowledgeable. I've taken a cursory look at the software and have liked what I have seen so far but it'll need to be scoped out a little better. I will be doing a thourough investigation of it's relative strengths and weaknesses here very, very shortly.
I think that about covers it for the time being. Any questions? Comments?
Thank you all again for your time and patience.
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Michael at WebFlyer
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>
2428 Hall Ave.
Grand Junction, Co. 81501
970.263.4201