I see that the LF forum archives (and many recent questions posted on this page) are now fully accessible on photo.net. Don't know when questions from here will start showing up over there; might this one?
Here's the URL for our new home:
http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1547
......
In my opinion, the Q&A belongs on this site and not on Photo.Net. The Q&A goes hand in hand with all the other excellent information that can be found on this site. It was Mr. Luong who had the original vision of putting this site together, one from which we've all benefited. I think that this site should stay intact.
I would add that the method for taking over this Q&A is of dubious ethics. In fact, it stinks.
Absolutley! At least we didn't need another bloody password system.
While I share some of Neil's and Trevor's trepedations, I think we must be honest. Q. Tuan created this wonderful place using Greenspuns services... and Greenspun has decided to move those services to photo.net... if you live in somebody else's trailer, you go along for the ride.
I think we should also realize that this is a public forum. It has always been open to anyone. The only thing that has kept it a cozy community is relative obscurity. On photo.net, it will still be public but much more visible (photo.net vs. ai.sri.com/~qluong/photography/lf) so there will be more noise... but more photographers will have an opportunity to benefit from this tremendous and unique source of LF info and advice. I am willing to suffer a bit toward that end.
Anyone want some cheese with your whine? Reality is that fresh postings here at greenspun.com can still be accomplished only because the migration to photo.net is being performed incrementally. I'd suggest we all get over to the new location now, thereby making things easier to follow during this transition period.
Neil, you seem to be under the impression that somehow photo.net has stolen the forum from its "home" on Tuan's server. In fact, since its inception it has been running as part of Philip Greenspun's free services on greenspun.com. When you click the link on Tuan's page you were going to another site running forum software. The labelling of the pages is so inobtrusive, and the graphics similar enough to Tuan's page, that you might not have noticed this.
Now that system is in the process of being wound down. As you know, the system has been going down for longer and longer each time. photo.net is another venture started by Philip Greenspun. It is is organized as a for-profit corporation, but in fact it's revenues just cover its expenses and at the moment it is run by unpaid volunteers. However, unlike it greenspun.com, it does have a revenue stream, pays its ISP charges, and has a little left over to upgrade hardware, etc.
Philip announced to LUSENET moderators last December that the service was being wound down. Some of them found other homes for the forums. However 13 photography-related sites were still without a home as Philip was about to leave on a four-month vacation. There is still a small group of Philip's friends, including some of the people at photo.net, who kind of keep an eye on the greenspun.com machine but it is not at all unlikely that the machine will go down without anyone noticing for days at a time. Philip asked us to move the remaining active photography forums that had not found alternative homes to photo.net.
If you have been coming into the forum from Tuan's page, it will look almost the same. It is true that photo.net has very slightly more branding than greenspun.com, so the transition to the forum site is not quite so seamless, but it is nearly so. And the software is almost the same.
So, the decision to start the migration was made with some sense of urgency and in the interests of the forums, for which Philip felt responsible, and because we at photo.net felt that it would be very synergistic with our site and therefore worth the week of effort that it has taken (so far) to move the forums, especially since nearly 40% of the forum participants were already photo.net members.
I would suggest that for now this community move to photo.net instead of dispersing into various sites. As it has been said here, the option to move to a new home from photo.net is not closed if a better solution can be found, even if the unsolicitated move makes thing a bit more difficult. I will elaborate on the LF page.
What I find curious is the number of forums that are being assimilated at one time. The progression seems to have gone something like the following: Offer free services, and when a site owner goes to all the trouble to make the site successful, take it over. This is what I find to be objectionable.
Neil, I think that while it is true that the forum owners are very interested to integrate the different Lusenet forums (and in particular this one) into photo.net to add to photo.net lustre, I don't think what happened was the result of a premeditated plan. The main benefit for Philip Greenspun in maintaining Lusenet back then was to showcase his expertise in DB-backed web sites. Unlike in photo.net where there is a perpetual licence to publish that you concede to use the service, there was no such thing for Lusenet, and legally the current LF Forum data doesn't appear locked in photo.net.
It was certainly not a premeditated plan. Philip announced to the moderators last December that the free LUSENET service would be winding down, and that they should make other arrangements. After six months several photography-related forum had not done so, and the situation with LUSENET was getting dicier and dicier especially as regards to human resources to oversee it. As I said, it was Philip's initiative to have the forums moved to photo.net, and this was not the culmination of some nefarious scheme to steal the forums, but a sincere effort to prevent their demise.
It is not the intention of photo.net to compel people to participate in a forum. We couldn't do so if we wanted to. We want to provide the forum with a home, because operating vibrant photography forums is our mission. But if we can't earn the confidence of the forum members, there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent them from going somewhere else, either individually, or en masse.
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