Seems like we're getting more people posting now. That's a good thing.

What are you guys seeing on the other outlets, like FaceBook, etc.? What else can we do to get more folks on and posting?

I'd like, at this point, to make TromboneChat the place everyone goes. It might also be time to start seriously thinking about organizing the public domain posts from TTF into some searchable resource here.

Thoughts?

In general, it seems that the active TTF membership was a relatively small set of individuals, and most of that group could be coerced through FB to jump ship or already have. The rest will probably be organic growth as the "new" crowd tries to go to TTF and sees it is closed. How do we get them to find this site instead? Where do we pop up in Google search results?

The facebook is still probably the most popular perhaps by virtue of the fact that tons of people have accounts there already. The current FB stuff in the news might damage that to some point. There have still been at least 5 posts in the last week from people saying something to the effect of, 'I was waiting until the TTF came back online but that doesn't seem to have happened so... [question]'. Many steer them towards our site but that initial hurdle of getting people to register seems to be a big problems.

I think keeping the registration process easy is a good start. I've banned a number of Russian and Chinese IPs and it seems as though that's really kept the bot population from registering unless someone else has been doing all the banning. Maybe we'll just keep it the way it is.

The other thing is that I do think a lot of people would use this + a combination of the archives if they were published. I actually created trombonechat.com/ttf yesterday and re-created the structure. I wasn't able to identify an easy way to get the SQLite database I made to dump into the phpBB database but I also only spent maybe 30 minutes on it. I don't think it should be too hard.

That said... here's a problem I'd like to avoid. When someone searches for something and Google starts indexing it... it'll go to trombonechat.com/ttf/blahblahblah. We should probably get a specific domain for that and park it there... something like TTFarchives.com or something ilke that. OR make it so the archives are not actually a forum, but a prettified dump of the messages. I'm inclined to make a separate forum that doesn't let anyone register for it.. that way we can make dummy users of the same name as those who posted in the TTF... it woudl allow skins and perhaps more importantly, it would let Google index it. Google has a bot that works very well with phpBB and would direct a lot of traffic to it instead of the horrible mobile version of the TTF lol.

Alternatively, we could make a top level forum called "Archives" and make the subforums the same as the TTF. In doing so, everything would be on TTF. We could lock it so that nobody could go there, but that would give the advantage that people would be logged in to our site every time the looked at archived content. It might be more difficult to do it that way though, although I think it would be just as feasible as the other ways. The only thing I can think of that would be a roadblock would be the users like myself who have the same name. I think that should be okay... but what I don't want is someone to not be able to register because we've registered a dummy user of the same name. E.g. if we did this and I wasn't already on the site as 'Matt K', then it might not let me claim that account because a dummy user "Matt K" could already exist. We could get around that by having all the dummy users have a specific prefix like A_Matt K (for "archive).

If we went with phpBB we could find someone else to do the work too, which may be optimal. My parents are in town this weekend and next week and I'm still working on my taxes so I don't know how long I'd have to dedicate to this and it would be a feature that I think would help draw traffic here that we should probably do sooner than later. I can check to see if we can get it done for a price. I'd not imagine it would cost more than $50 to get something like this done. But it depends on our ultimate specifications I think.

I like the idea of keeping the TTF archives as a separate and separable part of us. If Richard Byrd comes and makes a noise about it, we should be able to easily discard it.

Keeping the archives locked is also a good idea. We don't want to resurrect TTF for Richard if we don't have to.

[quote="BGuttman"]I like the idea of keeping the TTF archives as a separate and separable part of us. If Richard Byrd comes and makes a noise about it, we should be able to easily discard it.

Keeping the archives locked is also a good idea. We don't want to resurrect TTF for Richard if we don't have to.[/quote]

Well, the legal system certainly does have it's... problems here. Technically it should be no problem. Nothing was copywritten after 2008 and everything, even if he had applied the license to it, would be subject to the CCL. So as long as we have a splash page citing ttf as the source, it's fine. That said... I have a hilarious idea that I'll run past Brian later today... it'll shield us indefinitely for zero cost. At least on a legal level.

Yes, an archive would make a big difference. It will take time for the masses to come over but more posts will draw them in.

Chris