First, the Yahoo Groups list is still alive and will continue to send email for the foreseeable future. New mails are not being archived anywhere, as that is one of the features Yahoo did shut down last month. At least for the next couple of months, I will be sending any major website-related emails to the Yahoo group in addition to posting it in the Forums.
As for the forums (available at https://board.fairchild-club.org/), we have made some progress in the last couple of weeks:
- Registration is working, although we continue to have problems with confirmation emails being marked as SPAM by various email providers. Last night, I made a number of configuration changes that should make the situation considerably better (my own email server no longer marks us as SPAM, and it is configured to be fairly spam-sensitive). There is still one more configuration change that will help, but I am waiting on a ticket with AWS to finish that work. In the mean time, please check your spam folders for registration emails or email me directly from the email address you used to register and I will finish the registration process for you.
- The archive of all the messages sent on the Yahoo Group have been archived on the Forums. We tried to preserve the email threads whenever possible, but did not try to categorize any of the threads. The “Yahoo Group Archives” section of the website allows any registered user to comment on existing topics/threads (to continue any discussions), but does not allow new topics to be created. If you would like to start a new topic, please use one of the other forums so that we can add a bit more order to the website. A huge shout out to Dan Casali and Wilson at Personal Groupware for getting this import over the line.
- Because of the way we imported the Yahoo archives, a number of “users” were automatically created, based on the usernames from Yahoo. These users do not have valid email addresses associated with them and are not fully-created accounts. However, one or more of them may be you
. If you see accounts in the Yahoo archives section that may be you, it is possible for me to merge accounts to make history “right”. Please email me the list of accounts you wish to have merged, noting which account should be the one that remains. I will get back to you in a day or two after fixing the accounts. - We had some questions about file uploads. The site will accept attachments of just about any type, although only the popular image types (.jpg, .gif, .png) can be displayed inline in a post. We would prefer people not upload executables or the like, but otherwise, feel free to attach any Fairchild related bits. Please be cognizant of copyrights! The single-file limit is 10 MiB. If you have any problems with uploading attachments, please let me know.
- The website will send notification emails for various events. By default, you will be emailed whenever a thread you’ve created or posted in is updated. This behavior can be changed in your profile settings (click on your username in the upper-right corner of the site). For any forum on the site, you can also click the “Subscribe Forum” button in the lower left corner of the site to receive emails whenever there are any posts in that forum. Thankfully, this is all individually configurable, so hopefully everyone can find the right amount of email to receive from us.
- Finally, Dan and I are still working on both the visual design of the site and some of the functionality. If there is a feature that you would like to see, please let us know. phpBB is relatively modifiable and there are a number of extensions already built that we may be able to use. No promises, obviously, but send us an email or post in the “Comments and Suggestions” forum and we will see what we can do.