Ponniyin Selvan Varalaatru Peravai

All,

You may remember that I created poll couple of months back after
hearing from Sivaram about creating forum site and the idea was
dropped. I was also skeptical at that time about it. Now I came across
the software phpbb3 which seems to be a good replacement for our yahoo
group. I imported all our messages to the forum and did some
experiments with various available options to see whether it can be
used for various purposes.

It is available at http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net

Earlier I was skeptical because the main difference between a
yahoo group site and a forum. The messages will reach you in yahoo
groups and in case of forums you have to go there to see the messages.
Since we are used to yahoo group site, forum site may not appeal. But
after checking the features and importing the existing messages, I
think it can be done. We can still maintain the yahoo group site, all
messages posted to yahoo groups can be archived here, same time if we
post any new messages or replies to existing topics in the forum, then
an email can be triggered to yahoo group site which everybody will
get. In this case, both yahoo group and the forum will be in sync and
both can be used. After a while if we think that the forum site is
very good, we can discontinue yahoo group, otherwise we can simply
maintain it as a archive site and continue with yahoo group.

It has lot of very useful features. It is available at
http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/. I have created few forums/topics
to demo the features. I have imported all the users as your yahoo id
and email id as your yahoo email. You should be able to login after
resetting the password through

http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/ucp.php?mode=sendpassword.

1. Supports UTF-8 tamil fonts, you can see it in the home page
where I have used both english and tamil fonts.
2. All the existing messages are available in this forum – 20276
messages 5172 topics.

http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/history-discussion-f12/

3. We have 638 members who contributed at least one messages out
of 1410+ members, you can see the member list and their post here -
http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/memberlist.php, You need to login to
look at the list.
4. Easy to moderate, remove offensive topic, changing the topic
title, splitting topic, stick it to the top, easy to edit at any point
of time if the information is incorrect (I believe we can’t do this
right now with yahoo group).
5. Different forums for different type of discussions
6. Seperate forum for Articles eg., -

http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/novel-characters-f21/vallavarayan-vanthiyathevan-t10643.html

7. Attachments in Download forum -

http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/downloads-f14/

8. Links Forum – http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/links-f16/
9. Fancy stuff – embedding youtub, google videos -

http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/history-discussion-f12/pallava-chola-temples-in-movies-t10617.html#p42236,

http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/history-discussion-f12/vaaram-oru-alayam-51-arulmigu-pundarikaksha-thirukkovil-t10629.html

10. Sticking important message at the top – (TAMIL HERITAGE
FOUNDATION :: Meeting is on top)

http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/history-discussion-f12/

11. Search features
12. List of topics, posts written by members
12. We can create more forums to facilitate our new initatives and
discussions which can be private and available to only few members.

Lot more, it is always based on what we need, it is extensible.

Still this is an experiment, based on the usage, maintenance,
server load either I will abandon this or will discontinue the current
archive site and maintain this.

Please let me know your inputs, since we are doing lot of things
recently, we can make this better and present it as a good source for
others who are seeking it.

There are (atleast) four members who have been contributing always
irrespective of (lack of) response ::

Thiru (e-modifications)
Natraj (Vaaram oru alayam)

Kalinga Tamil Balu ( of late not heard much of his research)
Keerthivasan (Vedic classes etc)

I request members who are well-versed in these matters to interact
with Thiru and workout for betterment of our Group and suggest.

Thanks Thiru.

anbudan / sps

I disabled registration for now, the message source is always comes
from yahoo groups.

Please go here http://beta.ponniyinselvan.net/ucp.php?mode=sendpassword
give your yahoo id and yahoo email id (not your email id where you get
group emails), you will get email on how to reset the password and you
can change your email id in the preferences.

If you still have issues, please send me a private email, I know the
default password.

Thanks for the info.

Yes, you have to use the yahoo id through which you become member of
psvp. If you haven’t posted any message to psvp till now, then your id
won’t be there. Since I took all the existing messages and extracted
the user id from it, the list I have is those who posted atleast once.
I will get the list of members from SPS and create for everybody
shortly.

SPS, please send me the list of members, I will import them which
would allow those who haven’t posted any message as well.

Dear Sirs:
How does one get a reply to one’s queries?

Dear Thiru,

What an effort? that was fantastic and I think keeping yahoo groups site and
forum site in sync is the most important thing. If you could remember I was
telling about another effort i was involved, in which we converted a google
group to a forum site, that effort failed due to lack sync between the group
and forum. People did not like the idea of going to a forum to check the
messages posted. So if we could keep the forum and group in sync, people can
use groups for sending mails and use the forum can used as a effective
archiving tool, which I guess defines us as a literary/historical group.

Dear Thiru,

This week alone we have enroled 14 new members !

I am sure your contribution is commendable.

anbudan / sps

Thiru,
Amazing work. SPS is right in saying so. Your contribution is
commendable.

I checked the link you had sent. The date of the post shows something
wierd…it says Dec 31 1969. Anything wrong with the system date/time?
I would not have noticed it if the posting was anything other than
the timing by which google indexes