It is less confusing than two societies. They will both be linked. I would compare it to how there are many sub forums on some sites, such as 4chan. The differentiation can be by the 'chapter' of the society, if wished, and eventually our forums will be replaced by a more 'social' sorta beast that does not use smf. This difference in the end will differentiate them. I agree it is not ideal, but I feel it is better than what we have going on now which is essentially the same problem but multiplied by an order.
I don't think it is an improvement. Right now, the situation to a newcomer is fairly clear: there are two distinct Flat Earth groups, with distinct branding and distinct communities. Our respective branding is used everywhere, so that it's fairly clear to a newcomer which Twitter account is associated with which society, for instance. They aren't always clear on the relationship between the societies, but at least there is no confusion about the fact that they are separate.
With this proposal, there is one unified society, but if they want somewhere to ask a question, they have to choose between two communities. There is no way they can be properly informed about the differences between those communities in a way that is concise enough to aid their choice, which means that in practice whichever community is linked first from the homepage is going to receive the majority of new users. Whichever ends up receiving new users is going to be more attractive to regulars who want to answer those questions, sapping the life out of the other one.
In effect, we would end up with a slow, painful merge of our communities rather than a quick and controlled one. Not to mention the likely arguments this will create over whose community gets to be more prominent on the homepage once we both have access.
One die off quietly.
In that case, how would we coordinate access to the unified Twitter feed? Would we be able to tweet things under the unified banner, as we can with our own social media right now?
Ok, will you talk to him for us then?
I think it makes the most sense to do this the way we did previously, where we come to some tentative agreement and then I post it in a thread on our forum for everyone to comment on.
I believe this will be resolved by the other assurances you mentioned. You will have access to the servers and git to resolve any problems you wish.
I'm not sure this adequately covers it. Part of our approach to setting reasonable expectations for our members is that we aim to communicate non-trivial changes in advance and give users the chance to comment on them. Over here, the homepage frequently has changes silently applied, often ones which break the layout for months at a time. Having the ability to fix this when it happens is better than nothing, but with our current site, we can ensure it does not happen at all.
If you want to interview us for competence before we gain access to make changes, should we not have the right to interview you?
Yeah. I assure you, you can. We can figure this out I think. A botched execution of this will be a huge burden to both of us for the foreseeable future, so trust would become a vital necessity.
I would really like to believe that we can, but the past 9 years of experience with this site's administration isn't encouraging for me personally, and I suspect it also won't be enough to be assured for our other members. Even now, you are refusing to remove the word filter preventing people from linking to our site. What level of trust does that imply?
I want to be able to provide to your side a unified post history as that is important to you, but means nothing to us. We don't want our forums to be merged however and our user base and moderation agrees. This seems to be the way to do that with the least resistance, especially as we move towards the new platform.
A unified post history is not very important by itself, particularly nowadays. As I said in my previous post, we are now in a much better position than we were two years ago. The discussions we once had here are getting older and less relevant with time, and I personally think that unifying them in this particular way is not worth the maintenance cost.
What is more important is the ability to reliably cross-reference between threads on both fora. We fairly regularly reference old threads on here which have valuable content. This is currently made difficult by several factors:
- This forum has had semi-regular purges of old content ever since I joined, leaving it in doubt whether a given thread will continue to exist indefinitely.
- The frequency of outages on this site makes it hard to be confident that a given thread will be available to read at any given time.
- The word filter on our forum URL makes it difficult to reference back to our forum from here.
We will be moving away from smf and decentralizing our systems, partially through use of rest interfaces. Also, the size of our database will cause several issues you may not yet be aware of. This will allow us to hide the cost and infrastructure of a real search system such as elastic or solr.
Semi-tangentially to the reunification discussion, I am (vaguely) aware of your plans in this regard, and to be entirely honest I do not think it will end well. Correctly maintaining a decentralised infrastructure held together by APIs is a challenge even for companies that specialise in web development, let alone a society which should be focused on Flat Earth science. This is either going to be a huge time sink, or it won't be done correctly and everything will end up horribly broken, or both.
We are also not huge fans of SMF, but maintaining an entire discussion platform is not something we have the time or inclination to be doing ourselves, which is why we're sticking with it. It is important to know one's limits.
Unifying data from two sources always has a huge host of issues that come with it, and ultimately will end up destroying or mismatching data it shouldn't. The appropriate way to deal with this, imo, is to provide a service that will handle it and hide it from whomever is using the data. While you are right that one is a one time cost, it is a one time cost you can't reverse. By hiding this cost behind software, we instead are able to modify that one time cost through changes later as well as maintain our data sources integrity.
To the end user and developer, it will appear as a unified history.
Rather than being
able to modify it, we are instead
required to modify it every time we make a change to the database schema of either platform. This would immediately double (at least) the cost of any large-scale changes to either forum. For instance, were we to upgrade our forum to SMF 2.1, we would also need to modify and test this shim API to deal with that database change.
I do not currently have the confidence that anyone on either your side or our side has both the time and the competence to justify that cost for what small benefit it would bring.
If you would like to choose another person to be the point of contact, I'm happy with that too. I realize this came out of nowhere and you might not have the time you'd like to devote for it.
I'm not sure we have anyone else with the time to devote for it. I'm happy to proceed for now, but I'll let you know if that changes.
I do not want this to become too long drawn out or complicated in its nature.
Similarly, we do not want to rush into a bad deal. As it stands, you are asking us to shut down our site and make a bunch of concessions to you without anything in return. In particular:
- You want us to move our forum to a domain you control, despite having no interest in merging communities.
- You want to have some say in our wiki content, despite not wanting a wiki of your own.
- You want us to go along with your platform for the homepage, with you handing out access as you see fit.
- You want us to give up at least some of our social media accounts.
- You want us to give up control over our own branding.
- You want us to give up our homepage with links to all of these things that we have worked hard on for the past four years, during which time you refused any attempt at reunification, effectively forcing our hand to compete with you.
What exactly are you giving us in return, apart from limited access to do things on your site that we already have in full on ours?
If you don't want this to become drawn out, you'll have to stop acting like joining you is some sort of privilege. We do not need you, and while we are interested in unity for the good of the society, it has to be under fair terms.
What would make you trust us?
Removing the word filter to show that you trust us would be a good start. Aside from that, asking us what we want out of a merger instead of lecturing us about your grand vision would work wonders.
Personally, I think we need to do this incrementally in order to work out trust issues over time. There is no way we are going to trust each other well enough to merge the societies in one fell swoop.
He was antagonised and made fun of for your entertainment and when he reacted you banned him on account of 1 members dumb suggestion.
Again, this is not what happened. One of our moderators engaged in arguably questionable behavour, but before it could be dealt with properly, İntikam demanded attention by resorting to threats against an admin who hadn't even been online for the entire event, and couldn't possibly have intervened. That is not the kind of person I or anyone else wants on our forum.
And please stop saying it was "on account of 1 members [sic] dumb suggestion". The decision to ban him had already been made independently; the reply to that member's suggestion was just a way of communicating the fact.
To be fair, I recall Thork from the other site did something very similar to me and threatened (or actually did?) to get me reported as a terrorist to several legal bodies including the FBI. As a foreign national, at the time, this was pretty concerning. At the same time he also tried to recruit PP to hax our pagez. Thanks again to PP for instead doing the right thing and letting us know back when all this happened.
I have no recollection of this event, so I can't really comment on specifics, but I searched for the phrase "appropriately punish Thork" on our forum and came up with nothing. Did this happen on this forum, or in private, or...?
Point being, having two societies simply divides many of the efforts we both put towards the Flat Earth Society. It also puts both of our societies in a weaker position on a number of fronts.
While true, I maintain that unifying the society while leaving the forums separate is not a good solution. It will inevitably lead to one forum being considered more "official" than the other, as new members will want to know where to go to ask questions. This is as good as a demand for us to shut down our forum entirely, it just takes a little longer.
That said, if this is truly a deal breaker, I'll go along with it so long as moderation agrees and the user base does as I don't moderate and this would be a moderation activity.
I am still not convinced that having two fora as part of a unified society is a workable approach, so my statement was from the point of view of a unified forum community.