Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Steve Conner, Fri Aug 17 2007, 12:16PM

Yours of course

Seriously, I agree, the home page hasn't been updated in ages, and TDU's photos are certainly nice...

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Tesladownunder, Fri Aug 17 2007, 12:42PM

I used my photos because they were accessible to me and illustrate the point. The other two were also on my file. A poll can easily sort out favourites later.
It needs to be brief not a huge gallery. (although that works for my website but probably not here).

I haven't been following the DRSSTC stuff closely but how about a link to a showcase DRSSTC thread and other interesting topics that represent what we do?
How about the registration process? How does that happen now?
What do other people feel about the current home page?
TDU

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
thedatastream, Fri Aug 17 2007, 01:00PM

I also agree with Peter.

I would imagine most membes are like me and have a link in their favourites set to the forum page. However newcomers would generally start on the front page where, other than the side bar, there is no other obvious link to the forum. Since the forum is our greatest asset, we should advertise it so.

A "what we are" (I shall refuse to call it a mission statement) and a "what we are not" statement would also be good as well as some nice pics.

Since my web design skills are limited, I will defer to others on suggested layouts.

Good suggestion that man

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Bjørn, Fri Aug 17 2007, 01:33PM

How about the registration process? How does that happen now?

If you are not logged on you have an option to sign up instead of logging on with a suitable set of warnings.



In general I think this is a good idea. I don't think we need a lot of pictures of flying sparks. The first one looks pretty good to me for the purpose.

The wiki is in need of the same treatment. It is probably less fun but I think it is even more important.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
ShawnLG, Fri Aug 17 2007, 04:21PM

I think this site needs to be updated as well. I would like to see "Electromagnetic Radiation" changed to "Ham Radio, RF & Optical Engineering". Also the discription words such as EMP and HERF removed since they are not popular subjects anymore since post 9,11. It also helps prevent kiddy bubomb kids from finding this forum and it will attract ham operators.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Hazmatt_(The Underdog), Fri Aug 17 2007, 04:45PM

I know the admin's are going to hate me, but why 1 photo.... why not a small slide show.

(HEHEHE that'll keep 'em busy for a while)

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Dr. Drone, Fri Aug 17 2007, 05:10PM

A Mission Statement would be nice:

“Delight our visitors, members and guest by relentlessly delivering platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we built and test high voltage projects”.


Cheers,
Christopher

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Marko, Fri Aug 17 2007, 10:52PM

Hey, that is a great idea. I also think homepage needs to be fixed in some manner.. I wonder what chris thinks

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Tesladownunder, Fri Aug 17 2007, 11:52PM

Christopher, if you were talking to a friend is that really the language you would use? I think we should keep it simpler.
I couldn't quite phrase it well while keeping it simple. In some respect the pictures give the mission statement.
While I like that picture as it is mine, it doesn't reflect what we do here and I don't think it is right for a single photo. Only a few people have a TC of that size and no-one is using a rotating breakout point except me. Really the most active discussion is around DRSSTC's but they still form the minority. In the 6 photos I tried to convey the flashy stuff (big TC of mine and the exploding easter bunny in the last photo) but also the fact that we make HV and Tesla stuff and tinker with it.
By optical you mean laser I guess so we should say that. I must admit, I have usually put my laser stuff in General because I didn't want it in with HERF/EMP. But that is a separate issue to the homepage issue.
Not a bad idea depending how it is done. Most people looking at a forum to see if they want to join might want to go straight to look at the forum without waiting long to look at pictures on the way. There is also a bandwidth issue for 4HV if the homepage is left on and a download time issue if you want to have a slideshow on 56K and still show reasonable size eye candy.
LOL - Chris will think you didn't read the title of the thread.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Alex, Sat Aug 18 2007, 12:46AM

Good idea. I hate it when I come to a site and can't figure out what it's supposed to be all about. That may very well be how newcomers to 4hv feel.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Steve Conner, Sat Aug 18 2007, 10:54AM

I'd love to be rid of HERF and EMP too.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Alex, Sat Aug 18 2007, 01:11PM

Moved this to the suggestion box.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Tesladownunder, Sat Aug 18 2007, 01:33PM

Shifting this to Suggestion box is probably the kiss of death for the thread since no-one will know where it went. 194 views at present.

TDU

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
uzzors2k, Sat Aug 18 2007, 07:26PM

I think a new start-page would be a great idea! The current start page could be put under a "Site News" section. Has anyone sent Chris a PM yet?

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
LarsE, Sat Aug 18 2007, 10:38PM

I think a mobile version of the forum would be great, is a bit annoying to scroll threw all the menus every time you open a thread with a mobilephone.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
..., Sun Aug 19 2007, 12:44AM

Also, a version that isn't ~100-200kb per page would be nice... I don't know how you people on dialup manage... Or how I will over the next week

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Marko, Tue Aug 21 2007, 03:23PM

Shifting this to Suggestion box is probably the kiss of death for the thread since no-one will know where it went. 194 views at present.

Really, it is starting to look so.

If there is general lack of interest little can be done.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Munkey, Wed Aug 22 2007, 07:56PM


Yes, I agree.
Before I came a member I was wondering for AGES how to register and what was stopping me, I don't remember seeing notices to inform me. Then suddenly I was able to register, Huh? Only now I know that registrations are accepted only for a short time...

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
AndrewM, Fri Aug 24 2007, 01:56AM

Keep in mind that the comments of Bacon and others indicate we are enjoying a certain amount of security via obscurity. Determined, intelligent (?) registrants seem to be able to find their way in, exactly who else are we eager to encourage to sign up?

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Chris Russell, Fri Aug 24 2007, 03:28AM

I appreciate the suggestions in this thread. It's part of something I've been meaning to do for a long time. Let me see if I can address a few of these points, and let you all know what I would like to do.

First off, a front page full of images doesn't sit well with me. I won't deny that there are many visually stunning and impressive photographs that we could put on the front page; I am just not certain that doing so will attract the right sorts of people. It seems a bit self-congratulatory to me, and I fear that it will draw in the "lol sparkz are c00l, how do i built a telsa coil" crowd.

I think the news and announcements section would work well, if we had more to say. The problem is, nobody has any news (I was hoping more people would submit science news, upcoming Teslathons, etc), nobody is submitting any featured projects, and not much is changing lately on the site. I agree that there should probably be something different taking up most of the front page, so that things do not appear stagnant if no major news has happened for a while. Announcements could probably be relegated to a small feed in a box somewhere.

AM has quite correctly pointed out that I have not explained the registration process on purpose. I think we stand very very little to gain at this point by opening up the floodgates and inviting anyone and everyone to sign up. People who dig around a little, or can be bothered to send me an email or PM, will learn that registrations are, in fact, open. Others who can't be bothered to look around generally do not sign up. It is far from perfect, but it is doing an adequate job of keeping out the riff-raff until a proper registration system can be set up.

At any rate, what I propose is this:

a) We finally integrate the wiki into the site. This means the front page of the site will be handled by the wiki, not the forum. Clearly we will need to create a new skin for the wiki, and for the forum, so that they will play nicely together. The front page of the wiki will also need to be updated a bit. I will also start auto-linking certain keywords on the forum to wiki articles. For example, TC or Tesla coil will automatically link to the appropriate article. With any luck, this should keep unnecessary questions down to a minimum, while fostering some work on the wiki.

b) We look long and hard at changing forum software, again. I admit it, I made a poor choice with e107. When I settled on e107, I saw very few issues, and updates and new releases were coming fast. Certain things were just on the horizon, like being able to generate low-bandwidth pages, or letting users pick their own skin, but never materialized. Nobody even got around to fixing the odd way in which posts get marked as read. This time we ought to go with a straight forum, rather than a content management system. phpBB comes to mind as a very flexible forum that will cooperate nicely with mediawiki, but I am sure there will be other suggestions that merit investigation. I know people aren't keen on moving everything over again after just 18 months on this software, but we've run up against a lot of walls as far as what we can and cannot do with this software, and a lot of the issues that were supposed to have been fixed in various updates of the software never were. Either we move, or the answer to any other bugs will have to be "it'll get fixed when it gets fixed."

c) If we're doing a) and b), we might as well rewrite the rules from the ground up. Some things need to be added, and some things can probably be removed or merged. Bonus points if we actually include a mission statement and have the current membership vote on it before implementing it.

d) Once we've got a), b), and c) done, now we can look at the registration process. From previous attempts, we know that any process that requires people to manually review members will eventually get backlogged and fail. We also know that opening the floodgates wide and trying to run damage control afterwards works, but leads to a very very poor signal to noise ratio. I really think that the only solution at this point is going to be the creation of a membership test, one that quizzes people on the rules of the forum, as well as some basic points of etiquette. I am not sure if we need to quiz people on some basic math and science. It might be a good idea. At any rate, even if we use a rotating question pool, I'm certain that some wiseass will eventually post all the answers somewhere, but perhaps anyone smart enough to google for the answer wouldn't make such a bad member anyway.

Speech time. I think, no, I know, that we've got a lot of great people here, people who could do a lot more than just trade jabs on a forum, given half a chance. However, as one of our members said a long time ago, we are spending too much time wrestling alligators when we ought to be draining the swamp. We have accomplished much here, in the way of making information available to people, but there is so much more that could be done. How many good threads are just buried in the archives, never to be read again? How many times will the same question be asked and answered, when it could be answered once, forever? I'm very very proud of what we've done in the past six years, and I wouldn't get rid of the forum for anything, but it's time to grow, expand, and evolve. I feel that it's time for me to either step up and lead this community to something great, or step down and let someone else maintain the status quo. Who is with me?

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
ragnar, Fri Aug 24 2007, 03:34AM

I think most of us are with you, Chris.

Considering that you made sure the search functions and the images were left intact from the last 'archived' forums, letting this system settle into an archive would not be too hurtful if you wanted to try another software again.

So, can I put my quadraphonic plasma speaker system project on the front page yet? =P

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Tesladownunder, Fri Aug 24 2007, 09:07AM

Gulp... All I asked for was an update of the front page.
My 2 Aussie cents worth (= 1.64 cents US).
I personally would be unlikely to contribute much to a Wiki as my focus is on my website.
I would really not want to lose the ** Add your Tesla coil here ** thread (again) even though it is a bit stale. The hit count suggests that it is still very popular.
I too lament the loss of old mega threads eg can crushing or nitrogen lasers but am not sure that this would be recoverable.
I don't tend to look at the news section. News appears rapidly on the forum generally and I set my browser for that page.
The use of pictures in a front page may give the wrong impression but a large block of text and mission statement doesn't really create a great impression either.

Food for thought.
Big Tesla display tomorrow - must go.
TDU

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Steve Conner, Fri Aug 24 2007, 11:17AM

Well, I think we should write "4hv: The Book" It would be like the ARRL handbook but for amateur HV and pulsed power experimenters. You could give it away free as a PDF, and charge for the paper copy. I wager that we really do have at least an ARRL Handbook's worth of useful information here, and I would be happy to help compiling and editing it.

A good start to this would be to dig through the board and find all of the outstanding project threads, as well as threads and wiki articles that answer those frequently answered noob questions. Then collect links to them in one place.

It would also be a great way to go out, if Chris eventually does decide to wrap up 4hv and move onto greater things. It would give us something really concrete to show for all the years we've spent loafing around here instead of working ^H^H^H^H^H researching If he keeps it going, well, we can do the sequel in another 6 years

BP, I'm not too familiar with the "featured projects" system, but I think it's open to anyone who can be bothered to write up their project in the right format (whatever in the world that actually is!)

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Chris Russell, Fri Aug 24 2007, 04:38PM

Steve, that's sort of the point of the wiki. It is "4hv: The Book", in a format such that anyone can read it, and anyone who has something to add can add it. It could also house the projects section of 4hv, as well as threads like "add your tesla coil here", in a format that is more logically laid out and more easily searchable.

A new front page is fine, but the result is going to be more new people with questions that have already been answered. I think that constantly grabbing people who are new to coiling will just flood 4hv with "my first coil" threads, which basically makes us an elmer's forum. I'm not sure that's what we want. A wiki could help tamper that inrush of new blood, and perhaps even give them a way to be constructive when they find information they're looking for.

If there really isn't that much interest in a wiki, then I probably can't change that. However, I am going to do my best to ignite some interest, as this is something I really believe in.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Dave Marshall, Sat Aug 25 2007, 04:23AM

I'm all for a software change. I've been dissatisfied with e107 pretty much from the beginning. Its a usable forum, but its got alot of little quirks that seem to get more annoying the more traffic we see.

I kind of like Conner's idea, but I agree that first we need to reassess our approach to the forum. Perhaps once the Wiki is the front page, we can figure out a way to display a featured thread or two right up front. This would keep the forum highly visible, while still making the bulk of the information gleaned from the archives.

I'm all for it. Just let me know what you need help with.

Dave

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Steve Conner, Sat Aug 25 2007, 11:09AM

Hmm Chris, that's kind of a different (and better) function from what I thought the wiki was meant to do. If we can turn the wiki into 4hv: The Book, then great.

My only reservation is that I'm not sure quite how well our content maps onto the wiki format. For instance, project threads are someone telling a story about something they're building, with a big discussion of it tagged onto the end. How would you write up an existing project in a wiki? A "4hv's greatest projects" section with a wiki page for each?

I'm not saying this to dis the idea of wikifying our content, I'm just genuinely puzzled about how to do it, and I suspect many other people might be too, which would explain the lack of interest in the wiki. I took the approach of writing new material for the wiki from scratch, and I would never have thought of trying to transfer or link existing content into it.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Bjørn, Sat Aug 25 2007, 12:50PM

I think the book is a great idea and worthwhile, but it will not save the forum.

It is the future of the forum we are talking about, have a look at Chris' post count. Not a lot for 18 months and most of them has been to tidy up someone else’s mess. It takes a lot of time to run the forum properly. So much that you don't have the energy to start your own interesting threads because each time you log on there is some fire to put out. So there is a lot of tiresome work and hardly any reward.

The most important lesson we have learned in these years is that people learn by example, the quality of their posts depends strongly on the posts they read the day before. So without someone to set an example and keep everything on track the quality starts to decline and the experienced members gets frustrated and starts to make low quality posts themselves or just turn their backs to the forum.

We have reached a peak where we can't seem to develop any further and we can't increase the membership significantly because there are not enough hard working moderators. Chris is reaching the end of his tether and the moderator team can't agree on anything or do anything constructive on their own without directions from Chris except for some simple tasks like moving threads around.

The answer to this dilemma has been identified as the HvWiki, it is a much more rigid structure that does not have a tendency to deteriorate without a few people watching every step, because everyone is a moderator. It also increases the value of the information because the structure makes it very easy to find the information and all the off topic chat is left out. The wiki would also answer all the basic questions that gets annoying after the tenth time, what was once exotic starts to get annoying when it is repeated over and over again on the forum.

The alternative is that someone else takes over. That would be a wild gamble, it could take just a month and we would be knee deep in google ads and every other link would send us to dateanerd.com. In short there are very few people that are capable of running this forum without getting paid in some way.

There are many advantages with the wiki, it can even display proper equations. There are some things it is not good at like exploration of new concepts. If we put the information that fits the wiki format in the HvWiki and the rest on the forum and cross link the two where appropriate they should support each other very well and hopefully makes us able to develop further.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
thedatastream, Mon Aug 27 2007, 02:47PM

I'm willing to help with the wiki. If we can make it into a FAQ and The Book at the same time then well done us.

Is there a plan for articles that need writing / cleaning up / expanding? If the wiki is meant to be one of the answers, some central co-ordination might help. Otherwise all that happens is loads of "wiki fiddling" and typo correction and nothing get written. More direction on this issue is required IMHO

Following on from the idea of 4hv: The Book, do licensing issues prevent us from using the content on the wiki for inclusion in a paid for paper book or e-book unless profits of said book go back into funding the wiki and 4hv in general?

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Chris Russell, Mon Aug 27 2007, 04:27PM

I agree, more direction will be required in order to get things going. One easy way to help tackle this is for people to create "stubs," or articles that have been created but need more content before they can be considered done. We can then use the list of stubs as a to do list.

The license on this forum, and the wiki, while permitting free distribution and copying of the work, does not prevent commercial use of the work. However, it does require that the work and all derivatives be properly attributed and released under the same license. You could compile some of the work into an ebook and offer it for sale, but anyone who obtains the ebook would be free to copy it without restriction.

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
thedatastream, Thu Oct 11 2007, 07:08AM

Wotcher Chris,

How's the software update going? Just because the discussion has paused doesn't mean that we've forgotten!

Rgds,
James

Re: [moved] We need a new home page, Chris
Chris Russell, Thu Oct 11 2007, 05:22PM

Slowly but surely. I am assembling a suite of software that is capable of doing everything I want, along with a few other goodies that people may appreciate. I think most everyone will be happy with the end result.