Admin

The sites has now been moved over to the new server, hope you finding an improvement in performance

Kangaroos...bringing beer...hop, hop, hop

I really cracked up laughing when I saw this

Does Leo still have a CT...say hi to him for me will you Nev

The registration page would be blocked so existing users are fine and any new members outside of Australia and New Zealand could still be registered by myself manually

Will do

I am not sure what happened but the last time i did a major upgrade to the site the Movies and TV Shows section went offline, probably because of a clash with the server php version. Anyway I have fixed that and turned the section back on. Hope you can make good use of it

Nev is recovering from his Knee surgery in rehab so he will be back with Bells on very soon. Life would not be the same without Nev

Firstly like everything else why should just a few pay money to get the benefit when so many others get the benefits for free. The solution to that is every member has to pay to access the site but the outcome of that will be a closed shop that will kill a site off very quickly. If we compare the site versus the facebook points previously made: FB: Posts on FB are generally no longer than one sentence. SA: Not only does this site promote longer posts but there is also better formatting of posts like new paragraphs, bold, italic, colour, centering etc, in fact I can add many more if you want FB: Facebook is open to anyone on the planet. SA: This site is open to anyone in Australia and New Zealand and if any user would like specific friends in another country to be able to access the site, just let me know and I can manually add them FB: You can find the profile of a friend or relative, and select them as a "Facebook Friend". You can search for people you know, and send them a "Friend Request" SA: You can search for another user and follow them as a Friend basically the same as FB but there are also badges, reputation, etc plus I can add some more user and friend features unlike FB, tell me what you want FB: make you post available to "Public", "Friends", "Specific Friend", "All Friends Except" or "Custom" SA: Unfortunately FB has it over SA in this area. Not sure what I can do with this BUT FB: With items flagged as public, you get inundated with trolls SA: Moderation is enforced here on SA so Trolls against a user's post is extremely rare FB: People are suggested based on mutual friends, or common things in their profile, such as attended the same high school SA: Again FB has it over SA in this area. The only thing is you can see a users friends by looking at their profile BUT the thing is, SA has far more privacy and security to prevent unwanted targeting. I could relax this a bit with extra profile fields if we got many more users and friend/family groups were created...let me know how you would like this to go FB: how easy is it to post pictures? Actually, it's quite simple.When in the comment entry panel, an icon (as shown below) opens the Add photos box, where you select the file to upload. SA: It is much easier to post pictures on SA plus you can also attach different types of files and you do have the Gallery where there are categories FB: usually short video clips are uploaded in posts and show as a freeze frame. I cannot address Youtube type videos, I've never tried to upload one. SA: You can link most types of videos including YouTube ones. let me know if there are any you can't. Actually uploading a full video is hard because SA does not have the server space like FB FB: Absolutely littered with adverts. AI monitors your web searches then bombards you with adverts that are barely related. SA: Not here on SA at all FB: There are complaint groups for things like Australia Post and Foxtel. SA: We have Groups here that are far superior than FB for users to create, you can even have a Family Group that is locked to just Family users etc FB: A downside for some people may be that on FB people usually use their real name and perhaps some folks value anonymity. SA: A user can be completely anonymous to every other user but NOT to myself as I value user security to the highest level I can, unlike FB There are many more Pros and Cons of both platforms like cost, easy access, access to many other things etc. I comes down to that I can create just about anything you want here but to do so would need a massive more user registrations to make it viable. For example a "complaint group" as mentioned above is useless if only say 2 users access it or contribute to it. Thanks and I am so appreciative of the comments being made here as a collective.

The first one "No advertising is allowed"

No advertising is allowed, there have been many new registrations just to post about there business to get free advertising and not post in the general forums

Thank you so much for your input so far, it has opened up many more ideas to consider...I didn't realise, for example, the assistance that a site like this can have on us. Perhaps there is opportunity to steer the site in a more helpful direction instead of just being an Off Topic sister site to Recreational Flying. The following is just a quick brain dump... The domain names TheMensShedOnline.com.au and MensShedOnline.com.au are available @red750 don't suppose you could help in trying to resurrect that old site that we could use? I am looking into how I could lock this site to Just Australian and New Zealand users Do we open the site to say just 10 advertisers at $20 a month? When a user registers there is a message saying No advertising unless they take up this offer OR do we still stop advertising. I don't think a subscription cost is the way to go if we leave the site as it is. How do we get many more new users and friendships? A lot to think about and your help thus far has opened my eyes a bit so thanks for that

I am running both the Recreational Flying (.com) site and this one here for Off Topic conversations. The users here just use the forums and nothing else so my take is that we only need forums for off topic. This site is continually bombarded with spam threads and posts from users all around the world plus new users here in Australia that join the site just to promote their own business. The software per site costs $150 USD per 6 months, that's around $500 a year in AUD, or nearly $10 Australian a week to have this site in just software costs. Hosting costs are basically fixed due to the Recreational Flying site whilst costing a lot more in software costs, I still have to have the hosting costs of around $3,000 a year whether there is 1 site or 10. So, what do I do...I am no longer working, have no income other than the pension which is the reason I am throwing all this out there for suggestions. I could merge this site with Recreational Flying and have a separate section for Off Topic, including a separate What's New area for new Off Topic threads and posts but there is a risk that some pollution of off topic content landing in the Recreational Flying content. Some degree of edits would need to be made to the menu system there perhaps making the What's New menu area a bit confusing etc. Or could I just move this site to Facebook? i am sure there are many different options so what options do YOU think there are...thanks for your help

Something more solid