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Administrator's Public Blog - Page 3

What's The Point Of Rules?

When certain types seek to break the rules they agreed to. Upon joining a potential Member is clearly given a set or rules that they must agree to before joining. If you really digest what is being requested you will see that is aimed at keeping three types of online users out:

Spammers, Trolls and Whimsical net talkers.

These are all bad because they are the opposite of Constructive writing. They exercise a selfish behavior where the focus is to be placed solely on what they want to do and say regardless of how or if it is conducive to group they have joined. In a real life situation they are the kind of people that newly join a veteran club and tell the members there to change the mascot simply because they have joined and don't like it - crazy.

One would think our Registration process would be a barrier for the above three we are trying to keep out, but it isn't. They insist on joining. There are actually more than what you see on the Intro Board, its just that their Intro is so bad it never makes it to the approval stage. If we let them through we would be full of Intros with less than desirable content.

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A Huge Database

As the Community continues to get bigger the database that stores all the information also becomes quite large. This makes indexing, backing up and pulling resources an almost daily struggle. In the usual process of doing this sometimes the database needs to go 'offline' in order to make duplicates or index itself but I need to find a more unnoticeable way of doing that.

Administrator's Public Blog Blogs Member Public

Moving On From ISO-88591 to UTF-8

Moving the web pages' charset to be compliant can be quite a task. It is not simple as changing the text to say "UTF-8" although some do get by this other pages with data need to be saved in UTF-8 format.

For some of our sites I had to create a macro for batch processing of a conversion to UTF-8. This was nothing compared to changing almost 17 years of data done in ISO Latin 1 format! I made backups, tested, set charsets and so forth but I am finally done with it. I needed to get this out of the way so I could concentrate on introducing the new code for ROK 2. Now on to coding!

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Insensitivity Online

One of the most annoying things online is the sense of entitlement. Someone gets something, they use it, they do not know the work or effort that goes into it but they treat it and you as though it were made for them. In other words, no "Please", "Thanks", or "Is it possible", its more like "Do it because I'm so important". For some reason the internet make some people feel more important than they really are or unmasks their true selves since the way they treat others online might not be the way they would do it in person.

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Picking Up The Membership Momentum

I've recently started to send out nag Emails about the daily events in the Community with the hope of enticing readers to become Posters. My ability to Administrate becomes less and less so spreading things around is a good thing. While our readership is quite large from both in and outside of the Community those actually contributing to the Topics are small compared. These nag Emails also help to weed out those who are just taking up 'space' in the database but are no longer interested in the Community because as the Emails increases so do their unsubscribes.

Administrator's Public Blog

Preferring to be read than to read. I recently performed some upgrades for an administrator on another site. During the process the members there started to complain and post a whole bunch of new threads about this or that being different since the change despite the administrator posting information about the upgrade for all to read. He sent me an Email about his woes of which I am quite familiar but what stood out to me is when he wrote: "They [his members] prefer to be READ than to read." I can relate to that after almost 20 years running this Community but its not unique to my client or myself. I find in general it is human nature to be the focus of attention, we like the exclusivity of having our needs personally met without a thought of what it might take to meet those needs. Such is the life of trying to keep everyone happy while wearing the hat of "Admin".

Administrator's Public Blog - Page 3

The Internet Is Changing So Much! PHP 7 is coming on stream, SEO requirements are different, scripts are breaking down or need to be re-coded and the expectations of users / clients gets more and more demanding. What is a lowly web designer to do? I can hardly keep up, it is worrying mainly because of the way the internet has almost become like a monopoly with a few brand names fooling younger generations (Older ones too) that they are the internet. What works today does not work tomorrow. I need to go in a different direction, but what - I am limited by my situation. I sigh.

Administrator's Public Blog Public Member Blogs - Page 3

Its strange to me that people get so angry over the simplest things. One of the Terms of joining this Community is to receive the Newsletter which is usually sent every 1-2 weeks. Well, you won't believe how angry some people get over it that they take the time to write me an unfriendly message about something they agreed to. One would swear they were getting the Newsletter every hour on the hour. Wouldn't it be easier to simply delete your account by unsubscribing? What is more, they demand that they retain their Membership after such Emails and wishing no more Newsletters. I have to wonder, how much is the salary they are paying me again?