[pianotech] List changes - it's a lot bigger than just the lists...

[David Love]

Yeah great.  So heeding Israel's fine remarks I just attempted to post on
the voicing group list a response to Fred Sturm's request for a detailed
description of Steinway hammer lacquering and voicing techniques.  When
completed some 10 or 12 paragraphs later I went to spell check.  It picked
out some words for which it offered suggestions.  Since none of them fit it
allows an option to manually input, which I attempted.  It would not accept
my manual attempts (after several tries) so I finally tried to type it in
and hit enter.  The entire post vanished never to be seen again.  Great
system and no I'm not redoing it.  What a bunch of crap.  The PTG may not
exist for the list but the list members are part of the PTG.  Sorry Israel,
this has nothing to do with boomers.  The system sucks.  

 

David Love

www.davidlovepianos.com

 

From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of John Formsma
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 8:08 PM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [pianotech] List changes - it's a lot bigger than just the
lists...

 

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:36 PM, Israel Stein <custos3 at comcast.net> wrote:

 

There is one thing for which I will fault the PTG administration with regard
to this rollout. Much greater efforts should have been made to prepare the
membership for it in terms of explaining exactly what is happening and why
and offering tutorials in how to operate in this new environment. I suspect
that had this been done, the change would not be so traumatic. Change is
difficult, and people need to be prepared for it. It is not too late - an
internal PR campaign needs to be launched explaining all these changes andn
offering members help in adapting to them.

 

 

Thanks, Israel, for the explanation of why a new forum was a must. That
makes sense, and is good to know. And I agree, change was essential.

 

Before tutorials are offered, or we spend more time to learn how to use this
new forum, can we back up and rethink just the discussion part of the new
site? 

 

Is what is in place now the best type of discussion forum? I took the
suggestion from someone to look around at other forums. Most of the ones I
saw use vBulletin, which is the one with which I'm familiar (a cycling forum
to which I subscribe). Was that looked at? It would certainly work better
for discussion. I don't know how it would work from an integrated "Social
Media" standpoint. (Something I'm not opposed to, but something I'm not
primarily needing/looking for either.)

 

However, there are probably integration issues with which we are unfamiliar.

 

Why was this particular type of forum chosen? What does it offer that other
web forum software doesn't? E.g., what Pianoworld uses? (Not my favorite,
but it's better than this ... again, for discussion.)

 

I am all for change, but it needs to be good change. Not being able to
easily find new discussions really turns me off immediately, as does the
lack of automatic threading and the bolding of thread titles with unread
messages/replies (sorry I sound like a broken record already, but they are
standard features in any other forum software). And I've noticed there just
isn't much discussion going on in Pianotech, so others must find it
unsuitable.

 

Perhaps what we have now can be tweaked in ways that haven't yet been
discovered. If so, I'm willing to wait and see. I know that more than just a
few of us are frustrated; there are probably quite a few of the leadership
who are frustrated that they also don't know the answers yet.


-- 
JF

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