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The case against an edit button

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[quote user="Barbie"]Pete will know more as he is more involved than I am with the new CMS system, but a forum upgrade I think is on the cards.
[/quote]

 

Didnt Pete say this forum would be upgraded last year and that never happened?

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[quote user="AndyCanary"]A) Upgrading to any of the top 3 most popular forum softwares in the world would cost nothing. They''re freeware and easy to install. They''d not need ''server'' or operating system changes. You''re talking rubbish. If anything switching to a better forum platform would save Archant money as the better forum software would be more efficient on bandwidth usage.[/quote]I can tell you''ve never spent a minute in the IT or software development industries.Licensing is only one cost associated with software provision. As is platform upgrade costs. If neither are required, that''s great. But you always have to pay somebody to perform the installation, this isn''t a developer installing a test installation it''s a commercial website with hundreds of users, how much will it cost in downtime when performing the switch (assuming, very highly dubiously, that the ads on this site make money overall, rather than as I suspect cover a proportion of the losses such that the site is more viable)?What happens when your risk-averse boss asks how confident you are that the "new" software can handle the loads we experience? How many support staff need training on the administration interface? Does the way backups work gel with the system currently in place?Good lord, thankfully it''s not up to you!

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I have seen so many movies involving time machines to know that it is a bad idea to be able to edit things and who knows what might happen to some of the board members if they even dare think about changing a sentence with a period at the ending rather than an exclamation mark.[:O]

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Alan Grey - Andy Canary knows more than most.. he works for evolution E-Commerce.. google them.

as for licensing. welcome to the world of the open source. Software distributed on a FREE licence and and maintained for free too. why do you think the shift for linux is now increasing.

Steam, Brother printers, flickr and Agarve all develop for free operating systems now...

how many businesses use firefox as their browser of choice? case closed regards to licensing.

and it doesnt take long to traing someone to use forum software....

dont believe the microsoft hype "we are the only, you pay for us and us alone" there are better and free alternatives out there already being used.

Businesses just need to wake up to alternatives rather than stick to Bill Gates.

windows.. the only operating system where you click "start" to turn it off!

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[quote user="AndyCanary"][quote user="Mister Chops"]It would cost Archant money to upgrade the message board software plus possible operating system/server changes or upgrades.There''s no money in this message board.  Meanwhile, Archant have a lot of revenue generating websites which need more care and attention.Therefore there''s no commercial benefit to implementing changes to this message board, and the only way an upgrade would happen is as a "freebie" if other broader upgrades were implemented.  That''s the bottom line.[/quote]A) Upgrading to any of the top 3 most popular forum softwares in the world would cost nothing. They''re freeware and easy to install. They''d not need ''server'' or operating system changes. You''re talking rubbish. If anything switching to a better forum platform would save Archant money as the better forum software would be more efficient on bandwidth usage.B) If there is no money on the forum then why are Archant running Google ads on the forum? They''re there to generate income not to look good.C) Mixing both points A & B together means that there is nothing for Archant to lose. If they improved the forum from the antiquated 90''s crap it is to a modern system they''d get more people browsing and happier posters meaning more traffic to generate more income for Archant.As Jas said there is an edit button in PM''s so it''s just a case that the message board itself is poorly configured. Or for some daft reason edit is disabled.How''s this for irony.. just tried posting and got this:Sorry, an error has occurred.Please refresh this page, or use the back button, and try again in a few moments.If the problem persists please use the ''contact us'' section on this website and let us know the page you were trying to access.[/quote]1. Ask Pete how much money Archant make from the google ads on this site.  Clue - they pay on a click-through basis.2. Your definition of costs is very narrow.  It would cost Archant money to pay for the staff time to configure a new message board, migrate posts, accounts, blogs etc. to the new platform.  I''m afraid I am not "talking rubbish", just taking a broader view of cost.3. Archant staff probably have enough work to do as BAU without getting involved in software upgrades which have no commercial gain.

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[quote user="Alan_Grey"][quote user="AndyCanary"]A) Upgrading to any of the top 3 most popular forum softwares in the world would cost nothing. They''re freeware and easy to install. They''d not need ''server'' or operating system changes. You''re talking rubbish. If anything switching to a better forum platform would save Archant money as the better forum software would be more efficient on bandwidth usage.[/quote]I can tell you''ve never spent a minute in the IT or software development industries.Licensing is only one cost associated with software provision. As is platform upgrade costs. If neither are required, that''s great. But you always have to pay somebody to perform the installation, this isn''t a developer installing a test installation it''s a commercial website with hundreds of users, how much will it cost in downtime when performing the switch (assuming, very highly dubiously, that the ads on this site make money overall, rather than as I suspect cover a proportion of the losses such that the site is more viable)?What happens when your risk-averse boss asks how confident you are that the "new" software can handle the loads we experience? How many support staff need training on the administration interface? Does the way backups work gel with the system currently in place?Good lord, thankfully it''s not up to you![/quote]Thank you for making my point more eloquently than I was able to.

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the google ads arent necessary. theres a digital target to hit and banner ad space is available.

sold on page impressions and in bulks of 10,000. if enought are sold im willing to bet this site doesnt run at that much of a loss.

500,000 visitors came through this site in march and the message board gets 85,000 visitors a month (unique visitors).

selling smart ads (Eg a trophy supplier at the end of the football season) as a banner will make money for the customer and this site as people will click through.

if ad space didnt make money would companies sell it on their websites?

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[quote user="jas the barclay king"]Andy Canary knows more than most.. he works for evolution E-Commerce[/quote]

Just because he works for an e-commerce company, doesn''t mean that he is correct.  I bet if I called Evolution and asked them to do my upgrade, they won''t tell me it''s free even though Andy said "Upgrading to any of the top 3 most popular forum softwares in the world would cost nothing". There will be costs associated with the upgrade, as mentioned by Alan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_cost_of_ownership#Computer_and_software_industries)

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]why do you think the shift for linux is now increasing.[/quote]

You don''t specify which area is increasing. 

In the last 12 months % of users running Linux has declined from 2.02% to 1.45%

http://www.w3counter.com 

As for servers, their market share is increasing (although it''s still a lot lower than it was 3 years ago), but so is Microsoft!  It is other free servers that are losing out as people standardise on the mainstream applications - it is not that everyone is going open source.  The reason is, as Alan Grey mentioned, that there are other costs, and it is cheaper and to employ someone to develop on and maintain mainstream servers (UNIX, Windows, Linux) than it is for the minor servers.

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]how many businesses use firefox as their browser of choice?[/quote]That has also declined, but I don''t know what you are trying to support as none of the browsers have a license fee.

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]case closed regards to licensing[/quote]Not really, but license cost for operating systems is less than 10% of the TCO, based on a 5 year life cycle.

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]it doesnt take long to traing someone to use forum software[/quote]Depends on the user - you obviously haven''t worked with some of the people I have in the past [;)]

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[quote user="AndyCanary"]A) Upgrading to any of the top 3 most popular forum softwares in the world would cost nothing.[/quote]Jas mentioned that you work for an ecommerce company.  Will they do the upgrade for free then?

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[quote user="jas the barclay king"]

and it doesnt take long to traing someone to use forum software.... [/quote]I was going to write a reply to your post Jas, but the poster above beat me to it in very agreeable fashion. Though I will comment on the above sentence with the time-honoured rebuttal "Jesus wept!!"Never trained any IT professionals, I take it?

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[quote user="dhickl"][quote user="AndyCanary"]A) Upgrading to any of the top 3 most popular forum softwares in the world would cost nothing.[/quote]Jas mentioned that you work for an ecommerce company.  Will they do the upgrade for free then?[/quote]Hmm. Tells people something is free which isn''t... if he doesn''t work in sales, I''ll eat my own cobblers.

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[quote user="dhickl"]

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]Andy Canary knows more than most.. he works for evolution E-Commerce[/quote]

Just because he works for an e-commerce company, doesn''t mean that he is correct.  I bet if I called Evolution and asked them to do my upgrade, they won''t tell me it''s free even though Andy said "Upgrading to any of the top 3 most popular forum softwares in the world would cost nothing". There will be costs associated with the upgrade, as mentioned by Alan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_cost_of_ownership#Computer_and_software_industries)

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]why do you think the shift for linux is now increasing.[/quote]

You don''t specify which area is increasing. 

In the last 12 months % of users running Linux has declined from 2.02% to 1.45%

http://www.w3counter.com 

As for servers, their market share is increasing (although it''s still a lot lower than it was 3 years ago), but so is Microsoft!  It is other free servers that are losing out as people standardise on the mainstream applications - it is not that everyone is going open source.  The reason is, as Alan Grey mentioned, that there are other costs, and it is cheaper and to employ someone to develop on and maintain mainstream servers (UNIX, Windows, Linux) than it is for the minor servers.

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]how many businesses use firefox as their browser of choice?[/quote]That has also declined, but I don''t know what you are trying to support as none of the browsers have a license fee.

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]case closed regards to licensing[/quote]Not really, but license cost for operating systems is less than 10% of the TCO, based on a 5 year life cycle.

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]it doesnt take long to traing someone to use forum software[/quote]Depends on the user - you obviously haven''t worked with some of the people I have in the past [;)]

[/quote]just out of general interest for that Linux stat, is that Linux accross the board or just ubuntu, Kubuntu and Mint?

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[quote user="injustice"]What about the case for an edit button?[/quote]it will appear the day Lambert joins Southampton. im sure your source will confirm!

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[quote user="injustice"]What about the case for an edit button?
[/quote]

What about the case for the press conference you said would happen this morning?

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[quote user="jas the barclay king"]
just out of general interest for that Linux stat, is that Linux accross the board or just ubuntu, Kubuntu and Mint?
[/quote]Across the board - it includes anything that uses the Linux Kernel - SUSE, Fedora, ubuntu, etc - too many to list.  (The ones that you mention are variations of ubuntu.)

 

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[quote user="dhickl"]

[quote user="jas the barclay king"]just out of general interest for that Linux stat, is that Linux accross the board or just ubuntu, Kubuntu and Mint?[/quote]Across the board - it includes anything that uses the Linux Kernel - SUSE, Fedora, ubuntu, etc - too many to list.  (The ones that you mention are variations of ubuntu.)

 

[/quote]they are indeed. Fedora is horrible! I use ubuntu religiously now and hate switiching on the windows PC at work every day.

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"jas the barclay king wrote:

"injustice wrote:

What about the case for an edit button?"

it will appear the day Lambert joins Southampton. im sure your source will confirm!"

And is that an open source?

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[quote user="jas the barclay king"][quote user="injustice"]What about the case for an edit button?
[/quote]

it will appear the day Lambert joins Southampton. im sure your source will confirm!
[/quote]

Where did that thread end up at then?

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Lmao there is a lot of d!ck waving going on here.I am qualified to say for 3 reasons:1) As Jas pointed out I work in the software and licensing industry. I have done for many years across many platforms. So I know how it works, and why it could work.2) I have also been involved in migrating forums across with a MUCH MUCH MUCH higher user rate than this forum. It cost nothing except the time to migrate the SQL database across. 3) I also own my own hosting company. To which I''ve helped loads of people set up forums all which were absolutely free. At least 10 of them have higher user rates than this forum.So all the mainframe b0ll0cks you talk of is just hot air coming from your mouth.As for the income the forum generates you''d have to be utterly daft to think that this forum is here for the good of Archants hearts. Yes they probably won''t make a forture from the Google Ads but I''m sure they make enough to make it worth while.And of course the obvious factor that Archant sell advertising space on their main web site. Advertising is a traffic/circulation driven industry. How many people go onto the Pinkun web site and go straight here to the forum? or how many (like me) have the forum saved as a favourite. Regardless every time you load the Pinkun it''s another hit for the web site and helps them justify their advertising costs to advertisers.If you think that text on a page uses a lot of bandwidth you''d be daft. Running a forum is cheap on resoruces and there is NO reason why Archant couldn''t upgrade their forum for little or no cost and see an improvement all around.

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[quote user="AndyCanary"]I am qualified to say for 3 reasons:[/quote]I don''t really care, and I''m not interested in comparing CVs

[quote user="AndyCanary"]So all the mainframe b0ll0cks you talk of is just hot air coming from your mouth.[/quote]No one mentioned mainframe, so I don''t know what you are going on about

[quote user="AndyCanary"]It cost nothing except the time [/quote]That was our point, why we mentioned the total cost of ownership - you have to pay people.  It doesn''t cost nothing like you previously mentioned.

 

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Archant will have an expert, if not a team of experts who could upgrade the server (without any license cost) in their sleep. They''re a large media group who operate via computer so it''s clear that the upgrade would be possible without the ''cost'' of outsourcing it. I guess now you''re going to cling onto the idea that the internal departmental costs of getting the expert to stop maintaining the databases and upgrade the forum (very short job) is going to come at a huge cost.. yawn.

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[quote user="AndyCanary"]I guess now you''re going to cling onto the idea that the internal departmental costs of getting the expert to stop maintaining the databases and upgrade the forum (very short job) is going to come at a huge cost
[/quote]The point was that you came on here saying it will cost ''nothing''. 

I and others just pointed out that it does not ''cost nothing'' as you have to pay people''s time - development and testing. 

[quote user="Andy_grey"]But you always have to pay somebody to perform the installation[/quote]

[quote user="Andy_grey"]It would cost Archant money to pay for the staff time to configure a new message board, migrate posts, accounts, blogs etc. to the new platform.[/quote]

Which you have now backtracked and agreed with.

[quote user="AndyCanary"]Upgrading to any of the top 3 most popular forum softwares in the world would cost nothing.[/quote]

[quote user="AndyCanary"]It will cost nothing except time[/quote]

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Oi, get my name right ;)If only we had an edit button, eh! Seems a good idea at first, until you realise it would be prohibitively expensive.

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[quote user="AndyCanary"]

I am qualified to say for 3 reasons:

1) As Jas pointed out I work in the software and licensing industry. I have done for many years across many platforms. So I know how it works, and why it could work.

2) I have also been involved in migrating forums across with a MUCH MUCH MUCH higher user rate than this forum. It cost nothing except the time to migrate the SQL database across.

3) I also own my own hosting company. To which I''ve helped loads of people set up forums all which were absolutely free. At least 10 of them have higher user rates than this forum.

If you think that text on a page uses a lot of bandwidth you''d be daft. Running a forum is cheap on resoruces and there is NO reason why Archant couldn''t upgrade their forum for little or no cost and see an improvement all around.
[/quote]

At last someone who talks a bit of sense. Out of interest what do you charge monthly to host a site like this which is mainly text and doesn''t use much space. I''ll guess at less than £10pm??

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[quote user="Alan_Grey"]Why is he "at last" talking sense? Would you like to point out any particular nonsense?
[/quote]

 

Haven''t a few people in various threads suggested that it would cost a fortune to update this site and that we have to put up with it being a bit outdated without modern facilities like an edit button for example because its free?

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