As most of the veterans are aware, the Forum will occasionally go down for one reason or another. We had that big hacking event two years ago that took us down for a few days, but normally it's something "simple" like what happened today. I'm not a tech guy, so it's all Greek to me (sorry, @ps102 ). But in the event of a future outage, our fire drill meeting spot is over at .com. The fam is great over there and let's us hang out, start threads, discuss the situation, etc. We would obviously provide the same courtesy over here if they ever needed it. All of us mods at .org have a civilian email thread we use to communicate. We all visit the site daily, and with the time zones between us, we usually catch an outage within a few hours and can quickly communicate with each other as needed. And I have comms with Daniel, the owner, so I'm able to reach out to him to handle the tech things that only he's capable of doing. Say what you want about that whole situation--and you wouldn't be wrong--but he's always gotten back to me within a few minutes and fixed what needed fixing. And as I just discovered, I actually have email alerts wired into my .com account, which is the same Homer Potvin. If you PM me through there I will receive it via email. I almost never check that email because it's a dummy used just for forum things, but if .org goes down, that's the first thing I check. Send me a PM from .com and I will get it eventually, but sending it here from .org will get oogatz because I don't keep those alerts on. And you wouldn't be able to do it anyway if the site was down, obviously. Thank you all for your patience. I'm sure this will happen again but we have the crash kit as well stocked as possible.
Whoops. Thanks. Fixed. Scary part is I checked it over like 3 times to make sure the .org and .com didn't get crossed.
Up to you. You can wait until need-be or just lurk to see any updates. I usually don't log in unless I have something to say. I just click on their "What's new" or look for Louanne, Nao, JT or whomever.
You'll find me over there under the same user name also One thing i would note is that we should not abuse their hospitality, we can certainly use it as a ERV, but any .org drama should stay on this side of the fence when we are back up. Its also worth mentioning that .com does also hold some of our less sadly missed ex members and there maybe cheer leading or inappropriate suggestions (like during the hacking event one of our banned members decided to suggest that people should delete their .org accounts for 'security' ) If that kind of thing happens , report it to their team,or let me know and i will, but don't engage with the provocation...we cannot fill .com with a bunch of our drama any more than their drama is allowed to leach over here
Ooh la la how things have changed. But good for the team, that must be nice. Visiting .com made me feel like Tango & Cash when they got stuffed in gen-pop. "I put half of these guys in here." But everyone was super friendly and civil, so all was good. Still weird though.
you want to cut my head off and use it as a basketball, go ahead. You can bowl with the mofo for all I care, just don’t let HIM do it
I like that this mentions in case of Alien Invasions. Also, what do we do if .com is down at the same time? Do we actually have to stay away from writing related sites for x amount of time like normal persons? Maybe even spend our time writing instead of talking about writing? The idea is just horrifying.
I've exchanged emails with people specifically for this reason I havent had to contact anyone.... and I wouldnt want to intrude socially. but it would suck to lose contact completely with you guys. So i have atleast 2 emails if the world ends one day
the staff have emails for each other too... if ,com goes down too take cover in a bottle of gin and wait for us to get the engine running again
I made a dummy email just for Forum stuff. Might not be a bad idea for us to a little mail list together for anyone who feels comfortable sharing. @J.T. Woody i have yours right? Some piece of writing of yours i looked at?
That sounds like an excellent idea. I had this thought that maybe WF can create a group chat in some social media platform, but not everyone has x or y platform. Everyone has email though... can't sign up without it.
I'd be up for sharing my email. But doesn't the mod team already have it? Since it was needed for signing on.
the people i exchanged with werent mods (or, werent mods YET). but if WF wanted to do a monthly newsletter (updates, new threads, new resources, emergencies, etc.), or even an "as needed" one that members can opt in to, that would be cool, too
And only if the forum is up… I could make a list of regular members from the forum database , but technically that would be a breach of the data protection laws. I think to be honest our best bet is to try to get the forum facebook page back or set up another one so that we have an off site way of communicating with members
What about a Discord Server? That way, we would have another forum-like space that could be easily moderated and instant.
I'm really, really not interested in participating in a discord server, nor would I have the time to.
Yeah we're not doing that it just takes traffic away from the site... the only reason is to have a reserve space where people can come for news if the forum goes down... we don't need a forum like space since thats the forum.
If it's just for news and not for users to utilize there are tons of free websites like Wix that could strictly be used as a new bulletin. Those even have built in ways for people to sign up to have them sent to their email.
