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Proposal for DCS Managers (and members)
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Re: Proposal for DCS Managers (and members)
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CalBob
Proposal for DCS Managers (and members)
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May 12 07 12:25 AM
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Pam, I'm not suggesting that anything other than one's own work be stored by anyone personally. What I am suggesting is that the current data be stored somewhere other than MSN as a backup. This could be done in one of two ways.
One could find an alternate place on line to store the data. E.g., and I'm not implying that this is necessarily the best place, you could create a Yahoo community or whatever it's called these days and move the data there and make that community accessible only to the managers or to whoever is doing the backups. This is a perfectly legitimate and acceptable practice and not in violation of anyone's rights. It's basically the same as copying the contents of a cd in order to back up its contents. It's not a copyright violation to do so as long as it's only used for backup or even if you used the copy for your personal use while copying a cd and giving it to someone else would be. In fact, Pam, I could make a fairly strong argument that the failure of management to back up such data would encourage the very thing that you don't want to happen. If people wanted to assure that certain material would remain available in the event that DCS were to have to move, they might copy those things on their own and that might well be a violation of the original author's copyright protection while simply backing it up would not be.
A second method would be to copy the data to some portable medium such as a zip drive, a portable hard drive, etc. In either case, I'd suggest that there be at least two copies of the backups and that they be in the custody of at least 2 managers.
In any case, it seems to me to be much more important to worry about the backing up the data we already have than to worry about moving DCS at this point. As far as the purchased domain, since, as I understand it, that's really a non issue plus discussing that further would entail my discussing what happened in the past and, while I'm very tempted to do so, I want to resist that temptation for two reasons. First, one reason for having a Manager's site is so that the managers can discuss things privately. Secondly, I was always taught and I firmly believe that, when making decisions, you don't worry about what happened in the past particularly in areas like cost. E.g., just because I have a license to sell insurance doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best thing for me to spend my time doing.
As far as your argument that just because people haven't jumped on the bandwagon regarding this change doesn't mean that they don't want, or, at least that they wouldn't be willing to make the change, I'm afraid that, if I were accepting a change to anything, whether it be DCS, or a business, I'd want to make sure the most of the people, who were affected, were on board. Otherwise, the change is doomed to failure.
Also, I make my living primarily as a consultant. I generally make recommendations to management on things like whether or not they should implement certain changes. The one thing I absolutely never do is give them only one choice. Ideally, I give them 3 to 5 alternatives always including keeping things as they are. As objectively as I can, I give the pros and cons of each alternative. Also, unless specifically asked to do so based upon clear criteria provided to me, I don't recommend one over the other. To the extent that I can, I give them the pros and cons of the 2 to 4 best alternatives to the existing situation as well as the pros and cons of the existing situation. I know that there are at least 50 other alternatives to MSN and vBulletin and, if I were still in management, assuming that there was time to act, I'd want to know the pros and cons of at least one other alternative and I don't mean an alternative purposely chosen to make one particular idea to look good or bad.
Part of the problem that I see here is that the criteria of what is wanted or desired in a usernet type website on which to house DCS have not even been determined as yet. E.g., some people seem to want a lot more security. Others are quite satisfied with security, or the lack of it, as it is. You mention that vBulletin has features that MSN doesn't have but, so far, I've seen no indication that any of those features would be used.
There's also the issue of people learning how to use another site. Certainly, it would mean that the existing managers would have to learn some new things as well as the consumption of time for people who donate their time. Also, would a new site really be transparent to users or would the look and feel of another site be somewhat different? Having experience on several different Usenet type sites, they're all a bit different and, if you moved the site, what you'd be asking people to do is to undergo certain changes at a time when they're already undergoing some tremendous changes in their life.
It's not my purpose here to determine whether or not vBulletin or any other alternative site would be a better option than what we currently have. For one thing, that issue is far more complicated than what can be reasonably presented or discussed in a forum like this. Also, as I already said, somebody, ideally the managers, would have to determine on what criteria they'd want to evaluate alternative sites. To discuss that on here would be far more complicated and involved than would be reasonable in this type of format.
So, it seems to me that, before we even think about moving anything that there are two things that management needs to do. The first is to back up the existing data as well as establishing some procedure for back ups in the future. The second is to decide what criteria would be wanted if it were necessary to move the site. It seems to me that this would be a rather lengthy discussion and is not something that can be easily facilitated in a format such as this.
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