OWTX The problem was a shift in leisure time activity and publishing due to digital technology. Getting existing cost structures to work with new revenue models is really hard, going on impossible.
The problem was a shift in leisure time activity and publishing due to digital technology. Getting existing cost structures to work with new revenue models is really hard, going on impossible.
The "Trains Unlimited" subscription has value for me, with a large part in having access to back issues of Kalmbach's various RR oriented magazines. I would sign up for an equivalent service at White River if they ever get around to providing one.
The magazine publishing biz is a bit tricky. One example is Byte Magazine that got started in 1975, got bought by McGraw-Hill a few years later, page count hitting 600+ in the early 80's and their last issue was July 1998. The McGraw-Hill managers ticked off one of Byte's lead columnists, Steve Ciarcia, who then started his own magazine circa 1988, and Circuit Cellar i still being published in print form.
So if you say anything negative about California's so called High Speed Rail, Facebook would decide that was political and bounce you.
zugmannMost people who use those apps are probably at least twice that old.
I'm something more than three times that. FB comes in handy - while sometimes it gets tedious, a lot of information gets passed. I just posted about an upcoming event in a special interest page - free publicity. I don't use X much, although I am subscribed. My daughter and grandson are on Instagram, so I've got that, too. Grandson is into photography and video so I'm there to support his efforts.
FB also helps me keep track of friends, too.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
FB is just another app, login and data scrape. It's ephemeral, but seems useful for chases, but that sort of railfanning doesn't interest me that much.
I agree that much of the value at Kalmbach (and WR) are the archives, but the opportunities to monetize them are going to be slim.
I remember one of the first attempts at 'forum' activity that was more complicated than a BBS. It used what was then aclled an 'e-mail reflector' which took incoming e-mails, cleaned up their formatting if necessary, and re-transmitted to everyone 'subscribed to the list'. (You had the option of receiving or not receiving your original e-mail when it was re-transmitted).
The big problem with this was that people wouldn't 'snip their posts' -- remove the past post history that was often appended to e-mails "for context". This came in two approximately equally awful flavors: one put all the posts in order, first to last, with the new material all the way at the bottom; the other put the reply up at the top but could have literally hundreds of previous posts, some quite long and padded with extraneous material, trailing off hidden down at the bottom... and automatically copied into any reply. Where this got truly awful (and remember, this was in the days of dial-up connections, sometimes to proprietary services and not the Internet) was when you got two or three people being polite and thanking people for a post, or commenting "I agree!!!" or "Me too"... complete with tens of thousands of characters of useless and sometimes arcanely-threaded past messages. It did not help much to put the different threads in color, as a couple of 'improved packages' did, or worse, to start indenting them with 'helpful' vertical lines -- something that persists today on these forums with multiple levels of nested quotations quickly getting to the point you have windows with one character per line text...)
I don't know if the majordomo 'listserv' software has been maintained, but it represented a reasonable approach to a 'headless' group software, one which didn't have its own 'Web presence' but did business entirely within the e-mail architecture you had.
This morphed into egroups in Europe, which then became Yahoo Groups as Yahoo began growing as a media company at the turn of this century. This combined e-mail communication and good moderation with the ability to host both files and images (which in those days had very different filestructs) and to scroll and search a list of thread topics. At some point they added a Web page you could use to read and format threads. At its peak, Yahoo Groups had over 150 million active groups... then it all came crumbling down with a set of 'decisions' it still pains me to relate. One of the lead engineers kept a kind of port going as groups.io, which could be a contender for "forums phase three" except that the rights are afu and there's too much monetization for my taste.
There are tech Facebook groups that are reasonably good. But they require fierce moderation to remain free of the usual 'social' garbage that the Facebook display modality encourages. The advantage, such as it is, is that so many people already run Facebook for 'other reasons' that it becomes a reasonable cheap default, but it is not a good substitute for the kind of discussions we can have here. Aside from all the intrusive metrics, risks to privacy, etc. that the platform suffers from.
Kalmbach, in its early efforts to get people to participate in the forums, made registration bog-simple: you type a handle to use as your username, and you enter some kind of security password, and a valid e-mail of some kind that you can receive a confirmation message on, and bang! you're registered. The problem with this is that over the years the spam and malware approaches to this sort of thing have ballooned, and what might be very substantial behind-the-scenes modac to catch and kill all the various types of that stuff becomes required. (You could get a sense of this by watching the 'Users Active' panes in one of the forums early in the morning, which in the days you could see other users' profiles provided some very attractive looking people announcing they were eager and willing to correspond with, and even meet, you. (We had an amusing example of this on the old steam_tech list, where what appeared to be half the young and nubile population of Cebu City in the Philippines suddenly started developing an interest in steam technology and its technologists...) Keeping up with this is an unsung, thankless, probably near-unrecognized task -- that has to be done regularly and even those who lurk until 'unmoderated' to foist spam need to be monitored regularly, perhaps continuously.
Compuserve had some very well run forums, including one focusing on railroading (both full-scale and model). The way the Compuserve forums handled threads made quoting unnecessary. Since the forums started in the early dialup days where anything above 300 baud was high speed, it was critical to minimize the data sent.
It's so easy to forget now that 'how we accessed the information superhighway' was so up-foir-grabs in the early Nineties. (I was involved with digital library development, so saw more than my share of the fun). That was the great era of 'cyberspace', where in the stories of those like William Gibson cowboys would navigate... well, visual metaphors of a 'cyberspace', with architectural features, security that looked like attacking nastiness or black ice, 'breaking through' to access file content, etc. And so very often when you had a 'site map' it was exactly that: a little drawing that showed where the different files or assets of a particular Internet entity were to be found. One of the hokiest of the hokey was the community known as 'Geocities', which organized itself as 'cities' with various subdivisions and communities, that you navigated as if you had some digital equivalent of a Thomas guide.
This is basically what Google put a kibosh on, by providing a strictly URL-based directory with finding aids -- and it is why Geocities is defunct, but Alphabet thrives at the heart of an endlessly tortured web of SEO.
I've been on Facebook for a couple of years, just for the Groups. You can get a lot of information quickly on there. Unlike here, there are more than two dozen active posters.
I have enjoyed this Forum for a number of years; also subscribe to TRAINS and Classic Trains, with gifting opotions on both.
I am watching how this new ownership thingy works out.;
Waiting toi see how it will shake out... Keeping all options open ar this point.
Sure would hate to see all these years of interest get shot into the toilet.
Several weeks ago, an IT guy hired by Kalmbach (?) feeling us all out gave us all hope something new forum-wise was in the works. With the new ownership news, maybe that was just a feeler. Personally, I now see no hope of ever seeing again a top functioning forum!
croteauddSeveral weeks ago, an IT guy hired by Kalmbach (?) feeling us all out gave us all hope something new forum-wise was in the works. With the new ownership news, maybe that was just a feeler. Personally, I now see no hope of ever seeing again a top functioning forum!
Firecrown may be of the idea that one of the commercial form packages that have been 'debugged' by millions of users over year of operation will be more advantageous to their operation than some home grown wreck that fails constantly that we have been using for way too long.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
BaltACDFirecrown may be of the idea that one of the commercial form packages that have been 'debugged' by millions of users over year of operation will be more advantageous to their operation than some home grown wreck that fails constantly that we have been using for way too long.
Yeah, I think back when Military.com was looking one of the best packages was called jive or something. What you run into with this is price vs advertising revenue. Military.com wanted to ditch the moderation via people even though we were volunteers, they did not like some of the judgement of the volunteers. Specifically the News Department head kept getting PO'd because the Forum participants would post link to competing sources of info faster than he could set them up in the Military dot com news feed (I actually thought that was funny). The other issue they had heartburn over was the forum users kept ignoring the rules on posting copyrighted items and they had issues with lawyers finding it and then contacting the copyright owner for potential litigation.........then threatening lawsuit once they had that client-lawyer relationship. So there is a lot that goes into the should we keep the forums as they are or change them decision. At Military.com it was mostly internal politics but some of it was the Forum users were a PITA and costly to manage.
I found it amusing that the problems you reported for military.com were also somewhat of 'hot button' items for Kalmbach. I've gotten snippy responses to what I thought were civil PMs regarding errors of fact, grammar, and syntax in Newswire items. Fortunately, I think the Freightwaves consultancy, and then the Freightwaves site, understood the importance of timely but correct information (and timely updating if that information should turn out to be inaccurate) so I have little concern about that going forward.
Kalmbach 'solved' the copyright problem quite simply, at the time, by not allowing any image hosting on its site, and putting provisions in the TOS not to post copyrighted material without explicit written permission. Of course they then made it easy -- with little tools right in the posting interface -- to embed live links to photos that would display the content inline, and to embed videos that would play automatically right in the post. When it began to be apparent that there were costs associated with widespread multiple calls to hotlinks, image providers began restricting hotlinking access... but Kalmbach kept the tools just as they were, although they certainly enabled a protection against making a link to a Kalmbach thread 'hot' (in an undocumented way for end-users).
We fought the war about 'information should be free' proponents and, essentially, lost it when posters like wanswheel and Mr. Klepper were banned or put on permanent mandatory moderation (by a team with very intermittent modac). I of course have to uphold Kalmbach in not wanting to tolerate large swathes of pasted information that could only be considered 'fair use' by the most tortured excuses, and even though I was often interested in the material, I'd much rather have an accurate link (that actually resolves to the location of the quoted material rather than somewhere random in what might be a 75MB or larger PDF scan) than have to page up and down past many panes of pasted-in items; I'm prepared to be greedy when the source of the pasted items is otherwise paywalled or unavailable without active education credentials... but still, there are limits that a publishing company can't really fall foul of. Particularly if its finances are in a tailspin...
I'm sure that if anyone were to 'walk the code' of the forum software, they'd find all sorts of artifacts of wonder marketing dodges of the past. Remember how Kalmbach circa 2011 was going to redesign its whole Web presence around that amazing new device everybody was going to be using, the smartphone? Only to decide less than a decade later to abandon support for small-form-factor devices completely in much of the site enablement, including the forums? Lots of money spent on a package with extensive back-end e-commerce functionality, including all sorts of data mining for user habits and preferences -- I well remember the media articles from 2018 and 2019 about how the new Kalmbach Media was ideally positioned to monetize their subject enthusiast communities and provide their joint-venture partners with all sorts of information (presumably for a price, of course). Apparently 'results did not eventuate as expected' for that model, at least as Kalmbach fumbled their way through it. But all that complicated back-end code, from a proprietary vendor that has apparently gone out of business long since, with God knows what sort of obfuscated source or even original install media and partial documentation still available...
OvermodI've gotten snippy responses to what I thought were civil PMs regarding errors of fact, grammar, and syntax in Newswire items.
Based on my past military.com experience and not specific to any poster here:
Probably one or two guys on here that always hit the REPORT button (not even sure if it still works) repeatedly for the most trivial of reasons. I might add that majority of Mods dislike the frequent flyers with the REPORT button more than they dislike the reported posters. Because it is just dumb over time that you stay on a website when you dislike that many posts.
You also have the "woe is me" people who do the drama posts that they are picked on by other posters or throw a fit when they are warned by a Mod. Or post an "I am leaving because....." drama post. Military.com hated that because they looked at it as an attack on their reputation in public because it was public facing on their website which they were responsible for and it looked like they were not doing the job of policing posts.
The mod had to respond to anything objectionable or reported by another poster and the reason they are snippy is because of the time involved as they have to follow policy and procedure. At military.com you have to save off the offending post or thread in case there is an appeal to customer service.........to you the user it looks like it is deleted but they just move the thread or post to a Forum that is not publicly visible and archive it there. Only in very rare circumstances did they delete it at Military.com. Further there are notes attached to your userID or account which they annotate. The mods can also see who you are via the email you attached to your account and with Military.com there was an IP tag and IP address that gave a pretty good indication of your location. Depending on connection....accuracy varies there.
Anyhow, the reason for the procedure is legal based because there might be a future lawsuit or court action. In Military.coms case they had military people stupidly posting details about Court Martials underway as well as the very rare Special Forces person breaking their confidentiality agreement. So they had to save vs delete that stuff for follow-up action. There was even one guy that was AWOL and started to write about nobody would ever locate him (rural Montana and they did). The Chief Moderator worked in the Provost Marshall's office at Camp Lejune. The Pentagon even had a few ghost accounts (couldn't be seen by moderator staff or people publishing only seen by Chief Mod.......hence his regular job role). DoD checked up on what people posted as well and I am not sure how that worked but my guess is the Chief Mod alerted them to potentially problematic discussions or they had a keyword search software of some type.....beats me.
One bad post on Military.com took 20 to 30 min to fully resolve following procedure. I was a volunteer so I could always logoff and let someone else handle it. Trains staff are paid and they have to work on it. So big difference there..........I fully understand as a BTDT why they get ticked off though. After a few incidents it starts to wear on your patience as a Moderator.
Sorry for the long and rambling post but wanted to convey the other side of the argument from a former Moderator myself. I hope the Trains Forums continue but if they don't.......you know the other side of the story.
OvermodBut all that complicated back-end code, from a proprietary vendor that has apparently gone out of business long since, with God knows what sort of obfuscated source or even original install media and partial documentation still available...
I've seen a lot of versions of forum software, from homegrown mods of someone else's homegrown system to every kind of commercial product. No idea what this particular one is, except that it is decades old. So many more better options.
For those of you who have concerns, the forums WILL continue and eventually be upgraded. While we've had some software issues, rumors of the demise of the forums and the loss of old threads is untrue.
Rene Schweitzer
Classic Toy Trains/Garden Railways/Model Railroader
Thanks for keepin' the troops informed Rene!
That's what good leaders do!
Flintlock76 Thanks for keepin' the troops informed Rene! That's what good leaders do!
THANK YOU, Rene, For your explanation !
I'd bet many more Posters here, will appreciate it, as well.
In thew past, we've been fortunate enough to have had moderators who were ,unvolved, and engaged, on this Forum.. It has veen missed.
Recently, your noting of 'issues' witbh softwear; is an understatement; hopefully, imporovement is on our horizon.... Better communication, and some leadership, are always appreciated.
Thanks Rene, and I hope the transition goes smoothly for you as well.
I just remembered that Flying magazine had Len Morgan (DPM's brother) as a contributor for a number of years, so there is a bit of a connection between Flying and Trains.
Rene Schweitzer For those of you who have concerns, the forums WILL continue and eventually be upgraded. While we've had some software issues, rumors of the demise of the forums and the loss of old threads is untrue.
Considering the past issues and promises with the forums (as well as those of other no-longer here sites), I will remain skeptical.
It's been fun. But it isn't much fun anymore. Signing off for now.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.t fun any
In the Model Railroader forum there is a thread with a link to a lengthy interview with the new owner.
https://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/297787.aspx
MidlandMike In the Model Railroader forum there is a thread with a link to a lengthy interview with the new owner. https://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/297787.aspx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mOrCTG11d4&t=3s
(I'll watch it later.)
And thanks for the heads-up Mike!
I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Hopefully, no one changes their mind along the way.
From what I have seen so far, Firecrown does not appear to be buying Discover magazine, which is probably the closest to a general interest magazine in Kalmbach's collection.
Erik_Mag From what I have seen so far, Firecrown does not appear to be buying Discover magazine, which is probably the closest to a general interest magazine in Kalmbach's collection.
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