On Dec 8, 10:19*pm, Jim Logajan wrote:
Grider Pirate wrote:
*I'm on a bunch of forums. *Some allow embedding YouTube vids, most
allow embedding pictures. All seem to require considerable work to
maintain, and I don't get the impression that they are without cost.

The glider community could carve out a happy home on some existing web
forums that provide multi-media communication. A couple possibilities:

http://www.purpleboard.net/forums/index.php

http://www.pilotsofamerica.com/

Obviously AOPA and EAA have online forums, but they require membership in
those organizations.

One can also easily create forums on Yahoo Groups and Google Groups, though
I think Yahoo has some technical advantages over Google.

There are good options that don't require investing extra time and
continuing administration.

But who is going to run it - third party bulletin boards can do
whatever they want to "our" content and if they run into financial or
serious technical problems then it might all be gone tomorrow. There
are forum service providers that will host traditional forum/BB
software for you, but then you are at their mercy in terms of
operations and reliability etc.

Yahoo groups often seems to have performance problems and Yahoo seems
about to lay off folks from that group. And Yahoo Groups and Google
Groups do things that break stuff or decide to turn off parts of a
service (as Google has done recently) and you may be screwed. I've
seen two separate soaring related efforts to move stuff from a web
site one Google Groups/Sites just to have the bit of this turned off
by Google. Google and Yahoo are motivated by advertising revenue
their groups generates not the needs of the group users (if they did
lots of broken things in Yahoo and Google groups would have been fixed
ages ago).

I don't see how any option except for something say backed by the SSA
would work - initially for SSA focused communication but then maybe
expanding out more generally for USA focused stuff. But I don't see it
necessarily being justified for the cost and effort required by the
SSA.


Darryl