Web forum idea

[Bret Hess]

An idea to explore  (replacing this Google group) is to add a private web forum to our existing website utahsoaring.org.  There are wordpress plugins that should work.   Mike Neal suggested this and here some ideas of topics from him and me:

• Flight skills and safety
• Cross country flight and tracks
• New member introductions
• Airport news (could have one for each airport)
• Maintenance (could have forum for each glider, and one for general discussion, including of maintaining private gilders)
• Volunteer opportunities
• Co-piloting opportunities
• Group flight opportunities
• Classifieds
• Weather forecast discussion
• Suggestions to the board
• Condor

The advantage of a forum is that each member can then subscribe to the topics they are interested in and get email notifications for only those topics. 

Ideas, comments?   

[Eric Iverson]

That sounds good.  Whatever is easiest, and most user friendly.  

[Jonathan Foster]

This is an interesting idea ...

I have actually played this game with the Utah Hangliding Paragliding association when I took care of their website. How did it turn out? Not so great. It ended up be a lot of maintenance and wasn't used a ton. One other downside is it increases the attack surface of our website.

Now having said that, I am willing to give it a try if everyone feels like that would be an awesome way of doing this. 

[Bret Hess]

If the forum doesn't store anything more personal than email addresses, what are the security risks you're thinking about?

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[Jonathan Foster]

The more plugins and extensions you add to WordPress the more opportunity hackers have to find exploits. That is why it is called an attack surface. Hope that helps.

When a website gets hacked it is a lot of work to clean up and get working again. There is also the risk that Google will see that our site is hacked and remove it from their search results.

Again, I am not saying we shouldn't do it, I just want to make sure everyone knows there is a good amount of care and feeding something like this takes. If it gets used I don't mind doing the care and feeding.

[Eric Iverson]

I do like the idea of having the topics organized.  However, I'm not a computer guy, so I don't have an opinion on the best way to accomplish that.  

[Bret Hess]

I'll start an experiment with a few topics on a separate Google groups, and embed each discussion page on our website.  Then google can handle the security and the storage.  It would be easy to send invitations for all the groups in bulk to the whole club once a year and those that want can join the different topics.  Should be low maintenance.     

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/utah-soaring/9ff07507-bec8-4582-962c-1b57662a8995n%40googlegroups.com.

[Bret Hess]

OK this is moving ahead, but it will take a couple of weeks to get all the topics in, because Google has a limit of 5 groups a week I can add :).