New Premium Membership structure and archive forums

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Further to the message about finding new ways to fund the Forums: we're going to go in a direction that DD has been considering for some while.

First of all: for this month, the ChipIn widget will remain where it is until we gather enough in donations to meet the $60 needed to cover this month's increased database / message storage costs.

However, after that, things will start to change. If you scroll down to the bottom of the main Forum page, you will see a bar offering participation in a new three-stage Premium Membership structure. It'll work like this.

All our oldest messages are going to be pulled into Archive Forums that will not be available to nonpaying members. Members interested in having access to those messages can subscribe to the new Premium "Three-Month Archive Forum View". For USD $15, this will allow you to read all archived messages (as well, obviously, as all the new ones.) This will allow those users interested in having access to older messages to be the ones who pay to keep them in place.

We have also opened up a special Premium Content file area which will contain (as time goes on) quite a few different things -- scans of DD's original notes, exclusive podcasts (different from the WizCast material), author readings, and so on. But to start with, the most interesting things in there will be chapters of new YW novels -- specifically, as of right now, the first two chapters of A Wizard of Mars. (More may follow after that if we can resolve some minor issues with the publisher.) These will be published one per month for (at least) the next three months. A subscription to the Premium Content area that will allow you to view these chapters as they're posted will cost USD $15 per three-month subscription. This membership is for the Premium Content area only, and does not include access to the archived message forums.

Finally, there will be a combined Premium Content and Archive Forum mmebership, combining both the above sets of viewing permissions. That will cost $25 per three-month subscription.

(The new Premium Membership gateway page shows all three options: click here to see them.)

All these transactions will be handled directly by Groupee, our Forum service provider, through its SitePay system. They take a small fee on each transaction and then pass the takings on to DD, where she can apply them against Forum expenses. (See the SitePay FAQ here.)

Work on installing other value-added goodies to the Premium Content area is also now underway and will progress during the month of August.

Any questions?

[EricG1793]

All our oldest messages are going to be pulled into Archive Forums that will not be available to nonpaying members.

Do you mean the oldest messages that are being displayed as of right now are going to be going to Archive Forums, or are messages even older than that, ones that aren't on the site anymore and have been archived elsewhere, going to the Archive Forums?

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Originally posted by EricG1793:

Do you mean the oldest messages that are being displayed as of right now are going to be going to Archive Forums...?

That's right.

Any messages that have been actively pruned out between 2002 and now are gone forever, so they cannot be archived.

However, any message which displays at the moment and is older than about 2004 (we're still discussing how far back the archiving should go) will be pulled into the Archive Forums and will be available to anyone who wants to subscribe to be able to read them.

EDIT: About twelve thousand messages have now been pulled into the Archives. We're still trying to work out what to do about the Topic of Great Randomness, which (due to a weirdness in the software) can't be partially archived: either the whole topic has to be archived, or the oldest posts can only be deleted (not a prospect we'd want, frankly.) We may wind up cloning some of those messages into a TOGR II -- have to find out whether this can be done.

[Cyber Mirage]

While it's not a project I find to be particularly easy, would it be possible to save TOGR into a word document, then delete all/part of the thread to reduce it's size?

The word document could then be sent to whoever wants it by whoever has it, or hosted somewhere for download.

The main drawback with this is the huge size that the file would be. One forum page translates into seven Word pages. multiply that by the 500+ pages and you get a Word file that's 3500 pages long. I highly doubt that your computer would enjoy loading that file...

[EricG1793]

What I would do is somehow make TTOGR display as one LOOOOOOOONNNNGGGG page. (I know that's excessively long, but it makes thing easier).

Then (if you're using Firefox, I don't know how to do this for IE) to go File, Save Page As and save an HTML of the giant page.

[Cyber Mirage]

Hmm.. 530 Forum pages x 7 pages equals...

.

..

...

..

.

...3710 pages...

The problem with telling to load as a single page is, again, the sheer size of the stupid thing. I think I once saved about 30 pages into a word document and tried to open it later. Nearly froze up my computer. Bringing up the whole thread at once will probably kill most people's...

Best way to do it would to save 10-15 (forum) pages in a single word document and keep it in a folder with the 50 or so document's that would result.

[Tuttle]

On the topic of saving TOGR as a word file, this really wouldn't work for some people. I mean, first off that'd be a lot of pages, but would be doable, but you'd be keeping anyone who doesn't use microsoft products limited to only using open office if they want to open it. While yes, open office is awesome like that, I have found it can be an unnecessary pain, and likes large files even less than word does (at least the windows version, haven't tested a *nix version yet). I would suggest using html instead since it'd be openable by a browser (which everyone has to have since they are here...) and looks more like it used to as well as is overall easier.

The idea of pruning TOGR while sounds annoying also sounds like it is a good idea. It'd be nice if you deleted some or all of the stuff to include a download link there to download TOGR if that was an option. I just know personally I'd majorly prefer it being in a more friendly form than word documents, and there are others (while maybe not here) who can barely use them because of computer limitations and it'd be nice to accommodate all.

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Unfortunately there's no way to download a thread: the best we would be able to do would be to get a "dump" of the parts of the database that contain it - and that material wouldn't be particularly readable. It would require hours, maybe days of tedius massaging before anyone could read it. And the size of the .doc would be prohibitive, as you say.

Increasingly, pruning does seem like the best option, though again I resist it somewhat (and so does DD). It's hard to ignore the fact that something like 25% of the entire Forum database is tied up with TOGR.

A thought that's occurred to me in passing: it'd be interesting to have a Forum that was "The Best of TOGR." Members could pick out memorable messages or sub-threads and post them. ...In fact, they could post them over here, at the new Forum structure in YoungWizards.com. And here the material, once posted, will be easy to get at and to print out (a message at a time), since those forums are structured very differently from these.

I'll post a separate message about this momentarily.

[EricG1793]

*Cough*Forget the Word file... save it as an HTML. I said this before... maybe Kathy, Garrett, or Lee has the power to view threads as one big page. Or they could always split TTOGR in to, say, ten or fifty separate pages. Then save those at HTMLs. That's SO easy to do, and there wouldn't be compatibility issues because everyone (that's no over generalization) who goes to this site obviously has internet browsers, all of which support HTML.

And also saving them as HTMLs makes them look exactly as they would on the actual website, avatars, signatures, dividing lines, quote lines, and all.

The only problem with saving TTOGR this way is that there are... what, just below five hundred forty pages, right? So there must be a way for someone to view it as one big (stress the word big) page, or split it in to, say, fifty pages, so there would be about eleven big HTML files, and name the files "TTOGR Page 1", etc. I don't think that these big pages will have a problem with people opening them in terms of power of the computer because the source of the HTML code would be coming directly from the computer's hard drive, which is by far faster than any Internet connection, so I think that this is OK from all angles.

[ATimson]

Any questions?

I do have one question. Suppose that I subscribe in late September, after the earlier material has gone live. Will I still be able to access the material from before I subscribed, or is it lost to me forever if I'm not a subscriber at the moment of release?

[christmas]

The thing about saving the whole TOGR is that hardly anyone will ever read it, so that's a lot of space taken up for something no one is going to read. It would be more feasible to move the older TOGR messages into the archives, the same as all the other old messages. It doesn't really make sense to have them all just sitting there taking up space if hardly anyone reads them...

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Originally posted by ATimson:

I do have one question. Suppose that I subscribe in late September, after the earlier material has gone live. Will I still be able to access the material from before I subscribed, or is it lost to me forever if I'm not a subscriber at the moment of release?

You'll still be able to read all previous chapters, no matter when you subscribe. They're all going into the same protected file area.

Just to be clear, however: none of this material is going to go "free range", i.e. become available to nonsubscribing members / readers, until much closer to the publication date. Probably not until June or July of 2008.

[Cyber Mirage]

Originally posted by Tuttle:
On the topic of saving TOGR as a word file, this really wouldn't work for some people. I mean, first off that'd be a lot of pages, but would be doable, but you'd be keeping anyone who doesn't use microsoft products limited to only using open office if they want to open it. While yes, open office is awesome like that, I have found it can be an unnecessary pain, and likes large files even less than word does (at least the windows version, haven't tested a *nix version yet). I would suggest using html instead since it'd be openable by a browser (which everyone has to have since they are here...) and looks more like it used to as well as is overall easier.

Save it as a .txt file for people who don't have word then. I only say word document because it's the program I use.
Okay never mind... Copy and paste into a .txt works fine, but there isn't any space between the last line of a post and the user name of the next... I doubt anyone wants to go through those and edit them...

As for HTML, well, I don't know how to do that..
And Eric, You don't want to have anyone create a single page version of that thing... It'll crash people's computers...

Oh, I just thought of something. Do the Admins have the power to divide threads? I know some forum softwares allow admins to combine/split threads, but can this one do it? If it could you could just split TOGR off at, say, a year ago and archive it.

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

I dearly wish we could split threads that way. Unfortunately, we can't.

[Cyber Mirage]

Mph.. darn... -.-

I vote we move to a free Proboard or something!

Kidding..

Guess I'll go start copying TOGR..