After having just lost the forum for almost a week, it seems like it would be good to have a backup line of communication that is separate from the forum and can be accessed if the forum goes out for some reason. Ken has the facebook SOC page, and some of us connected there, but not everyone has Facebook. Some of us are able to email other members, but there were a lot of us that I had no idea how to connect with to let people know what was happening. Suggestions and ideas for this ?
I was so happy when I clicked on the forum ….and it popped up I’m one who’s never joined Facebook however a couple of members have my email address @Yvonne Smith
It is good that some of us have outside contact with other members; but there are some people that might not have any kind of outside contact. I am thinking of maybe an email list that I could set up (offline from the forum) for people who wanted to be on the contact list, and then I could let people know what is happening who have no other contact or Facebook. Hopefully, we do not ever have this happen again, but it would have been nice to have been able to message people when it first happened and then keep them updated.
Glad to see you up and running I haven't been on much recently but it's still good to see your back in business. I don't have Facebook but my wife does she's been keeping me informed on what's going on. Tony
Yay, so glad you all were able to get back up and running. I was beginning to have SOC withdraw symptoms.
Thanks to @Ken Anderson and today @Yvonne Smith pestering the chat jockeys at the host, someone finally took an action. It was probably a simple fix but one of those requests they ignore until they are pestered several times. I chatted with some guy with an East Indian name twice and he assured me they were working on it. I suggest they not lolly gag too much longer or they might be losing customers. It was an idle threat on my part, but little did he know I was a nobody hahaha.
Me toooooooo @Krystal Shay the forum means a lot to me I’ve gotta have my morning giggle on the games or the days just not the same
That's a good idea, Yvonne. I'll throw this out there for conversation: -Create a thread in the Forum area that only moderators have access to -Any member who wants to be included can send a Private Conversation message to the Mod of their choice -The Mod will add that email address to the Comment (since we can Edit/Append any time we want, we'll just update the one Comment.) --We won't keep track of Member Name for each Email address, we'll only add the email address to the list. -Whichever Mod is gonna be responsible for such communications can keep a copy of the list on their computer. Again, there will nothing to identify a specific person/member with each address. The reason I suggest keeping the list on this private area of the Forum instead of only on the responsible individual's computer is so that we can hand off the duty as required. Besides, email addresses are already captured on the Forum in the secure Member Account Database. I do have a couple of questions/points: -How will the responsible Mod receive the status updates in the first place? -Keep in mind that the responsible Mod will be sending stuff out from their personal email account, so all recipients will have that info
A big thanks to each and everyone who worked in getting the forum back and running again ..without loosing any content
@John Brunner if we have a list of email address it will make it easier to try to contact that member or the members family or carers if they go missing I’ve got no issue sharing my email address after all there would be 100’s of businesses and people would know my email address …..sadly that includes never ending SCAMMERS …….
I am not internet/computer savvy enough to have any suggestions ... So I'll just say glad we're back up and running. I will say also that ... if an 'outside' the forum contact is established , it might 'ruin' the forum itself ?
I completely agree. I was just trying to lay out the process so that folks knew the details, and then lay out the going-forward management of the info. I'll gladly participate.
I think we're talking about a behind-the-scenes informal thing where you give your email addy to a specific individual who will keep you in the loop when there are outages. We're not talking about adding your email address to your profile or anything.
Actually, people already can have any outside the forum contact that they choose, @Ron Beforee , they just private message information with each other. The emergency alert system would be just for emergencies like we just went through. The forum has been offline, and we had no way to contact many of the members here to even let them know what was happening or when/if the forum would be back up again. It was looking like Ken might have to completely rebuild the forum from scratch again, and we would lose everything from the last few years, and would all have to register with the new forum. We would have lost a lot of members if that had happened because we would have had no way to let people know the forum had to be re-started. An emergency contact system would be very helpful in this kind of circumstance; but it would always be optional for someone to be on the list, so if a person did not want to leave a contact email, that would be their decision.