Member showcase forums?, Please post your thoughts here Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

Hi all.  

Recently, a discussion began regarding the idea of creating a new category of forums (would be located at the bottom of the board) titled "Member Showcase" that would house your own works.

This category would contain a forum for EACH of our Admins, Praetorians, Centurions and Gold Members where you could COPY and PASTE your own works to serve as a centralized record of works you choose to put there (forums ON REQUEST) - NO CRITS. This would be a place where you can keep track of your selected works.

I could do a few things in the forum set-up:
[*]Make it so only the groups mentioned above could start, read and reply to topics.
[*]Make it read-only for our Silver & Bronze members.
[*]Make it available to guests.

Some of the feedback I've received thus far include;

Others may think differently, but personally I'm not that bothered about having my own forum to post copies of my work. I have all of my poems and stories on an access database on my PC and I am in the process of uploading most of them onto a website which I have set up.

I have copies of all my work on my PC anyway, and backed up elsewhere. I suppose the new system would allow them to stay on MM as an additional backup?

The benefits are endless. Recently ezboard was a part of a mass hacker attack where we lost most (almost all) of our posts. I had a forum I used as a database there, but everything is gone.

Let's say your computer freezes up, and the only way to fix it is to reset it from its original state and this would mean losing all of your files. You would still have your work stored at Mosaic Musings. Let's say that you have works on another site, such as poetry 911-and it crashed, losing it all. You would still have an archive of your work here.

Great idea!

It would be for work that has been posted, critiqued and revised that you feel its a finished piece for others to access, without having to go into forum archives searching. Actually each writer's choice of a small collection of what they consider their best work. No comments or additional crits.

On reflection this seems like a very good idea. Often I want to check back on a posting and this can be a long and tedious business. It would also help when trying to find a particular piece written by another member that I am keen to read again.

I am posting this thread to obtain feedback on this idea. Yours is MOST welcome!

Thanks!
~Cleo    


post script - 08 AUG 2005:

Stay tuned - I am going to revise the initial thread.

My apologies as I am using the wrong techno terms which is causing confusion here with this new idea...

I do not mean that MM will serve as a data storage back-up facility (thanks James, Peter and Don) as I mentioned earlier. My bad.

All we're offering is a specific category for members to put copies of their work(s) making it easier for them and others to browse. I term this as a "reference repository" in my words.

Even if this new category was a back-up, the Terms of Service specifically (in paragraph 14 section b) absolves MM from any legal action resulting from loss of data. We take reasonable precautions to ensure that data will be available in the event of a complete system crash. However, I recommend that you all have a back-up copy of your works somewhere other than on our (or any other forumboards) system.

If our database is lost, it would not affect only this new category of forums, it would wipe out the whole forum board's database. I can assure all that not only do we have our own back-ups but in the event of a crash, we also have an offsite copy (within a couple of days old) and that provider also does tape back-ups too.

Having just said that, I want to say this is a place for selected works copied by the member (which would be the forum names = member names) as they choose to showcase their talent 'at a glance' instead of having to search through every forum for that member's posts. Also, the search feature by member name will populate not only topics started by that member but also all their replies. This is a much more convenient way to read works by a specific member.

Does this clarify my idea?
Cheers!

~Cleo