THE FUTURE OF THIS FORUM - PLEASE READ

**Josh Wand** · 9-Apr-2002, 17:26

I've been a lurker here, and a semi-active participant in the People Photography forum. I was a bit distressed about the prospect of the greenspun servers going away, so I started writing a facsimile of the q-and-a system in a more portable form than ACS is (PHP/mySQL vs. AOLServer/ACS/Postgres/Oracle).

The result is http://joshwand.com/q-and-a/. Mind you, it's not finished yet (most notably missing are email notifications, but that will be added within the next week or so), but the core functionality is there and solid.

My next task after polishing up the service to current levels is to figure out how to move existing content-- I can write a spider, I suppose, but I might ask philg if he can give me raw database dumps of both the forums (and any others that might wish to move) so I can import them directly into my new system.

I also plan on releasing the source code so that others can maintain similar services on most popular UNIX webhosts.

How does this idea sit with the forum?

**tim atherton** · 9-Apr-2002, 18:32

Hey - looks great. If you can get the email notification up and running, it should be pretty cool.

Yep, the existing material ont here would be a huge advantage

Tim A

**tim atherton** · 1-May-2002, 21:41

Outtages of this list all the time now... kinda annoying. Maybe it's tame to take Josh up on his excellent offer and migrate the lsit to somehwere that works?

tim a

**David R Munson** · 1-May-2002, 21:52

I'm down with that. All the outages, on top of being irritating, kind of make me nervous. This forum and its archives along with Luong's site are easily the two greatest LF resources on the web and I'd hate to see the former lost. It's just too good to lose.

**Wayne** · 2-May-2002, 01:02

yes, go Josh go, if this server is going to keep being trouble like it has been

**Clive Warren** · 22-May-2002, 17:05

I hope that this forum continues in it's present form - clearly a useful resource to large format photographers.

I hadn't visited for a while - I was pointed to a discussion here by Tim Atherton who posted some URLs to the f32.net LargeFormat Mailing List.

Some of you may not be aware of f32.net Large Format Photography. We run a Forum and a mailing list amongst other things. It is essentially a Community of Practice for large format photography.

If this board does (heaven forbid) go to the wall then there are alternatives that have been running for a couple of years.

Best Regards,

Clive Warren http://www.f32.net