This is long due, usually I try to change the site at least every year, the last time it happened on 2009 this time it took another year.
The idea came to my mind when our group members started discussing sculpture (poetry in stone), ponniyin selvan also in facebook and thought is there anyway we can provide that kind of site for ourselves where we will own the content and we can create article out of it easily which is bit cumbersome if the content is hosted @ facebook.com. Discussed internally with Vijay, Venkat and few others and found it might be worth a try.
We also have discussed moving away from Yahoo Groups few times earlier for various reasons but not much of response from the members. Sometimes we need to show how it would look and options to lure them in.
So the site is in beta now, lot of work needs to be done and few bugs to be fixed before making this site live. This site is powered by Wordpress & Buddypress
* Mobile friendly - Those who have smart phones can visit the site and it should be optimized for mobile screen - Current it should work in iPhone, iPod, Android phones. I tested only in Android. * Use Profile - Which can be customized to display whatever the user wants to show, this should show when he was active, how many topics started, how many posts/replies etc., (No body could beat SPS till now - http://beta.ponniyinselvan.in/members/sps10142004/), you can check your stats by using your yahoo profile id http://beta.ponniyinselvan.in/members/put-your-yahoo-id-here * Content is reformatted - it will display only the email response member posted instead of displaying the chain of replies, it is not perfect yet to understand inline response, but needs some work. * Site should be faster than the current one - will know the results in a day or two * We can create as many groups we want to focus on certain topics (scultpure, ponniyin selvan, bronzes, lounge to discuss anything etc.,) instead of discussing everything in one place which sometimes irritates member who do not want to see them
Saurabh and Sash insisting on keeping the email option open as well, it is not done yet, will add that later. I need to convince our moderators also on this and make sure this is going to reduce the work as well as make the forum better place.
I would like some volunteers who are very active to use the beta site and give feedback which can incorporated based on the priority. Based on the volunteers decision If the site is not suitable we can drop the idea of moving away from yahoo groups and continue to maintain the site as an archive or we can all move to the site.