Post any questions re: the New Forum here.

Thanks to Eloy, Gui, Clayton and Michelle for putting this together.

This forum is designed for help us better organize our DISCUSSIONS and leverage the magic of the internet.

This way, we can have, for example, a "Cat 4 Grant's Tomb" discussion thread that everyone can see if they go to that thread, but which doesn't clog up the inboxes of those who aren't participating in it.

That said, you have the option of "subscribing" to any category/discussion you are interested in. Simply choose the "Subscribe to Discussion" button on the left of the sreen when you are in the discussion. Any new posts will be emailed to your inbox.

Some points to remember:

1. Use your own name, or something like it. This is a private forum open ONLY to dues-paying, release-signing Kissena Cycling Club members. We check this before giving anyone access, so don't feel it is necessary to invent a strange moniker. Use your "Account" page to list your email address, a photo of yourself, and, if you want, your phone number.

2. To embed pictures, videos or links, copy and paste the address of the media into the comments box. It will automatically embed once you submit the comment.

3. BEFORE YOU START A NEW THREAD, MAKE SURE THERE ISN"T A RELEVANT ONE ALREADY IN EXISTENCE. Such as the "Buying/Selling/Trading" thread.

4. Use the "Whisper" function to send a private message to one person, or start a private discussion with one person.

hmm . . . that's it.

Have fun!

Okay, it's finally here.

Indeed!

OK I'm in. Wish I had something intelligent or at least witty to say but I don't. Just trying it out.
I see the advantage to this method of threads to avoid unnecessary clutter but there could also be things people would miss out on that they would have seen on the listserv. I guess we can take this for a spin and kick the tires.

yeah

i think a lot of people would find it useful

i figure, if it's something relevant and important to everyone in the club, listserv

if it's making fun of ricardo ricco, zinging roy, or giving a recap of who said what on a group ride, forum

plus we can incorporate multimedia much better here

plus plus it can work like an easily searchable archive

is there a way to get these items/comments/threads as e.mail?

kind of, but i think it actually detracts from the purpose of the forum

i believe there's a plugin so you get an email update for EVERY message, or, i believe, for EVERY MESSAGE in a particular thread, but either way, that leads to lot's of messages in your inbox

gui can tell you more, i'm sure

the process of getting people onto (and "in to") the forum will take some time, but i think we shold take the long view here and leverage it for what it's good for: discussion

JP brings up a valid point. Many people prefer to receivne from the Groups list serve as individual e-mails on each post. I think, in part, this is because they don't want to go to a seperate site for group discussion. Such people would likely want to continue with e-mails regardless of which site is supporting the discussions. It may become important to have such an option.

important distinction: as far as i understand, the "email notification" only works one way: they can receive forum updates in their email, but cannot participate/add to the forum from their email.

if there is a need for this, we can set up the option

i think there's a good argument to be made for "email for announcements, forum for discussion" distinction. regardless, there will have to be a test run and it will come down to whether or not it improves communication and people like it. personally i like the notion of being able to, say, have a big ol' tactical discussion with a squad reg'ed for one race, without cluttering up everyone's email.

anyway, thanks to those who worked to pull this together!

I wonder how much people are going to actually be in front of their pc to participate. I know this is not meant to replace the Yahoo group, but there will confusion as to its purpose.

I can re-enable the plugin that lets members get notifications. With the plugin any member can subscribe to a thread, or to the entire forum and receive an email notification each time a message is posted. William and I discussed this plugin and decided it might be counter-productive, but I'm not opposed to it. Keep in mind that it does not aggregate messages so members are notified for each message, not once a day or once a week.

Right now we're letting this evolve all loosey goosey but once the content begins to become more abundant things can be organized in categories, or stickied if/when they're relevant. For example, a "catch kissena" thread could be stickied in the weeks prior to the club championship.

There are probably lots of features that active users will learn about as they become more familiar with the forum.

William, Mattio, Alan and I have enhanced our member profiles. On the yahoo group there is a lot of banter amongst people who's email addresses mean nothing to me. Here it is more personal. I'd like to migrate the message from the Yahoo group to an archive area here.

Anybody can create a new thread, on any topic. If other users are interested and the thread is active it will show up near the top of the page, but if it is not active it will not float and begin to sink to the bottom.

I added a few more features....

• Who's online - a list on the top left to see who else is online at the same time as you
  
• Quotations - makes it easy to quote a user's previous message in the same thread
  
• RSS Feed - for those who would rather view the forum via RSS, instead of visiting the web site
  

Cheers.

Those features are valuable and should prove useful. I also agree that the Yahoo group has too many posts where I don't know who it is, (and I probably sent the invitation!).

The notification would be nice because then I don't have to wonder if there has been a response. Also if it at the thread level then I could mute any discussion which does not concern me.

I also added my map location, but found it not the best interface. Luckily I spend enough time with star charts to know my lat and long. Unfortunately I know it in h-m-s and not decimal. Perhaps we could add a link to a site like http://www.stevemorse.org/jcal/latlon.php which is fairly accurate.

testing icon

Maybe I am missing something, but if there are two web based communication tools for the club, won't that get confusing? I think it is important for members to have one source for club information. It also seems there is some sentiment e-mail access is an issue in receiving messages. I do see the how threaded messaging can keep things more organized, at the same time, it also segregates access. At least with the list serve, I can pick up a thread and then when it comes up again, I can make a decission as to whether or not I want to read on. I don't want to have to log on to two different sites to check for any new information and then have to search multiple threads to find what I might be interested in. Also, if the e-mail access on this forum is by a daily notification, that is no different from the digest version of the Groups.
So while the forum does offer some improvements, it also opens some new problems or at the least doesn't solve others.
I would prefer to have some of these issues considered prior to going live to the entire club. While there may be need for improving the groups functioning, this present version of the forum may not be the answer.

In my opinion, we can move away from the forum completely and use another mechanism (twitter and/or email blasts) for announcements.

Posted By: GuiIn my opinion, we can move away from the forum completely and use another mechanism (twitter and/or email blasts) for announcements.

oops, william just pointed out to me (via a whisper) that is not at all what I meant.

I meant that I think we will move away from the yahoo group and onto the forum for discussions, and use another mechanism for email blasts or announcements. But this has to start happening soon, because once the 2010 season is under way, everyone will want to continue talk about existing topics in the same place where they have already been started.

I'm still not sold on this forum.

I think we have many topics that should be in front of the entire membership. Rides, race info, race results, training and gear queries and so on. I am concerned that group communication will suffer if we implement this forum. For all the peanut gallery comments that can be annoying, there are plenty of things that are worthwhile. I think a big weakness of small clubs and CRCA subteams is that they have such a small knowledge base that all of them are busy figuring out how to reinvent the wheel when they could get the answer they're searching for in a fraction of the time if they just had more people around. People complain that peanut gallery comments are a waste of time. I'm not disagreeing, but I think not having the broad knowledge we have is a greater waste.

Even small things like race strategy can often be puzzled out better and faster on the general list.

I have a dedicated mailbox for Kissena stuff. I scan and delete pretty freely. I currenlty don't see this as an improvement.

subscribe test

indeed.

Norm started this thread on the email list:
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Apologies if I've overlooked the guidance on this subject, but is there a plan to retire the Yahoo Groups list --eventually-- towards getting everyone onboard with the new Forum?

Seems like having two resources so alike will bring about quite a lot redundant posting, missed replies, and general confusion. Supposing these problems are likely, I would hope that we retire the Yahoo Group and just maintain it as an archive of past discussions (since it contains so much valuable content on advice, race reports, etc., etc.).

However, if we are to continue posting to both of these community resources, what's the protocol for posting in one vs. the other vs. both?

Thanks,
Norm

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Mattio's reply:
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I would recommend email for announcement, forum for discussion.


So, Norm, if you wanted to call attention to your spooky thread, you could do so with a link to the thread, and a short blurb. And people could (and should) respond there.

violating my own suggestion by discussing this over email...
mattio


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My thoughts:
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I don't recommend keeping both long-term since subscribing every member to both, and expecting people to keep up with both, is more trouble than it's worth. We wanted to keep both alive for now just in case the forum didn't work out, but the goal was to use the forum exclusively (depending on how people think it's working out).

We wanted to make a decision within a month after the forum started, so holler... is the forum working? Anything you'd change?

Well the really nice thing about the forum is the subscription feature. We can ask everyone to subscribe to an official "announcements thread" which would do away with the need for the yahoo group.

i think the forum is working excellently. i like this type of posting more than the yahoo group because it's easier to keep up with and more organized. though i didn't mind sifting through all the e-mails in my inbox, the ability to see what everyone has said on a topic at once is nice compared to opening up six e-mails to read everybody's responses.

The web forum format has some nice features over yahoo groups or listservs but this version of vanilla forums is pretty ancient and not at all mobile-friendly. E-mail integration with the yahoo group + a threaded mail client worked great and was much easier to read, IMO.

If we upgrade Vanilla to 2.something, which automatically does The Right Thing (TM) for mobile phones, then it would be a better replacement for the yahoo group / listserv stack.

If it's too much of a pain to maintain vanilla upgrades on the existing hosting account, we could get a free hosted forum at http://vanillaforums.com/plans and store a link to the club's Google Docs for all shared document storage.

My $0.02.

P.S. I'd certainly be willing to help with porting this forum's data to a newer hosted vanilla instance and any system administration if need be.

Good points, Rich and thanks for the great suggestions. I believe we're using 1.x because of some limitations of the hosting service; Gui has the details.

What exactly is Doing The Right Thing for mobile phones? That plus making notification emails' subject lines show the discussion topic are highest on the forum wishlist, I think.

On another note: One cool thing I've noticed is that if you set Safari/Chrome preferences to open new tabs with "Top Sites", and this forum is one of your top-visited sites, you can see how much new activity there's been just by seeing how much of the thumbnail is yellow whenever a new tab is opened.

Posted By: mishmoshGood points, Rich and thanks for the great suggestions. I believe we're using 1.x because of some limitations of the hosting service; Gui has the details.

Nod, it's entirely possible that the current server environment doesn't provide some dependency required to run Vanilla v2; That's where the suggestion for the hosted instance came from.

What exactly is Doing The Right Thing for mobile phones? That plus making notification emails' subject lines show the discussion topic are highest on the forum wishlist, I think.

Well Vanilla 2.x automatically themes the forum for mobiles when it detects a mobile browser, like:

http://vanillaforums.org/applications/vforg/views/features/images/mobile.png

It has quite a few updates over 1.x. Perhaps better e-mail notifications / digests are included as well.

So, over on the old discussion group, William mentioned that the plan is to phase-out the Yahoo Group.

(Thanks William... sounds excellent!)

So, once we've proved the Forum is going to meet all our online conversational needs --I would suggest specifying a date when the old group will go dormant so that latecomers can hurry-up and get over here. And, after that date has passed, it would be cool if a permanent post could be nailed to the top of that old board indicating its closed to new entries and that all conversations are now happening on the lively Forum over on Kissena.info

-Norm

Is anyone "maintaining" the forum. Maybe we can post some guidelines or suggestions to make it more efficient and user friendly. For example, there are 3 or 4 discussions regarding weekend rides. I don't think we need a new discussion for every weekend. I think it would be better if we had one discussion for weekend rides and the latest info for that weekend would be there. Michelle or anyone have thoughts about this?

Is it OK to post this?
Great deal at Coloradocyclist.com
Reynolds DV46C Clincher Wheelset Shimano
List Price: $2475.00
Our Price: $1399.99

Posted By: StéphaneIs it OK to post this?
Great deal at Coloradocyclist.com
Reynolds DV46C Clincher Wheelset Shimano
List Price: $2475.00
Our Price: $1399.99

yeah, but not in this thread

repost it in the "Buying/Selling/Trading" thread (it is marked as "sticky" near the top)

this is the thread for general questions about using the forum

In General: before you post, take a moment to see if there is already an appropriate thread for your message

best,

-william