Changes afoot for TerraGenesis

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**Ruglud**

Just popped over to TerraGenesis to seek some model building inspiration and saw this in the announcements:

Administrator is resigning

It's incredibly quiet around here.

There will be those who will blame me… and they are probably right. I know my strategies with regards to the archiving and purging of information have been unpopular. However we have a 'tradition' here in the UK (not sure about other countries) whereby we vote a government into power only to complain bitterly about pretty much everything they do for the next four years. At the end of their term we vote in the opposition… and moan about everything they do for four years… and so the cycle continues.

Okay, so nobody voted for me to be the admin on TG, but I made the hard decisions to the best of my ability. I think that much of what we're seeing is down to the fact that currently available mechanisms such as Facebook and Blogger make it so much easier for people to publish online, that few can be bothered to conform to someone else's requirements. I believe that there is still a place on the web for TerraGenesis and that this trend can be turned around… however I no longer have the enthusiasm, and am too busy with other things, to sort this out.

The big issue, for a long time, has been the differing requirements of the archives, and the forum. Thus I am going to split the site into two. I will continue to own both but am looking for volunteers to administer them.

terragenesis.info

This will be the archive site. I will move all of the currently archived material (articles, past comp entries, and gallery) to this site. I will continue to administer it until I have been able to write the necessary software to run it. Ultimately people will be invited to submit articles for assessment by an editor. I will install banner and google advertising on this site and use the funds to support BOTH sites.

terragenesis.co.uk

This will be the forum site and I am looking for an administrator, or group of administrators. I will set up and install the latest version of phpBB, SMF, or other bulletin board software of their choice. This will be a standard installation and it will be up the the admin(s) to create and implement any modifications they desire.

I will use funds generated by the .info site to support this site, on my server, to the tune of 200 UKP per year. This should be enough to support a pretty large forum however, should the admins implement policies that allow the site to grow beyond that, they will be required to find the difference. Thus I would suggest that they install google advertising or similar (a standard mod for the popular BB packages) from the outset.

If you want to run the forum:

If you are interested in taking over as admin then please post here and say what software you would prefer to use (and what if any experience you have with it).

An additional thought: the administrator, or team of admins, may also want to appoint moderators... so anybody willing to volunteer some time to do that should say so here as well.

Interesting development and could mean great things for the site if someone with the know-how, time and dedication takes over. A fresh perspective and all that...

**Eilif**

Interesting development. I've used TGen in the past, and even have printouts that I made of articles in the 90-'s. I largely fell away due to not wanting to have to use their gallery system. Though it must be said that their gallery system cuts down massively on the cost of running the site, so maybe that's part of why it's survived so long.

Still, there's alot of good stuff their and if they can get the articles organized for easy viewing (I think they were that way in the late 90's, early 00's) it would still be a great site for terrain info, With the proliferation of blogs and forums it seems rarer and rarer to have a good hobby website.

**Ruglud**

And your new administrator is...
Although I proposed that I might hand over to an admin team rather than an individual, the more I've thought about that, the more I've come to think that we need to have an individual with whom the buck stops.

The new admin will face a number of decisions and while it's good to get input, I think it would only complicate things to have a second round of discussion taking place within an admin team before any action could be taken.

Consequently I have decided to take up Melly.Monkey's offer to take on the role of forum admin.

My thanks to Taltosvt and Tob who also offered to step in and/or help out and to whom I have sent personal messages with further explanation of my decision. I feel sure they will assist Melly where they can and ask that all members to do likewise. In particular please:

a) do not bombard Melly with questions about how this or that will run on the new forum. This is a new gig for Melly = big learning curve. So please: give her chance to get to grips with it.

b) do realise AND ACCEPT that some features are going to disappear.

The Next Step

Melly and I have already discussed software and partly as a result of Taltosvt's comments have taken a look at MyBB and are going to give it a try. Within the next few days I will set up an installation of it for Melly to get hands on with.

Beyond that: watch this space.

**adamsouza**

I like Terragenesis but my service provder thinks all of their emails are SPAM and filters them before they ever reach me. Making registering and recovering passwords from there a nightmare for me.