Forum Deficiencies in rec.aviation.soaring

On Dec 9, 9:10*am, "Lars Peder Hansen"
wrote:
And, do not forget that RAS is the only truly international forum that we
glider aficionados have in common. Although I admit that maybe 90% of the
posts seem to come from the US. Why is that, by the way?

Societies like Facebook and LinkedIn are the only others I can think of, but
they are cumbersome to use in their current form.

Anyway, most European countries have fine local soaring discussion forums..
But to keep an international perspective, I find myself monitoring one or
two of those, plus RAS.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Lars Peder

DG.600 EE, Denmark

"jcarlyle" wrote in message

...
,,,,
*- but on the whole I find RAS as it







is quite useful.

-John

We certainly expect http://SoaringCafe.com to be international in
scope--both from the articles and the discussions.

On Dec 9, 7:10*am, "Lars Peder Hansen"
wrote:
And, do not forget that RAS is the only truly international forum that we
glider aficionados have in common. Although I admit that maybe 90% of the
posts seem to come from the US. Why is that, by the way?

Societies like Facebook and LinkedIn are the only others I can think of, but
they are cumbersome to use in their current form.

Anyway, most European countries have fine local soaring discussion forums..
But to keep an international perspective, I find myself monitoring one or
two of those, plus RAS.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Lars Peder

DG.600 EE, Denmark

"jcarlyle" wrote in message

...
,,,,
*- but on the whole I find RAS as it

is quite useful.

-John



r.a.s. has so much USA traffic because its an old established English
language group and USENET started in the USA so there are stronger
historical ties here (not sure when r.a.s. started). But many
countries, especially European countries have great local newsgroups/
forums. A good USA focused forum would take some of the USA specific
traffic off r.a.s. (that part might be a good change for all).

Darryl

Good looking site, but low bandwidth needs to be addressed.

WE wrote:

On Dec 8, 6:32*pm, Gary Osoba wrote:
This forum is great for general discussion, opinions on nearly
everything germane to it's topic and otherwise (unfortunately), and
various other uses.

However, it does not allow for any presentation of attachments,
graphics, or other useful information. I am likely in a small
minority, but when I visit this newsgroup what I could offer would
most often include pictures, or papers, or other information both
technical and otherwise- none of which is possible to present here.
There is a world of information that is not presented on conventional
websites- *linking to which seems to be the only way to go beyond
simple messages which are here presently. You can't even share a
simple equation. At this stage of development in IT and e-publishing,
it seems rather archaic. Especially for a group of people who enjoy
great technological innovation and implementation.

Eventually, Usenet groups will either evolve into a more useful format
or some other forum will take over. How can this be accelerated, or is
anyone interested in moving to another forum? I've been using the
Internet since the very early 1990's, and this forum seems quite
antiquated given the fact that 2011 is nigh.

Best Regards,

Gary Osoba

Gary,

Not sure if you are in the minority, but Rand and I felt the same
way. Take a look at http://soaringcafe.com/

We have been working on our new site for the past month to address
this specific deficiency. Our new site is clearly in its infancy but
everyone will get the idea. Yes, there are some pages with place
holder information, etc; but we are gaining ground fast. We should
have all the Welcome pages fleshed out by the weekend. We are
currently building the Condordia Project pages and these will start
rolling out in January. We are eager to here everyone’s thoughts and
hopefully to start seeing your posts.

Regards,
Bill Elliott and Rand Baldwin

On Dec 9, 1:32*pm, Gary Osoba wrote:
Eventually, Usenet groups will either evolve into a more useful format
or some other forum will take over. How can this be accelerated, or is
anyone interested in moving to another forum? I've been using the
Internet since the very early 1990's, and this forum seems quite
antiquated given the fact that 2011 is nigh.

I like plain text.

The hottest newest thing on the internet is perhaps Twitter. It too is
a plain text service, but limited to only 140 characters rather than
the effectively unlimited length we have on usenet.

That doesn't stop people frequently referring to photos, videos and
many other things. In fact independent 3rd party sites such as
twitpic.com, twitvid.com, twtvite.com and many others have sprung up
around it.

There are plenty of other free sites around on which you can post
photos, videos, or images of your equations. Then you can include a
link here, using a link shortening service if you wish.

I hate hate hate clunky, difficult to navigate, web forums.

"Bruce Hoult" wrote in message
...
I hate hate hate clunky, difficult to navigate, web forums.

Yes! What Bruce said.

Also going to any web forum effectively ties the group's fate to (at minimum)
the whims of whomever hosts the forum. There is nothing to stop it from
disappearing overnight without so much as a puff of smoke! The diversified
nature of the Usenet leaves no one person or hosting service in charge. It is
very difficult, perhaps impossible, for a group to suddenly disappear from
Usenet without a trace because the groups exist on multiple servers.

An even worse situation is if the group were to disperse to a random group of
forums. In the forum world there is such a thing as "Critical Mass". The
soaring world is of very finite size, so it is important that we all be in one
place to effectively exchange ideas and information.

Vaughn

On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:48:14 -0500, vaughn wrote:

"Bruce Hoult" wrote in message
news:b1f32025-a6b7-4902-a9b2-
...
I hate hate hate clunky, difficult to navigate, web forums.

Yes! What Bruce said.

+1


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

On Dec 8, 5:31*pm, "vaughn" wrote:
"Gary Osoba" wrote in message

...



However, it does not allow for any presentation of attachments,
graphics, or other useful information.

Not strictly true. *You can insert a link to anywhere on the Internet. *A link
can take folks to pictures, documents, etc. etc.. etc.

Since there still are some folks working with dialup or other restricted
bandwidth, that gives them the opportunity to decide for themselves what they
want to download..

Vaughn

OK lets try this link theory and embedding out to see what works.

Just paste the html below:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Qzxde

or as an Image
img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_w8sOtGep79M/Stx5YLqCjvI/AAAAAAAAAKI/
VMYa0H1tz4g/s144/n1771_Phil_Paul.jpg" height="111" width="144" /

or Embeded
table style="width:auto;"trtda href="http://
picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/QzxdeXTBrJOXqBqt6Y_jzw?
feat=embedwebsite"img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_w8sOtGep79M/
Stx5YLqCjvI/AAAAAAAAAKI/VMYa0H1tz4g/s144/n1771_Phil_Paul.jpg"
height="111" width="144" //a/td/trtrtd style="font-
family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right"From a
href="http://picasaweb.google.com/jb92563/RaysSFournierRF4D?
feat=embedwebsite"Rays's Fournier RF4D/a/td/tr/table

Ray

Gary, you are right and I concur, we need to get into the next century
with this.

I did notice that there is a "View with Google Groups" browser but it
is not operational yet, and I dont know that it is adding any
additional capability
to post pictures etc.

Ray

PS: Loved your article on Micro Lift and the Carbon Dragon all those
years ago...its a classic.

On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 03:36:29 -0800 (PST), Bruce Hoult
wrote:



I hate hate hate clunky, difficult to navigate, web forums.


me too!
and, I hate advertising

aldo cernezzi

wrote:

I hate hate hate clunky, difficult to navigate, web forums.

me too!
and, I hate advertising

aldo cernezzi

I Also hate hate clunky, difficult to navigate, web forums.
and, I hate advertising.

RAS is fine as is, but could use some ability to embed graphics, but
that probably won't happen.

Wayne