Hi John. Thank you for your last post regarding future changes and asking for opinions. I have copied portions of your post and inserted my thoughts."HOW ABOUT THIS, THEN: INCORPORATING A CHAT FORMAT INTO ONE OF THE FORUMBOARD'S MAIN LF CATEGORIES?"
I think this would be a good feature.
"It would be like a chatroom in terms of simple and quick posting, but messages would remain visible and answerable for a week or more, and would self-archive for future reference. I envision reading chat posts in a browser page that behaves differently from the rest of the forum, allowing you to scroll, read and respond to existing messages as if they were in a plain regular forum, if you happen to be in the room alone. However, if someone else joins you in reading, either of you can initiate a sorta-live session. (I say 'sorta' because I don't like to push content in AJAX, so there will be a few seconds of latency.)"
This format has properties like the ON4KST chat rooms which I would like to say are fun and super effective in setting up skeds or passing info on a real time basis with others. I used to use them all the time when setting up 2m MS skeds or 2m EME skeds. Highly recommend this.
"As with the rest of he forum, assume EVERYTHING you write will be visible to EVERYONE in the known universe, so use good sense.
"Conversely, however, it may be necessary to limit posting in chats to only Authenticated Authors! Would that be too limiting?"
Yes it would IMO.
"If we have do that, would it inconvenience anyone to have to log in with your Author credentials for every session? Or should we join the 20th century at last and start using cookies at lwca.net to keep from having to log in as often?"
Let's join the 21st century please. I like chocolate chip cookies !
Just my additional 5 cents on this question and maybe several other points that are related.....No to posting by Authenticated Authors only. That number is small and I imagine not getting bigger each year.
Does the ownership think that keeping the club or membership a closed and private entity is the best way to move forward? I am not judging here, just wondering.
It seems to me that there should be a desire to grow and expand the membership above anything else any way possible. Imagine if instead of the same 4-5 people making posts per week we had 20 or 30 sharing ideas and reports etc? WOW that would be cool.
BTW, I wonder, of the current membership, how many are "youngsters" (say under 60 years old)? Probably not too many. Would it be possible to make a poll to get demographics of the userbase? It might be helpful in making future decisions.
I have no idea what the membership numbers have been each year, for say the last 20 years, but if I had to guess I might guess that they are tending to decline with each passing year.
Having said all this would it not be a good idea to open up membership to the public to draw in more people who, in the case of (LWBC), have an interest and now will have a place to go and is easily accessible at any time? IMO only the most dedicated and able individuals are going to renew memberships with annual dues and financial contributions.
Anyway, these were just some thoughts as I read your questions....it is above my pay grade to decide what is best for the group but it does seem to me that opening it fully up could bring in many new voices and increase participation and activity. Maybe try it for a year and see how it goes.
"Or, if we want to keep posting to chats available to all, much as this board is with basic posting for all and expanded privileges for Authenticated Authors, we might have to very tightly limit size and content of chat posts when not using Author credentials. Otherwise the Spamb*stards will be all over our chat rooms like stink on rice, or white on a cheap suit. Any thoughts in how short would be too short?"
So I should have read this last Paragraph of yours first before I rambled on about opening things up to the public etc. I was not aware that anyone could post on these pages. Forgive my ignorance. For some reason I thought only paying LWCA members could post here. Red faced here now !
So in this case yes let anyone post on the chat pages but continue to let only Authenticated Authors enter messages with URL's or paste screen grabs etc.
What would be really useful would be to have a place where we could upload a WAV file or a JPG etc to share with others. You could make it so that the contents would only be saved for a couple weeks. This would give folks plenty of time to DL the material and then reply etc. Make an option where folks could click a DL button if they wanted to save it to their local drive before the slate gets cleaned. I suggest a size of 5 MB per post. This would allow a WAV or MP3 to be several minutes long or large enough to send 4-5 good resolution screen captures etc.
Or maybe a long term storage facility, like a "files" section as seen on places like groups.IO. That is a wonderful idea where Authenticated Authors can place diagrams, schematics, antenna plans, etc in a proper folder so that others can access them a year or two or three from now.
73 Gedas W8BYA