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Mars Anomaly Research archive -> Alien Anomalies -> Mars General Discussion -> Communal project and information site ideas
Post Info TOPIC: Communal project and information site ideas
qmantoo


Teaching the truth

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RE: Communal project and information site ideas
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Although there may be forum software which already exists that addresses these extra issues, I was not really meaning that we at Alien Anomalies should necessarily provide this as part of the forum.

The idea of this topic was to invite ideas and suggestions as to how we go about organising our anomaly investigations.

Out of this discussion, may possibly come a requirement of what we collectively need. We could then go out and search for something that fulfilled our requirements or it could be created either by the forum or by me independently.

It could be that we do not need something as formal as this, however there are people on this forum who are pretty serious in their hobby of searching for and investigating anomalies. I reckon that there are many gigabytes of data on personal PC hard drives which are disorganised or difficult to search should something be needed again in the future. I know that there are on mine.

If software like this already exists as shareware or even paid software, and it fits our requirements then perhaps we could install it somewhere and use it. If it does not do what we need, maybe we could produce it to serve our investigations of anomalies and also use it to attract others to the forum too.

If we all think we would use this kind of software or facility, then maybe I would write it, run it on another site and link back to the forum for discussions which are relevant to the projects.

Although marsanomalyresearch site came first and the forum second, there is no reason why there should not be many inter-related independent sites which all link to each other which serve different aspects of the anomaly investigation and which are used by the same people who visit the forum for different purposes.

It is impossible to be all-things to all-people and so it may be better to allow certain periphery functions to be handled by other sites and to work with these sites to make the users experience a better one.

Wherever people are, they will always need a social aspect to their lives and forums fulfill this function along with social sites like Twitter and Facebook. The most successful sites on the internet are the ones that do what they do well. Google does searches, wikipedia does facts, etc

Forums are great for discussions, debate and social grouping, so there is always a need for a forum in the scheme of things.

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Xenon


Administrator

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Thank you qmantoo for your thoughts

My problem is I rely on my wife for any programming or HTMl etc.. because that is her field, but she has a career, family and other commitments and has very little time to work on such projects.

I did mention about links and images to the team a good while back (when we where exploring the Idea of an off site main page for the PTP), with direct links to the forum and off site image storage and data sites. and I agree, there are a lot of images posted at the site where links would suffice, but the site has always had a data-orientated and 'scientific' approach to the evidence, only because of the freedom of expression on the site not all viewers realise this.

My administrator panel does have limitations to what I can do at the site, Chandre has done a wonderful job at organising the various threads and it is easy to use, but her time is taken up on another project  I agree the issue does need further thought and discussion by the team as we plan further ahead..... Thank you! smile

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qmantoo


Teaching the truth

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OK, this is not necessarily a Mars-only project, but we could start out with it being this perhaps and design it for other areas of investigation too. I do not know if it is do-able or even  whether I want to get involved with this kind of large on-going project.

I am trying to address some of the downfalls of a forum and steer clear of the discussion aspect for which forums are an excellent medium. However, they need a fair bit of moderation and control to ensure that they are a safe place for all.

I think there is a need for both this kind of forum discussion aspect to a subject and a cataloging aspect for future searches. I feel that searching for something is where a forum format is perhaps not the best way of finding the information you need because often it is mixed in with a lot of other information and difficult to extract..

This future searches aspect is the part I am targeting in this post, and I feel that limiting the project to links and data only will possibly steer through some of the off-topic or side-issues and allow a more data-orientated or a more 'scientific' approach.

Hopefully one will complement the other and links will go back and forth from each. It would certainly not be an either - or thing and as I see it, would not compete at all. Rather like Facebook or other social sites are a necessary part of internet life and so are search sites like Google.

Is there perhaps any good online software that allows us to share information/links about a project and links to other projects showing the same picture or similar theme? This would stop us re-inventing the wheel again?

If not, could it be done on-line? If there is some already, please post links and a review if you have used it.

My initial thoughts, and I would welcome other ideas and suggestions here too please.

I do not think that images should be stored again at the website, but just links to online images would be enough. Most people have areas on photobucket or similar photo sharing sites if necessary and what we need is a communal project catalogue perhaps with tags and information relevant to the project. If we allowed images to be stored online at the website the data area would get filled with duplicate and irrelevent images and dross (which is a possible downfall of forums).

A PC-based solution would take MONTHS to write and more MONTHS to test. The online one could be done but again would take quite a while to write (for one person) and would need a lot of thought and design with masses of input as to what would be required. It would probably need to be a membership site otherwise you will get spammers putting links to their products.

What kind of features would we need ?

Project code
project description

image links
image thumbnail
image description
image features/highlights
image feature positions (maybe a grid idea?)
image tagwords for searching
image feature/tagword search


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