growing the community

[Moai by Peopoly]

Hi group members,

Thanks for signing up.  Google Group is certainly easier to use and manage than a forum.  At the same time, it has more of a mailing list than a community type of feel to it.  

The Google+ community seems to be more interactive, and at the same time, it is harder to find and post things. 

What are your thoughts on these two options and how do you see Peopoly user community fit in?   

I have chatted with as well as met many of users. We have a fantastic group of users with wide varieties of backgrounds and shared interests. We hope to make this journey together as enjoyable as possible for all involved. 

Shu

[Chris Cox]

While Google Groups are slow and annoying in their UI, they do work and do help keep down the spam.

Google+ is pretty dead.  (I think I saw some engineers heading to Mountain View with hammers and coffin nails)  At best it's just FacebookLite.

The community will almost certainly have tables/pages of data to share (settings for different resins, for instance) - so we could link to google docs, or a wiki.  That could be managed on either Groups or Google+.

There will be discussions on problems and ideas that get pretty long, and Groups makes that sort of thing easier to follow.

There will be discussions on particular models, including files and photos -- Google+ sort of makes that easier, but not by much.

So Groups seems to be the right answer as far as I can tell.

[Clark Cianfarini]

My only concern with Groups (and I'm probably wrong on this as I do not know a ton about groups) is that it is a closed system.  It benefits those of us in the group, but not necessarily new comers.

That is why I personally like the idea of a forum or wiki.  It provides a place to share information about the Moai with the world and act as an extension of the sales team to help drive users to purchase the Moai.  I know I like to go to forums for high tech products I own to share my experiences/tips/tricks and learn from others.  It is absolutely a geeky thing to do, but I am an engineer by day, so I might be a bit biased in what I think is fun! ;-)

Now that I rambled a bit, I do think Groups is a great first start and should help keep the spam low.

[Matt Lynch]

I'm an Information Security Engineer, and I predicted that the previous PHP forum was going to get clobbered with spam like it did, and this is why I stopped supporting PHP professionally.  It's a nightmare to try and secure!

While providing forum access to non-members is admirable, it is very difficult, and Shu & staff would have to contract someone to manage it for them, whether in person or as a managed system.

This is why I originally suggested Slack as they manage it for you, but I think this suggestion might have gotten lost in the hectic time right after the Kickstarter ended.

I think Google Groups used to be able to support different custom access levels (as in Anon READ-ONLY access to guests), though I have not looked into it for a while.  

[Moai by Peopoly]

I intended this group to be open for public view and only member can post type of deal.  So someone who wants to learn about Moai or SLA printing in general can get some information without joining. I updated the group settings to reflect that now.

[Matt Lynch]

I've confirmed that an anonymous user can read the forum postings and can't post without logging in

Hopefully we can have some good discussions without getting overwhelmed with spam

If Peopoly is interested, I might be able to assist in extracting the forum posts on the PHP site so they can be imported on here

[Moai by Peopoly]

Please assist if you have an automated way of downloading those messages. 

[Matt Lynch]

Ill try to extract the data, however I can only access the forum through the website and this is perpetually offline/overloaded.

The PHP Forum software was setup on a Server that Peopoly should have some form of access to (either through SSH or a Website Management Console).

This Forum software has to write the messages to a Database so they can be stored and retrieved.

If you guys had a way to connect onto this Server and into this Database, you should be able to extract the messages.

If you dont have a direct way of doing it, you might be able to contact Support for your Server company.

[Matt Lynch]

The old PHP forum temporarily stopped being slammed with traffic, so I was able to extract the messages.

Ive stripped out the HTML, cleaned up the text and extracted the images that were posted.

Peopoly would have to post the messages by hand onto this new Google Forum, since there isnt a way to post messages by another user.

All messages would then by listed as from PEOPOLY, but you can include the original poster's name and posting time within these "new" posts.

Ive included this info in the output files too.

If Shu wants to contact me offline, I can email a ZIP file of the data to him.