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erolz
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2005
Posts: 4195
Location: Kyrenia / Girne
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Firstly thanks for the input TVSET
To be honest I am not sure I agree.
For me the percieved 'need' that led to the creation of this forum was first and foremost the need to have a truely 'neutral' (bi-communal) online space where Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots and others can discuss Cyprus issues. I am not aware of any other site that meets this need, which is why I got involved in the creation of this site. There are other forums out there but I do not know of any that are bi-communal and that have decent functionality (not an MSN group for example) with a decent level of functionality. Cyprus-forum was / is the closest to this but it is not bi-communal in how it is run and is in reality a personal (revenue generating) 'fifedom' of a single person from one community alone. This to me then is tlakcyprus' 'USP' (unique selling point).
On the other hand there are many many sites that attempt to be a general 'cyprus portal'. To me to move the site in this direction would be to move it into a much more crowded and competetive area. I like focus, and would rather spend my effort trying to be the master of one trade than a jack of all trades.
I also see some 'practical issues'. Firstly I just do not have the necessary skill sets to create such a portal in terms of webdesign and coding. This however could be learnt or the skills 'brought in'. More of a problem to my mind is that I do not have the skill or time to create the content and constantly updating and current content for such a general cyprus portal.
Having said all this, as ever, I consider this forum to be the 'users forum' and not 'my forum'. If the members here want to try and evolve the site into more of a general portal then I will do my best to do that. I do however have my personal reservations about this as expressed above. |
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TVSET
Villager
Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Limassol, Cyprus
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| cannedmoose wrote: |
| TVSET wrote: |
- Frequently Asked Questions
- List of places to see, eat in, etc
- Recent happenings in Cyprus (maybe in a blog form, with the link to the forum thread discussing the post)
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Good ideas... you mean a kind of 'What's on' for Cyprus - both North and South. |
Yes, something like that. |
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erolz
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2005
Posts: 4195
Location: Kyrenia / Girne
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TVSET
Villager
Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Limassol, Cyprus
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| erolz wrote: |
| For me the percieved 'need' that led to the creation of this forum was first and foremost the need to have a truely 'neutral' (bi-communal) online space where Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots and others can discuss Cyprus issues. |
Oh, I guess I misunderstood than - my bad. I thought Cyprus was meant in a more general way.
| erolz wrote: |
| I am not aware of any other site that meets this need, which is why I got involved in the creation of this site. There are other forums out there but I do not know of any that are bi-communal and that have decent functionality (not an MSN group for example) with a decent level of functionality. Cyprus-forum was / is the closest to this but it is not bi-communal in how it is run and is in reality a personal (revenue generating) 'fifedom' of a single person from one community alone. This to me then is tlakcyprus' 'USP' (unique selling point). |
Well, I have to say than that this viewpoint is not very obvious. I've been reading this forum for some time now and while I could appreciate the bi-communal nature of it, I didn't see it as a primary focus. Maybe instead of becoming a "generic website" it is better to promote this viewpoint.
| erolz wrote: |
| On the other hand there are many many sites that attempt to be a general 'cyprus portal'. To me to move the site in this direction would be to move it into a much more crowded and competetive area. I like focus, and would rather spend my effort trying to be the master of one trade than a jack of all trades. |
Well, although there are a few cyprus portals around, I haven't found one good yet. They are either outdated, or too broad, or don't have discussion boards/forums available for members, or have something else so wrong about them that it makes them unusable.
| erolz wrote: |
| I also see some 'practical issues'. Firstly I just do not have the necessary skill sets to create such a portal in terms of webdesign and coding. This however could be learnt or the skills 'brought in'. More of a problem to my mind is that I do not have the skill or time to create the content and constantly updating and current content for such a general cyprus portal. |
Content can be 'brought in' in much the same way as coding and webdesign. :)
| erolz wrote: |
| Having said all this, as ever, I consider this forum to be the 'users forum' and not 'my forum'. If the members here want to try and evolve the site into more of a general portal then I will do my best to do that. I do however have my personal reservations about this as expressed above. |
I am not pushing for any changes here. I'm just saying that there are several ways to promote the forum and wrapping it into a website is one of them and it could be done. If no one feels the need for it, that's fine me. But if someone does, I would rather see it done here, because there is already a good number of mature users around who could contribute.  |
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TVSET
Villager
Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Limassol, Cyprus
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Forums links returns an error 404 (Not Found).
Again, I don't see any forums or discussion boards. And their events listing is a joke.
Looks like a bunch of very static info to me. And again no forums. |
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erolz
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2005
Posts: 4195
Location: Kyrenia / Girne
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There are a couple of 'portal mods' for phpBB that integrate with the forum and allow for a protal like front page. The two main ones would appear to be.
http://smartor.is-root.com/
and
http://integramod.com/home/portal.php?page=2
One thing that does worry me a bit from the off, is how the implementation of a 'front page / portal' ysytem like these would impact on the file structure of the current site. Perhaps you could reassure me on this point TVset? Would the front page not have to go into index.html of the site's root? This is where the current forum frontpage lives. I am just not sure where the existing frontpage would go such that the existing site would still function properly ? Prob a simple thing but I am having trouble getting my head round it atm.
We could look at implementing a portal system like this and see how it might work, what content we could put on it, how it would integrate with existing forum, how new content would be added and by whom as a kind of 'beta'. If it looks like ti will add to the site then we could make it live I guess.
Basically more input about this suggestion would be welcome. |
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TVSET
Villager
Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Limassol, Cyprus
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These look good. IntegraMOD looks like a more powerful solution. For example, I like the Calendar functionality that is demonstrated at their site.
| erolz wrote: |
| One thing that does worry me a bit from the off, is how the implementation of a 'front page / portal' ysytem like these would impact on the file structure of the current site. Perhaps you could reassure me on this point TVset? Would the front page not have to go into index.html of the site's root? This is where the current forum frontpage lives. I am just not sure where the existing frontpage would go such that the existing site would still function properly ? Prob a simple thing but I am having trouble getting my head round it atm. |
This is a simple issue indeed. Forum can be just moved into a subdirectory like /forum/. If you want for old URLs to work too, than it could be arrange too, with URL rewriting (mod_rewrite).
| erolz wrote: |
We could look at implementing a portal system like this and see how it might work, what content we could put on it, how it would integrate with existing forum, how new content would be added and by whom as a kind of 'beta'. If it looks like ti will add to the site then we could make it live I guess.
Basically more input about this suggestion would be welcome. |
I suggest to separate this into another thread and ask existing users how interested they are in seeing and participating in something like this. That would generate more ideas, general direction, and will also show how popular the idea is. |
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erolz
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2005
Posts: 4195
Location: Kyrenia / Girne
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| TVSET wrote: |
This is a simple issue indeed. Forum can be just moved into a subdirectory like /forum/. If you want for old URLs to work too, than it could be arrange too, with URL rewriting (mod_rewrite). |
My concern with such an appraoch would be the impact this will have on our search engine indexing. At the moment we have a considerable number of the sites pages index and cached with various search engines. If the structure of the site changes in such a 'radical' way all of these indexed pages will no longer be valid and we will have to 'start again' from scrath the process of building up a history of cached pages in the search engines. We already have been through this process once when I changed the forum to present static urls to guest users (search engine bots see site as guest user) from the dynamic ones. We used to have for example 1000+ pages from the site indexed with MSN search. After making this change we 'disapeared' from MSN search all togeather for 5 -6 days. We are now back, but still only have 8 pages cahced and indexed there currently vs the 1000+ we had before. MSN search reacts pretty quickly to such changes. Yahoo and Google do not. So I am worried that constant changes to the url/file structure of the site will delay out ultimate indexing and listing in the search engines.
It seems to me that if things could be set up such that the protal page takes over root/index.php and the forum front page becomes something like index2.php , then there would be no radical change to the overall file structure of the actual forum pages. However I am currently not sure what impact this will have for links from the forum pages back to the main page. For some such links it would not be a problem to link to the portal front page, like the link in the logo for example. For others though they would need to be changed to goto index2.php and not index.php (like the text links to 'www.talkcyprus.org forum index'. I am not currently sure how difficult this approach would be.
Or perhaps there is a simpler and easier solution that would not require an overhaul of all of the sites pages? Anyway I will look into this futher.
| TVSET wrote: |
I suggest to separate this into another thread and ask existing users how interested they are in seeing and participating in something like this. That would generate more ideas, general direction, and will also show how popular the idea is. |
Good idea. When are you going to create this thread then? |
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brother
Warnings : 3
Site Admin
Joined: 15 Aug 2005
Posts: 8920
Location: London/Cyprus
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Permit me to start the poll as i think what TV is saying is spot on.  |
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brother
Warnings : 3
Site Admin
Joined: 15 Aug 2005
Posts: 8920
Location: London/Cyprus
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TVSET
Villager
Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Limassol, Cyprus
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| erolz wrote: |
| TVSET wrote: |
| Forum can be just moved into a subdirectory like /forum/. If you want for old URLs to work too, than it could be arrange too, with URL rewriting (mod_rewrite). |
My concern with such an appraoch would be the impact this will have on our search engine indexing. ... So I am worried that constant changes to the url/file structure of the site will delay out ultimate indexing and listing in the search engines. |
I understand your concern. But I think that the way the forum is setup currently is a bit limiting. Having forum files in the root directory presumes that there will be no growth in any direction except for the forum functionality. Even with only forum in mind you can still run into problems, such as testing a different version of the same software or a different software altogether.
I think that the earlier you will rearrange files, the easier it will go. Even if you don't want to grow the site into a portal, I still suggest you move the forum into /forum/ directory and make a redirect to it from the root directory. As a side effect, you will have a word 'forum' in the URL which will be used by many search engines (Google, for example).
Regarding your current ratings - they shouldn't be affect if the changes are done properly. Moving the files from one place to another is not the only thing that needs to be done. The search engines (as well as user browsers) need to be "told" that the files were moved and where they were moved. This is usually done with redirections. HTTP protocol supports this internally and it is rather easy to use.
When you just move files than browsers and search engines (which are very basic browsers) see that files disappeared from locations that they knew. They delete these files from their indexes and caches. They will return to the site at new location only when following links from other resources (crawling the web).
HTTP redirecting (status 301, not 200) tells search engines that the page was moved to a new location and might not be available here later. Search engines than update their caches and indexes with the new location and use it from then on. |
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Crash Test Dummy
Warnings : 3
Ministerial
Joined: 25 Sep 2005
Posts: 4911
Location: London(ish)
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| We can create flyers and just leave around Cyprus? |
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cypezokyli
Ministerial
Joined: 20 Dec 2005
Posts: 2344
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erolz
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2005
Posts: 4195
Location: Kyrenia / Girne
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| Crash Test Dummy wrote: |
| We can create flyers and just leave around Cyprus? |
Well I did take some little 'business cards' showing the site name etc to the Gradash meeting with the hope that others might spread them around. I am a little relcutant to do such in the North right now, for I do wish to as much as possible try and maintain some 'balance' amongst the membership here , if that is at all possible. |
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Crash Test Dummy
Warnings : 3
Ministerial
Joined: 25 Sep 2005
Posts: 4911
Location: London(ish)
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| i can see your point about balance and i think its true. We only have 3 real Greek Cypriot members. Word-of-mouth cant be that hard in Cyprus. |
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