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There is a ways this could kind of work..but it would take strict adherence to the requirements, and detail from the end user.
Hi Jeff - I was just throwing this out there as an alternative to printing to paper. Storage is cheap and printer cartridges are horribly expensive--almost as much as a new printer. But I see where you're going with the idea...
Hi Jeff - I was just throwing this out there as an alternative to printing to paper. Storage is cheap and printer cartridges are horribly expensive--almost as much as a new printer. But I see where you're going with the idea...
Ya..totally online, In a few short years, enough people have to do enough things, you could get most things covered.
Thw amount of eefort just to edit and format content we already have available here is staggering. Folks in engineering disciplines are acutely aware that a large fraction of any project budget is dedicated to documenting the work. The first 90% of a prooect is doing the work. The the other 90% is all the documentation that goes with it. Every design change, supercession, change order or product update from a supplier forces new documentation.
Now lets say we want o come up with a "standard" frmat, a design template that we want to retrofit to prior posts and instructions, plus try and get new posts to follow going forward. Who wants to tackle that for both our historical and future critical content. Oh, let me remind folks that you can't arbitrarily copy forum content and repurpose it unless it's your own posted info.
Want to build a compendium of RL posts on a particular subject, and offer that someplace else? Youll be in direct vilation of your TOS agreement, plus a slew of laws related to copyright and intellectual property.
----
Use the DIY section to host your compilations. Find some retired techncal writer to do your formatting and editing. Alan will tell you how much fun it is to edit your own created content; better to find an independent person to be your "editor' and focus your own efforts on compiling content.
Invest your time and efforts in manageable chunks of the projects. Break things into manaeable bite-sized pieces, and there''s hope for actually finishing pieces.
No matter what happens - the 928 will always have a special place in my heart. And so do the friends I made over the more than 20 years of owning three of these cars.
PS: I was at the last Sharktoberfest, including the Electric Chair. Some 928 owners were quite interested in it, and a few very nice ones even got to test drive it.
My first time driving a Tesla. Thanks Nicole! Super cool car and ticks a lot of boxes. I also enjoyed talking to you about your experience growing up in Germany and aspiring as a little girl to someday own a 928. I'm bummed 2020 has shut a lot of us out from gathering, but I look forward to being at as many events as I can attend soon!
But I feel reluctant to start yet another thread about a topic that has been discussed in detail in the past.
That's why I'm an advocate of a static resource for known solutions. We don't need to start a new thread every time someone wants to drop the torque tube and do the bearings or put the new blower motor into the existing housing. But, we do need a single, definitive thread (or article) that can be easily found and is only updated when there is new information.
Oh, let me remind folks that you can't arbitrarily copy forum content and repurpose it unless it's your own posted info. Want to build a compendium of RL posts on a particular subject, and offer that someplace else? Youll be in direct vilation of your TOS agreement, plus a slew of laws related to copyright and intellectual property.
Which is exactly why I pointed out that it needs to be an effort that directly involves I.B.
Originally Posted by dr bob
Now lets say we want o come up with a "standard" frmat, a design template that we want to retrofit to prior posts and instructions, plus try and get new posts to follow going forward. Who wants to tackle that for both our historical and future critical content. Use the DIY section to host your compilations. Find some retired techncal writer to do your formatting and editing. Alan will tell you how much fun it is to edit your own created content; better to find an independent person to be your "editor' and focus your own efforts on compiling content. Invest your time and efforts in manageable chunks of the projects. Break things into manaeable bite-sized pieces, and there''s hope for actually finishing pieces.
It's a multi-step process...
Identify threads that have valuable and suitable content.
Some clever I.B. programmer writes code to pull selected threads from the forum database and create an initial, rough conversion into a suitable format.
Under the project management of someone appointed by I.B., the various chapters are vetted, edited, enhanced, and finalized.
The resulting formatted chapters are preserved on RL and made available through on-demand publication.
It's never going to happen, because the 928 community is too small to make it worthwhile. That being the case, printing threads as described above is - despite the legal implications - the best solution to preserving this knowledge base.
Before putting too much effort into organizing, compiling, and fine tuning a book or DIY section, I just take advantage of search engines and the main 928 forum. In my 11 years of 928 ownership, almost every repair I've had has already been addressed by someone else, usually with full photo documentation. This is without question the most technically competent and knowledgeable car forum I've ever seen - by far. - and members have been really good at photo documenting so many of the things I've had to address. I can Google search under Rennlist for specific topics and have almost always found what I need. before even having to ask a question.
On rare occasions I do need to trouble shoot certain failures, and that's where the decades of experience from a handful of members pays big dividends, but those are almost a case-by-case basis.
-- Finding that "clever I.B. Programmer" is close to impossible. The IB crew is focused on functionality of the forum itself, not at all focused on the content. It's up to members and the volunteer moderator team to keep up the integrity of the content. Similarly, the 'appointed by IB' project manager duty fall on the volunteer moderator team. The "vetted, edited, enhanced, and finalized" is the duty of the participating members. That same volunteer moderator team places the finished thread in the DIY section for future generations of 928 enthusiasts.
Thoughts:
Start a dedicated thread for a particular subject. Start with an easy subject. You can manage the open or closed status of that thread yourself. Paste in links from the relevant posts and threads you want to include in your final DIY. A post or thread of links to other posts and threads means it doesn't take too much space and also means that you don't need to do any formatting, attributing or editing. It also means you are forever dependent on the integrity of the linked objects, where pictures hosted by third-party services have a habit of disappearing and you remain dependent on our host IB to host and maintain your DIY thread. As interesting as it might be to just copy all that linked content into a new document and host it somewhere else, this is where the issue of IP and ownership gets to be fun. You can extract content from posts here and build your integrated posts contents thread in this or the DIY forum on this site. You can save that off for personal use of course, but you can't host it at another site without IB's permission and/or the permission of the original author(s).
I think Google has some website way-back machine capabilities, but I'm not sure how linked items work in that service. I know I've been able to go find usenet posts and threads from thirty-plus years ago, and also found archived web content from some long-gone sites where I had posted content. In those early times I had less faith in maintaining live links to other content, instead building full content documents off line, then pasting into a hosted site when I got tired of paying for bandwidth to my own sites. And that circles back to deciding the best place to maintain content. The white-haired crew moves on at a certain point, and younger enthusiasts join in. Archived content I've accumulated will eventually be scattered to bits. Does it make sense for individuals to try and maintain the integrity of the accumulated knowledge shared in the forum on their own? I look at the predecessors to this forum, including porschefans and porschelist which have traceable lineage to Rennlist. Got easy access to any of the porschelist content? I have years of accumulated list posts, in the daily summaries of activity that were emailed to members. Instant gratification was only days away in list-server land. But the content would be tough to find online. Since Google has entered the fray though, we have reasonable access to archived web content though, so even if IB fell off the map there's an available recovery option at least in HTML format. You won't do a full database restore to make a duplicate of the interactive forum structure we enjoy now, but you could fins specific content by searching the archive.
In the meanwhile, support our host with membership and participation. Survival of the business that hosts Rennlist depends on membership, participation, and clicks to contributing advertisers. As far as maintaining our contributors, that's a different challenge. Right now, doctors and medical insurance to pay for them are a good start at least for me personally.
. Since Google has entered the fray though, we have reasonable access to archived web content though, so even if IB fell off the map there's an available recovery option at least in HTML format. You won't do a full database restore to make a duplicate of the interactive forum structure we enjoy now, but you could fins specific content by searching the archive.
Do we? Forums aren't like other web pages; they're built on the fly and the content varies moment to moment. I don't think I've ever seen an archive of a web forum. If you know differently, I'd be happy to learn.
Hi Dr. Bob -
Just curious, for threads that are tutorial in nature (like many of Dwayne's), if a thread owner/starter contacted you or another mod and asked you to clean up a thread by deleting superfluous posts, could you do that? Using Dwayne as an example, his threads are incredibly helpful; yet, they all seem to be peppered with "I like pie" comments. If he contacted you and said whack posts 13, 19, and 25 would you do that? Don't get me wrong, many comments from Stan and others really advance the discussion and are great supplements. But others with "Weeeee another Dwayne thread!" and a bunch of emojis is just a waste of 1s and 0s.
Again, I'm only referring to tutorials or "how to" threads. I think many who made those non-value posts at the time didn't know the thread would become part of an enduring body of knowledge--me included.
Hi Dr. Bob -
Just curious, for threads that are tutorial in nature (like many of Dwayne's), if a thread owner/starter contacted you or another mod and asked you to clean up a thread by deleting superfluous posts, could you do that? Using Dwayne as an example, his threads are incredibly helpful; yet, they all seem to be peppered with "I like pie" comments. If he contacted you and said whack posts 13, 19, and 25 would you do that? Don't get me wrong, many comments from Stan and others really advance the discussion and are great supplements. But others with "Weeeee another Dwayne thread!" and a bunch of emojis is just a waste of 1s and 0s.
Again, I'm only referring to tutorials or "how to" threads. I think many who made those non-value posts at the time didn't know the thread would become part of an enduring body of knowledge--me included.
I don't think it would be a big challenge to do that.Know that copying posts into other threads maintains the original posing date/time. Makes it interesting to build an "intro" post now in a new thread, and copy/paste selective posts into that thread. The latest pots will be last. This is where making a thread that starts out with your intro post, then includes links to the posts you want to reference/include, makes sense. I sometimes look for post links rather than thread links when searching for candidate content. Another trick is to use the quote option to reply, then grab the link text at the beginning of the quoted section, paste that into your tutorial. For example, this post includes the link in the format "(open bracket)QUOTE-NoVector;16880682(close bracket)" so you can click on the link triangle and go to the original posts. Follow that with a space and then "(open bracket)/Quote(close bracket)", maybe with your descriptive text in between. I'm not a guru of this stuff, just learning by observation.
I don't think it would be a big challenge to do that.Know that copying posts into other threads maintains the original posing date/time. Makes it interesting to build an "intro" post now in a new thread, and copy/paste selective posts into that thread. The latest pots will be last. This is where making a thread that starts out with your intro post, then includes links to the posts you want to reference/include, makes sense. I sometimes look for post links rather than thread links when searching for candidate content. Another trick is to use the quote option to reply, then grab the link text at the beginning of the quoted section, paste that into your tutorial. For example, this post includes the link in the format "(open bracket)QUOTE-NoVector;16880682(close bracket)" so you can click on the link triangle and go to the original posts. Follow that with a space and then "(open bracket)/Quote(close bracket)", maybe with your descriptive text in between. I'm not a guru of this stuff, just learning by observation.
Thank you! - Learned something new! good tip.
Yes links are much more helpful than merged threads (that gets weird quite quickly... think schizophrenia), and post links are often better than thread links - some threads are epic in length (how about that for spelunking). I often reply with links (threads and posts as appropriate), and sometimes external links - just to point to the appropriate existing content. Others often do the same - we may not know the answer to something but we can remember enough about someone else's post to search for it and to link to it. Even if it isn't a perfect answer - its the right place to pick up a 'context already defined' discussion - perhaps with the best expert ready to respond back to you. This is the value add of the forums history and archive - at least some of this is encapsulated in the institutional knowledge - and its really NOT just the experts who hold the key info here. Making the right connections is the important part.
Likewise - Rennlist uploaded photo's are basically here forever... externally linked photos rarely survive beyond 10 years in my experience... Upload!
Rereading all my late-night tablet mis-typing and spelling, I apologise.
Expanding on the list-of-post-links idea, note that you have the option of scrolling through the whole thread from which your target post is sourced. So if a reader wants to look at the immediate context around the post you selected for linking, it's a mouse-wheel away. Contrast that with using the search-for-posts option, and copying the URL of the post into your instruction. While that option is good for narrowing the reader's focus, it doesn't share the context. Of course it's a little more work, but you could provide both types of link to your target if you want to be generous.
Similarly, you can insert links to particular pictures in your post, perhaps pictures that were originally placed in different posts or threads than those you are linking for content. Be sure to give credit to the original picture source. This works especially well with images already hosted on RL servers.
The first post in the thread today. My text looks like it's Kevin's though.
Originally Posted by FredR
...
FredR adds a little alternative option in the third post to that thread. My text outside the post quote link.
Kevin's picture, but could be any image from any thread really:
Image credit: Kevin in Atlanta
So with just a little creative cut-and-paste from multiple threads, you can build a comprehensive how-to, and add commentary, suggestions or other tips as pictures and text mixed in.
08-31-2020, 10:21 PM
