Topic: Chumby forums new home?

Since it appears evident that Cumby.com is winding down, where is the alternative forums/hangout/gathering place  for talk and trade of all things chumby? Since I am only a few days into the Chumby community, I have great timing. I  have not scouted out the other places you folks are inhabiting.

I am partial to G+, anyone else there?

2 (edited by Odo 2012-04-21 13:01:44)

Re: Chumby forums new home?

Same here, tomwsmf...

However I have a server and can provide hosting for a website/forum... If interested PM me...



tomwsmf wrote:

I am partial to G+, anyone else there?

I didn't quite understood what you wanted to say here.

3 (edited by zurk 2012-05-06 18:48:26)

Re: Chumby forums new home?

community @ insignia is probably a good standby place :
http://community.insigniaproducts.com/t … diaDisplay

I have my own forums here at :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zurk/forums/forum/12064

Re: Chumby forums new home?

I would wait until we know for sure this is gonna die, that way we are not split up. Also, I would not want to rely on BestBuy in the event they go under.
I would do a Yahoo Group, much like the one for the LinkSys WMLS11B...
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/wmls11b/
THere is firmware there, posts, help, ideas and pictures.
Just my 2-cents, Matt

Re: Chumby forums new home?

I also have ample hosting space for the forums... I was actually speaking with Duane about providing alternate hosting for the main Chumby servers, but the specs on that are a little too high-end for what I have available; a forum, on the other hand, I should have no problem with.  I think I'll go write him an e-mail about this now wink

Re: Chumby forums new home?

I agree that we don't want to split up the forums until this one goes dark, but there is a huge amount of knowledge in these forums that we don't want to be lost if chumby.com goes dark.  Perhaps a read only mirror (that goes write-enabled when needed).

Since we don't know the plans for turning off chumby.com, it is possible that it all goes dark all at once.  People who have been happily using their chumby suddenly find that it doesn't work and go to a turned-off forum to unsuccessfully find help.

At the very minimum, it would be nice to have a nicely written howto about using zurk's offline software, and have that hosted outside of these forums (perhaps at sites.google.com). 

As a community, we need to be careful about using the chumby trademark, and we don't know that chumby assets (including trademarks) won't be sold off to lawyers.

Re: Chumby forums new home?

There's this:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgr … user-group

But I tried to post there today and nothing happened; perhaps it's not active?

Re: Chumby forums new home?

Props to the good Doktor; I think migrating the forum intact to a new home is much preferable to alternatives like G+, sourceforge, google-groups, yahoo, but it requires cooperation from Chumby and Duane.  Sounds like maybe Doktor Jones will have / does have a contingency plan in place when the current host gets shut down.  Keep us posted and let us know if there is anything we can do to help.

Re: Chumby forums new home?

Does anybody know who might have been a moderator for the Chumby-User-Group on Google groups?  I too have tried to post there in the last couple of days while forum.chumby.com was offline, without success.  I would be happy to help moderate them if we can gain control over them, although I agree that keeping these forums active would be a better solution (it would be nice to have a live backup though, in case the same thing happens again).

10 (edited by bobsz 2012-05-09 23:09:18)

Re: Chumby forums new home?

I just wanted to bump this up again in case anyone has any new ideas. I wonder if Doktor Jones is still around? Seemed like he might have a lot to offer. Zurk has a small startup forum on sourceforge dealing with his firmware. Of course we need a place to discuss the new issues. But something that's actually got me a little more concerned is if these forums could be kept up as archives even in the worst of situations. Pearmaster mentioned it above. If Google and Internet Archive do it, could it really be a legal problem? I mean there's 40,000 posts covering such a wide range of topics on the Chumby, not just the offline firmware. It was nice to read from Duane yesterday that he's still in there plugging away in general, but obviously in no position to offer much.
(http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?pid=42584#p42584)

But I have no idea how expensive or involved it would be to "preserve" these old forums, so all this experience is wasted. Is this something even practical to wonder about, or just try to keep saving pages on my own? Funny, so often you run into "ghost" forums or bulletin boards floating around on the web, now I kind of hope this can be preserved as one.

Re: Chumby forums new home?

After a bit (okay, a lot) of contemplating of how I wanted to do this, I've set up http://chumcom.the-doktor.net/ .  Right now there's no forum there, and that's the intent.  Just bookmark the site, and if anything ever happens to this forum, rest assured that there will be a full-featured forum available there.

Ideally, I'd like to essentially just do a copyover of these forums, so we can continue discussions uninterrupted and still be able to see all the old posts and such, but it will be dependent on whoever owns the Chumby intellectual property as to whether I can do that or not.

Failing that, I will try to get a static archive of the forum content posted so it's at least available for reference, and open a new forum where we can continue discussing Chumbyish stuff.  Since this would just be a static archive for reference/historical purposes, hopefully I can convince any future owners of the Chumby IP to let me host this, perhaps with a disclaimer banner at the top that it's a private, static archive and is not operated by Chumby Industries.

Even if the future holders of Chumby do not permit me to do either of those, I will still open the forum as a community site so we can discuss all things Chumby in an unofficial capacity; the only thing we'd lose is the existing forum content -- fortunately, at least some of it will still be available at http://www.archive.org/ -- and we'll still have a means to communicate and share our Chumby projects.

Re: Chumby forums new home?

Good move, Doktor Jones. If you can, maybe you should re-post this as an "Announcement" to make sure folks get the URL. I sure hope we can work something out to keep these forums online in some form. In any case, maybe we could personally save some key areas to refer to, even if not "publish" it.

Archive.org will have a little saved, but not much. They just archive most sites a couple of times a year. But between notes we've all taken, snippets we've copied, and the brains of some of the more experienced chums, I bet we could answer a lot of questions.

Just curious if you ever were able to talk to the guy Odo above who said he had ways and means to set up a forum? Maybe he's got the 'real estate' because you've sure got the organization part down. In any case, it would be good to have a central site llike yours to point to other links like zurk's or whatever comes up. I sure would not want to use space from Google+ or Best Buy as mentioned above.

I have no idea what's involved in setting up a forum like this, but I'd help in any way I can.

(BTW, The-Doktor is a pretty cool site name!)

Re: Chumby forums new home?

As to the internet archive, I made a request that they specifically archive this forum and also chumby.com  thoroughly and they said they would.  So hopefully that has been done. 

I have also archived both thoroughly. A snapshot a few weeks ago.

Re: Chumby forums new home?

@Steevo- that's great. Even if the Internet Archive doesn't come through, it's good to know we've got this stuff saved someplace. I did a "snapshot" of the forums last week using WinHTTrack, which was new to me. (Most of this is new to me.) The archive I got from the forum is so massive, it would have been a shame to lose. Great that you got a record of the chumby.com site, too. Like any back-up, let's hope we don't need it too soon!

Re: Chumby forums new home?

Just for anyone who might have been subscribed to this thread, the forum is getting a new home -- and best of all, it'll continue to live at forum.chumby.com!  Also, in the event that something ever did happen to the forum, I now have a complete backup of the actual forum DB, so (provided I can get the legal okay to do so) I can re-upload it on my own servers as a knowledge archive if nothing else.

Please be sure to read through this thread (yeah it's lengthy, but it's got a lot of useful and pertinent information in it) and this thread (pertaining specifically to the preservation of the forum and wiki) for a wealth of info on the future of the forum and Chumby in general.