Please move to our new UU discord server

Most unfortunate.

Discord is not for me, if Ukulele Underground is closed or put into hibernation will have to look for something to replace it.

I'm surprised that one or more of the major instrument manufacturers don't pick up the reins (Kala for instance) a perfect marketing opportunity to a captive audience for relatively little outlay, I've seen seen other businesses do this very successfully.

I've certainly enjoyed my relatively short time on Ukulele Underground, a very friendly and informative forum.:)
 
(Apologies in advance for the duplicate posting here, I wanted to make sure that Rayan sees this message, sorry if I ruffled any feathers)

Hi Rayan,

Thanks to you and the others that keep UU going.

I will be very sad if the forum shuts down. I've used Discord in the past, and did not like it because of the chaos that often happens with many simultaneous, yet disconnected conversations taking place in a specific channel, all in real-time.

Using Facebook is not an option for me because the company is evil and I will not give them my personal (or otherwise) info nor my time.

I would be willing to sign up to a Patreon or GoFundMe as well as UU VIP once I have a regular income again. Right now because of the COVID-19 problems, I am unemployed and going through a very difficult time.

If in the end, it is absolutely necessary to take the forum offline, will you please consider and investigate having the historical content preserved on The Internet Archive, via https://www.archive.org?

If so, then all of the deep and meaningful text information contained here would not be lost forever in some offline backup tapes, never to be seen again.

There are also a few places I know of where there are teams of people to assist with getting sites into The Internet Archive. If you PM me, I can send you the details. I am not sure if they are all volunteers, but I know that some of them are.

Also, if the forum is to go offline, will it be possible to give fair warning, like 15 or 30 days before shutdown so that we can exchange contact info with other friends (that we may have not already), and also copy any important info we would like to save locally?

Thank you in advance for reading my post.

All the best to you, and the rest of the UU management team,

Joe :)
 
I attempted to reach UU moderator Ryan through private messaging and got the following message:

rayan has exceeded their stored private messages quota and cannot accept further messages until they clear some space.
Your Message


My message was simple:

Ryan,

Following your recent post regarding the use of Discord, there seems to be confusion among UU members regarding the shutdown of the other UU forums. Could you please clarify the intentions of Ukulele Underground regarding this issue.

Thank you,

Rick (Sequoia)


Onward! Through the fog!
 
I attempted to reach UU moderator Ryan through private messaging and got the following message:

rayan has exceeded their stored private messages quota and cannot accept further messages until they clear some space.
Your Message


My message was simple:

Ryan,

Following your recent post regarding the use of Discord, there seems to be confusion among UU members regarding the shutdown of the other UU forums. Could you please clarify the intentions of Ukulele Underground regarding this issue.

Thank you,

Rick (Sequoia)


Onward! Through the fog!

G'day Rick, in post one this thread Ryan states "I give up with my PM box, just email ryan(at)ukuleleunderground.com"

Perhaps if you email him.:)
 
Ryan,
We chatted on discord briefly.. Discord is very different from UU. Most people discover this forum via google searches..
If you do plan to shutdown the forum, I offer to move the content to a read only forum to maintain the history here.. which is priceless.
I also offer to help run a hosted by vbulletin site migrating this one to there..
I am testing out ukulelegrounded.com as a test on their hosted offering to see how it works out.
Please do not under estimate the relevance of the content in these forums to the community.
 
What about a community install of Discourse? They have migration tools for vBulletin as well so historical content could be migrated.
 
If $$ are the problem, could this site allow (shudder) advertising?
I created a Discord Account, and it seems less intuitive than this one.
Having authored and been editor/ co-editor of several newsletters, I am well aware of the time and effort these things require. I do appreciate it.
However, I may move on, thankful for my time here and the exchange of information that I have experienced.
 
I believe the problem really stems from users not willing to pay a nominal fee to be a member. From the first day I joined 7 years ago, I paid the VIP fee. Where ever UU moves, I'll be glad to pay for being a member.


This is Michael Kohan in Los Angeles, Beverly Grove near the Beverly Center
9 tenor cutaway ukes, 6 acoustic bass ukes, 12 solid body bass ukes, 14 mini electric bass guitars (Total: 41)

• Donate to The Ukulele Kids Club, they provide ukuleles to children in hospital music therapy programs. www.theukc.org
• Member The CC Strummers: YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/CCStrummers/video, Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheCCStrummers
 
If there's going to be a new forum, one possibility is having different levels of membership. Maybe 3 levels? Possibly don't make it blatantly obvious, which level you are, just a subtle indicator somewhere.

One time donations are great, but there's less incentive for recurrence from year to year, so there should be more incentive to sign up for a membership.

I'm sure there are some people are donating smaller amounts if they feel the VIP cost is too much (or if they want to donate extra). Just because you don't have a VIP next to your name, doesn't mean you didn't contribute.

Everyone has different financial situations, and maybe less than $1 a week sounds cheap, but a one time layout of $45, means a big hit to the groceries until the next cheque comes in for some folks.

(reposted from here)
 
What about a community install of Discourse? They have migration tools for vBulletin as well so historical content could be migrated.
I am trying to get ukulelegrounded.com on vbulletin hosted solution up. I really want
1. content to be saved from past
2. easy management model for the community
Ryan and team use that experiment to see if it makes sense to migrate this forum from self hosted environment to a hosted one which will reduce the pain of keeping the site up by quite a lot.
 
What about a community install of Discourse? They have migration tools for vBulletin as well so historical content could be migrated.

:2cents: I think every other forum I visit runs Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/). It's an adjustment from Vbulletin at first but it *is a forum* with a nice clean design and some built-in safety features (delays between new sign-up and posting, number of posts per day, etc.).

If maintaining a huge database is a part of the problem, then let's please start weeding out the chaff. I say this of my posts as well as anybody else's: they're not all diamonds. Not everything needs to be held onto ad infinitum. (If migration is considered, I would recommend doing this beforehand anyway as it will make the migration more likely to succeed without problem and less time-consuming overall.)

However this turns out, mahalo to Rayan and the rest of the team who kept the forum running for so long. :worship:
 
Our company went through a similar change about five years ago.

We had a web platform installed in 1996 that had tens of thousands of posts, videos, and images. The architecture (guts) weren’t able to deal with that amount of stuff. The people who operated the site (not we, who moderated it) tried to keep the site running on its original carcass. But it became too unwieldy and crashed a lot. And it became more expensive for us to pay the vendor to keep adding the chewing gum and bailing wire needed to keep the site running.

So we went to a new carcass. It meant our old stuff wasn’t as easy to find, but we could keep going. And the new material we posted looks better and is easier to share and modify.

My guess is the mods here aren’t doing this for a living and the cost of keeping this old car running isn’t worth it. So you move to a new model that’s different. Better, in the long run, maybe, but different now.

I’m amazed they could keep this heap afloat as long as they did. I hope Discord works.
 
Our company went through a similar change about five years ago.

We had a web platform installed in 1996 that had tens of thousands of posts, videos, and images. The architecture (guts) weren’t able to deal with that amount of stuff. The people who operated the site (not we, who moderated it) tried to keep the site running on its original carcass. But it became too unwieldy and crashed a lot. And it became more expensive for us to pay the vendor to keep adding the chewing gum and bailing wire needed to keep the site running.

So we went to a new carcass. It meant our old stuff wasn’t as easy to find, but we could keep going. And the new material we posted looks better and is easier to share and modify.

My guess is the mods here aren’t doing this for a living and the cost of keeping this old car running isn’t worth it. So you move to a new model that’s different. Better, in the long run, maybe, but different now.

I’m amazed they could keep this heap afloat as long as they did. I hope Discord works.

I too am grateful and thankful to the mods for all their hard work in starting and growing Ukulele Underground and, especially, the forums. And it's probably true that UU has outgrown it's carcass. I respect the people who run this site and I'm sure they know much more than I possibly could about what it needs. I just don't think discord, which behaves more like a chat and, therefore, very much unlike a forum, is the proper form of new carcass. When a snail outgrows its shell, it finds a bigger shell. It doesn't move into a milk carton.
 
I've only been here for a short time and I'm happy with the status quo. Chat lines are not for me so I'll continue to visit this forum and when it closes up I'll say It's been nice.... bye.
 
I've only been here for a short time and I'm happy with the status quo. Chat lines are not for me so I'll continue to visit this forum and when it closes up I'll say It's been nice.... bye.
I'm with you,Willy
 
Yup - Willy and Timbuck (Ken), I've had a look at Discord and it doesn't work for me.

John Colter
 
I´m new here, had a look at Discord but didn't understand any of it, and couldn´t work out if or how I could post.
Could be age-related on my part, but I´m a writer, not a chatterer.
 
Yup - Willy and Timbuck (Ken), I've had a look at Discord and it doesn't work for me.

John Colter

This is it for me too Geesh , this has been such a great site , It's like your favorite tv show being cancelled and you think , I wonder why it was cancelled , everyone liked it.
 
Top Bottom