Linn Forums

I wondered if Linn would be interested in uploading the archives of the Linn Topica Mailing list into a dedicated section of this forum.

The Topica Mailing list has been the closest alternative to an official Linn forum for the last few years, and the wealth of information contained there would I believe be a great addition to this new forum.

I can understand that Linn might have doubts in doing this. For example it seems that Linn personnel will be actively involved on this board, and no doubt many of the Topica posts would have received an official response quite differently to the original reply.

Nevertheless please consider this suggestion as another nod to the new openness of Linn :-)

I have mbox format files of all topica posts up to the end of 2007 so technically it should be quite easy.

Sean Hinde
(Klimax DS, KK, LP12, 350 passive, 4* Klimax Chakra Twins)

+1

Count me in!

Great idea!

Another vote in favour from me, too.

There's a lot of very useful information in there. If there are concerns about it in the context of the rest of the site, it could be in it's own section of the site, with appropriate caveats about the information.

I definitely agree with that. Most Linn Topica members have been waiting for an official Linn forum, but are reluctant to lose the information accumulated on the Topica discussion board.

For fellow Topicans, might I suggest we use the same screen name as we used on Topica - to make it easier to identify each other?

I'm happy to provide space on the linn.co.uk community servers if the Topica lists contains information you would like to archive.

Before we design a technical solution, can you consider the following:

* What are the benefits of moving the Linn Topica list? Topica is "live". It is unlikely to be deleted. It is indexed by google, and can be accessed and added to in its current form.

* The archives are unlikely to be in a form that could be importable into this Forum software (MyBB). As a consequence, it would be a read-only archive.

* Would the "owners" of the Linn Topica list delete the Topica list and move it here, or would there be two copies? Wouldn't that be confusing?

* Would whoever "owns" the Topica list, or its members mind closing the list? Maybe there will be people that don't like this new forum? It's not the intention of this forum to "kill" the Linn Topica list.

If you can agree on resolutions to the above, and everyone is happy then we can discuss a technical solution to moving the Topica List.

One further thing - the engineering time I can commit to the community sites is limited - please consider if there are other online tools that would be more beneficial.

Hi,

One of the issues I see in the take up of this Linn site is OpenID* Make a look here (https://www.idselector.com/) at quite a nice solution that Linn may wish to adopt.

Rik

*I think that OpenID is a great thing but it still has its teething problems.

That's great. Let's see if we can work out a way and whether it is really what everyone wants. I will pass on your questions to the Topica list and see what comes out. I am not the Topica list owner, and cannot of course speak fully for Topica members, but below are my views for a starter:

Actually it is not well served by Google. Any results from a general Google search appear way way down the google page rank, and it seems not to be completely indexed. Linn Topica is a really hard to find site.

The Topica site itself is pitiful. The built in search never returns results from after around 2005, and it regularly suffers outages, blanked e-mails and other such ills.

There has been many a discussion there about moving somewhere else.

I guess that would be fine. I have written a simple spider that crawls the topica web archives and puts them into the very simple email mbox format. A quick search of the MyBB web site does not suggest an easy way to import these files though...

I will ask. It is fairly common to mirror mailing lists to bulletin boards, and I am involved in one mailing list which has bi-directional posting between two totally different systems (one being phpBB using the mail2forum extensions).

So yes, probably a bit confusing ;-)

My guess is that Topica folks will watch for a while to see how this board is moderated, the general tone (e.g whether commercial interests start to dominate or ?), and how the involvement of Linn personnel alters the character from a purely enthusiast driven site. I will canvas opinion.

Sounds good.

Possibly so. I have been wondering about whether there is a benefit in setting up a separate hosted forum and providing bi-directional mirroring between the existing Topica mechanism and the new forum. This has not got much past the wondering stage, and the appearance of this forum makes that seem like even more duplication. But let's see.

Thanks for giving this idea your detailed thoughts and consideration.

Cheers,
Sean