Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
All Change at HOL?
When I started this site just over nine years ago, I didn't have a clue about what I was doing nor how the site would grow. I found the platform we still use today by accident and back in the heady emerging social media days of 2007 and 2008 they were great. The platform was constantly evolving and if I ever had any problems they were incredibly responsive.
However, the exciting (excitable?) social media buzz of those days has settled down to a background hum. Many tech companies went to the wall. Our platform hosts have survived, but were bought by a company which if it were a parent would long ago have been taken to court for severe neglect. This second-rate parent has just sold the platform on. Some accounts suggest that the new owner may be less parent and more modern-day slaver.
Worldwide, users of this platform are up in arms that our monthly fees are being doubled, but perhaps more than that, people are concerned about the viability of the platform in the medium term. So it seems like it's time to start contemplating some other futures.
If the platform closes down, not only would HoL face oblivion, but almost a decade of local community conversation will be lost for good. (This would be just one small part of what's being talked about as potentially the 'forgotten century' as all sorts of digitally stored archives disappear forever). That would be a shame for us now as well as for those who come after us.
To ensure our survival and the preservation of the rich tapestry in our archive, we may need to find a new home. As a first step I've reached out to the other Haringey sites that patterned themselves on HoL and used the same platform.
But, whether we do it alone or work with other sites, any move would mean specifying a new platform and then finding someone to make it for us. So two questions from me at this point:
1. In terms of the features we have and the ways things look, what would you like to change and what stay the same?
2. Can anyone help out on the technical side? As you can imagine the site is not blessed with huge wealth! (But we have won multiple awards and are well known in communities around the world....and...and....I guess any solution you make for us can be applied to a huge number of other people currently using our platform and also looking for a new home).
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Nanz on
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Hi Hugh, gutted to hear about the changes going on, but I've seen this before with platforms like this.
I run a few sites and am a Web developer so I have the technical knowledge to help out where possible.
What I'd suggest is that you commission your own Virtual Private Server and manage it yourself.
Depending on the format the content can be exported in, I don't think it would be too difficult to migrate to another platform with some decent database skills.
I've not heard of Ning before but I'll check it out. Ideally migrating to something like WordPress and one of the popular forum modules would be the best way forward, but it's all dependent on the data.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Thanks Nanz, We're not on our uppers yet, just looking at taking precautionary measures.
Another member who messaged me following my adding this post, flagged up the option of Social Engine. He linked me to a web page that might answer your question about archive format. (Useful if Ning's archiver will ever let me sign in!).
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Permalink Reply by idff on
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I think that's the key Hugh, if you can get in to archive the site it should be fairly straight forward to import into socialengine or similar (from my quick investigation socialengine does seem to be the best alternative).
I am a developer but do not have a lot of experience with social networks, happy to help if I can though.
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Permalink Reply by AndrewAW1 on
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https://www.phpbb.com/ is one of the larger free forum providers (although you'd need to pay for hosting). Vbulletin is also pretty popular https://www.vbulletin.com/en/vbulletin-cloud
https://microco.sm/ is very good but I'm not sure whether it's taking on new forums anymore.
This isn't the easiest site to use, the threaded display is hard to follow and the multiple forums make it difficult to work out where things actually are. As a result I, and I suspect a fair few others, just look at the most recent few posts.
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Permalink Reply by Julia on
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I had a very lively health condition forum as part of my team in my old job and we, with apparently a number of other users were moving away from vBulletin for some of the reasons Hugh describes with Ning. We were planning to go with https://xenforo.com/ but I moved on before testing and migration began so not sure how it panned out. Have contacts if you need them Hugh.
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Permalink Reply by Finsbury Park Ranger on
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I've heard great things about 'slack' as a kind of email 2.0. Worth a little consideration maybe as a possible part of hol 2.0 maybe. Perfect for helping disparate individuals suddenly becoming a working team.
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Slack is more for temporal discussion. It's used in the office for collaboration and status alerting. We have other permanent homes for long lived content.
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Slack is more for temporal discussion
If Slack-2Plus is good for eternal discussion, I'd be interested.
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I'm not suggesting Slack replaces the bulletin board. Just like twitter supports HOL I was wondering is Slack could be useful one day also.
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Permalink Reply by ThaiDi on
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I second Microco.sm as a platform too (albeit as a user of forums, I have no idea what it is like to manage!) I particularly like the 'today' option that it offers where you can see all the threads that have been updated today without having to trawl through different subsections. An example is this one: https://www.lfgss.com/
It's clean and clear.
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Permalink Reply by Tullie on
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I'd suggest Drupal. It is free and open source and flexible, and there is a vibrant developer community. The upside (and it is a huge one) is that Drupal can be configured to do just about anything. The downside is that it has quite a steep learning curve (I have now done the same workshop on it twice and can just about build a single page, so I am unfortunately not the right person to do it). So, unless there is someone out there in Harringay who is a Drupal expert and willing to give up their time - or unless there is some funding in the HOL coffers to perhaps pay someone to design and set up the site, and enough people out there with enough experience to maintain it, it's probably not a workable option.
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