Apathy Reigns Supreme!

At the last ARW (2013 in Melbourne) it was decided to use this forum as a means of keeping everyone in touch and issues on the table. To date, it has been EXTREMELY UNDERWHELMING for such an important mechanism in our community. What do we need to get it happening? (Now I will duck)

Yes, you are right: for the past five years this forum was neither known nor used.
Last December Laurent Hardy, Rossano Giachino and I met at CERN to discuss its future.
We've decided to do what is necessary to bring it to life:

• We will advertise and explain it, starting with contributions for the IPAC 2014, WAO 2014 and the ARW 2015.
  
• We will use it ourself: post all information we get related to accelerator reliability.
  
• We will encourage all people we know that work in the field of accelerator reliability to use it.
  

It is a long way and we'll need all the help we can get. I count on you!

Hi Andreas,

Happy to help and push from this end, in any way I can.

Hi,
Since there have been only few posts, I rarely open the forum page. And... since I rarely open the forum page, I don't think about posting here.

To break that circle, I thought I'd subscribe to email notifications of all new posts. Since there are not many posts, the risk of having too much email seems reasonably small.

However, navigating around the settings, I found that I'd need to subscribe to each new topic individually. --Not a good solution since there are rarely any new topics.
A quick Google search told me that others have had the same problem and there seems to be a solution by installing a "MOD":
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=2106567&p=12877384

This would certainly be helpful to me, but perhaps also to others.

To get the forum going, maybe we could install this MOD and set up email notification to all users by default, with an easy way to switch off the notifications for anybody who does not wish to have the additional unsolicited email.

What do you think?

Peter.

Peter, 100% agree. Who has the power?

Thanks Tony,

There's still not a lot of activity here. Probably because nobody connected or because they did not spot that this post is active.

It takes a while to connect to the forum and scan all topics for new posts. Maybe it's just me who do not know how to use the tools properly,
but it seems to me that there are too many topics to scan through for new posts and there are many topics with zero posts.

I must admit that I just don't feel like spending that time if there is no activity.

So, re-iterating my request, I propose that we install some add-on that allows email notification of all new messages. Ideally with the content of the new post in the email so that you can immediately read and see if it is of interest. Maybe also a possibility to answer the post through email?

Cheers,
Peter.

Hi Tony and Peter,

100 % agree with the fact that subscribing for every topic individually is boring although most of us would like to do so. Many thanks to have investigated this "MOD" add-on that I did not know. I will do my best to install it and keep you aware.

Laurent HArdy

Cheers Laurent.

Thanks Laurent,
Concerning the email content, I found this message explaining how you set up "email templates" and decide what the content should be:
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/board_watch/support/only_some_emails_contain_post_content-t_101108

I did not find the templates. Maybe they are only available to the administrator?

Cheers,
Peter.

Hi Peter,
I would really like to install that module board_watch, but I cannot figure out how to install modules.
It may be that you can only install modules if you provide your own server to host the forum.
We are using the free server forumotion.com; the phpBB package is preinstalled there and we don't have access to this installation.

At least I found some useful features that I can configure. The main page has now new features to offer:
- a widget "Latest Topics" scrolls through the 10 topics with the most recent posts.
- a widget "Feeds" allows you to bookmark an RSS feed of the forum.
- the main page shows you all forums and spares you many clicks to navigate.

I think these three new features, in particular the RSS feed, are a good alternative to the board_watch module.
The Forum software phpBB is open source, if we can install it on our own server, we can get rid of the advertisement and install new modules like board_watch.
Laurent, do you think we could use http://www.accelerator-reliability.org/ directly to host the forum?

Kind Regards
Andreas