Been a busy week for us as we had guests aboard and we playing tourist guide through the BVIs.  Not much chance to get anything done until yesterday but I was able to make some additions.

For your review:

All messages from the Yahoo board have been captured through yesterday. I can do that at will and append the document now.

I uploaded and made available all these messages in both .pdf and .html.  You can download them and own the entire Yahoo group dialogue from day one.  It is an immense document and searching it takes a long time on a slow machine.  I think the web document (.html) is faster. Someday, when someone has a week with nothing to do, it would be nice to trim out about 900,000 words of spurious html markup from all these messages.  I think the finished document would be quite manageable then.  Not sure I'm up for that quite yet though.

Per the suggestions made here, I added numerous message boards and photo gallery categories and subs.  I did not go into the granularity that I could have because the bbs software is not exactly simple a filing system. The way it'll work is that is, for instance: Someone comes up with a solid service schedule and posts it under that category.  A moderator will format it and lock that message making it a 'sticky' note that will always be at the top of any other messages. If it needs to be updated, the moderator just unlocks it and the original poster or the moderator can update it. Then it gets re-stick-ified so it always remains first on a search and first on the message list for that topic.  

The photo organization will need conventions: any time you post a message and include photos the decision needs to be made whether or not that photo is just incidental to your message (i.e. this is us sailing along with the dolphins) or if it is substantial to the group (i.e. here is the information plate from my Leroy Somer Outhaul Motor).  

As I mentioned, there are several levels of the Photo Gallery already so pictures can be sent to the appropriate topic (and new ones made at any time). In addition, individual members in good standing can create their own galleries and just share them to other board members.  Overall, I think the availability of photos and documents will be better and easier to organize than in the the Yahoo group, but until we actually get some content going it's impossible to really see it.  

I really like the idea of a naming convention and I think the exhaustive description of the suggested 'directories and sub directories' could be integrated in the file naming conventions.  I will come up with some arbitrary conventions to start with and they can evolve from there.  Ultimately there is no way to enforce naming conventions prior to upload so it will will be incumbent upon the membership to try and make it easy on the rest of us.

I created separate categories for each model boat (again). The beauty of a beta :)  I like the idea that the format will be the same regardless of which model you own or are doing research on. Specs, sailing notes, checklists, parts sourcing and the whole spectrum of needed information should be organized identically for each model.  

Having said that, I have not created the sub-boards for any models except Super Maramu/Super Maramu 2000 because it's a bit of a time sink to do so and I await feedback from the group on what is currently available.

If you have a chance, please have a look at the changes and see what you think.

I could be ready to turn it on any time really. I'll just need to make a 'last pull' of the existing messages and make them available.

Thanks again for the suggestions and support.  Now, who is the current moderator of the Yahoo board?  

and .. I need a couple of volunteers to try their hand at the role of moderator :)  

Gary W.

s/v/ Adagio

Leverick Bay, VG BVI