Side Project #1

Have a little look to the right and you should see a button that will take you to the first of the side projects that have kept me distracted of late....a forum.

Why a forum? Well simply the suggestion was to have somewhere for chat, discussion and news that wasn't reliant too much on me getting my finger out and writing a blog post! Now I realise that the blog seems to be a fairly one way affair...lots of views but only the odd comment here and there, perhaps, the thinking goes, a forum facility would encourage a little more discourse. If nothing else, it will give the other team members who feel like contributing a platform to do so and to put their point of view across as well.

As with the Twitter feed, this is an 'as well' feature, not an 'instead of', so there will still be the usual inane rubbish here and via Twitter, but now with the added bonus of the forum arena too.

Pop over and have a look see, read the welcome posts which should help give you a few basic ideas and 'rules' then why not join up and introduce yourselves!

A few caveats and the like:

This is very much a trial run to see if it works or not...that's why the odd web sub-domain address .zxq.net, I'm trying this out with as little financial outlay as possible so am using a free web hosting service...if it takes off and become popular then expect to be notified of address changes and such like further down the road....because it is a free service, their customer support is more formula 3 than formula 1 shall we say and they have the occasional web outage...if you can't see the forum that's probably why and I'll endeavour to inform you via here and/or Twitter.

rules of the forum are simple...keep it clean, be nice, have fun!

I don't expect to have to moderate much, but if there is cause to do so moderation posts will be written in red to differentiate them from my own postings. Things we don't want are the obvious...personal attacks, flaming, junk posting....all the sort of thing that turns a forum into an unpleasant place to visit.

There are a number of measures in place to deter spam posting, but they won't be 100% effective I'm sure...if you see junk being posted, if it's anything like the junk the blog gets it'll be Chinese characters or trite platitudes that are html links to spurious web pages, then please report the post...there are buttons to report on every post or send me a PM or email via the forum.

When you sign up your first 3 posts are restricted and have to be approved by an administrator...well me really!...this is one of the systems to weed out junk posts, a little inconvenient I know, but worth it I think...please remember that although I keep unusual hours, I do live in GMT+1 so those of you in more distant climes (USA, Canada, Australia etc.) may have to wait a few hours to have your posts approved initially because I do have to sleep sometimes!...you will get an email from the forum when they are approved and posted. I will probably add a moderation team to help run the board and assist with initial posts, but details of that will come on the forum in the next week or so.

I think that's pretty much it for now....so go and have a look, join up and say hello!

TTFN