New Textkit Members?

[thesaurus]

I noticed something that Annis wrote in a somewhat recent thread: "the number of new members to the forum has stopped cold until Jeff or his minions have time to put far better spam-control measures in place."

I've also noticed that there haven't been any posts by new Textkit members in quite some time (at least in the Latin forum).

Is it still possible to register for the forums? If it's still not possible, I think that fixing this should be a #1 priority for the powers-that-be, as new members are essential to the lifeblood of this community. Besides, if we're left to our own devices, it'll only be a matter of time before we turn upon one another ravenously...

[aloimonon]

Honestly, I have not seen too much spam here lately. But other facts might stop new members from staying here (assuming that they could register), such as:

a) If new members cannot register, then it goes without saying that this is the biggest problem facing the forum.
b) The "Outside Links Of Interest" forum seems to be locked. I cannot post there at all. Can anyone else create a new thread there?
c) Old posts with Greek Unicode do not display properly. Perhaps I have not stated the matter with technical correctness, but the fact is older posts (not SPIONIC ones) using Greek Unicode are not displayed properly.
d) The search function does not result in hits among the older posts. This is a most serious deficiency, as it makes the past wealth of the forum less accessible. It can still be searched via Google, I do believe.

Now I have never managed a forum, and I'm sure that it takes a lot of effort, but it may be that facts such as the ones which I have enumerated might not make the best impression on new members, and in consequence they may tend to post less than they otherwise would. I hope that I am exaggerating.

[Essorant]

Thanks for posting this. I hope the moderators may do something about it soon.

[Jeff Tirey]

I see this and will be working on Textkit for the next couple weeks.

thank you,
Jeff

[thesaurus]

I see this and will be working on Textkit for the next couple weeks.

thank you,
Jeff

Thanks, Jeff! I don't mean to carp. I just want to see Texkit continue to flourish.

[Jeff Tirey]

Agreed. I have a huge to-do list and I have made so many mistakes with failed implementations. One thing that has changed is that I have significantly more time to work on the project. I have been traveling and working nonstop on the Mongoose Metrics project full blast for the past 3 years and that is finally easing.

I need to transform Textkit to a site with more social media. The Drupal project I tried was an absolute failure. I felt horrible about it for a long time because I don't like wasting other people's time. But recently I finally had to face the facts that the platform didn't fit the project and drupal in general required enormous amounts of time to customize.

My immediate goals are to move the project to a new server, update the forum version and add back a consistent template, then fix lots of small buggy things with the site in general. From there I plan to migrate Textkit to a wordpress platform. I have had a good bit of experience using wordress as a CMS platform with good success and where too the site doesn't look at all like a blog. From there, I'm hoping I can start thinking about some creative and engaging community features. At the top of the list, I plan to upload all source files for all the books and let anyone do whatever they want with them.

I'm still working now on the site transfer. Textkit is LARGE with gigabytes of files and database, so moving it has been a bit of challenge.

Jeff