I'm not ignoring the feedback, I'm watching and waiting for more of it. There is more discussion also in the private senate forum where a lot of the points being raised here and via Facebook are also being discussed. To answer a few factual questions, so they don't build up too much.
Financially we're OK. We have a shop which pulls in the minimum required hosting fee each year. That an annual fee of around $1,600.00. We have 2 or 3 years left in the "bank" at the moment, so financially we're OK for the server costs. If we wanted to do other financial things we would need to fund raise.
The new server? We bought it ($8K). We have it. It's essentially built. CraigRat has a horrendous personal work load at the moment. It should be up and running soon (maybe 4 weeks). One of the issues in relying on volunteers. People have a personal life which will take precedence.
iOS (iPhone) app, yes we'd love one. We'd be looking to partner with someone who can build it. Neither CraigRat not I have the developer skills to do this, nor the hardware to test it.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios ... _Language/
Andoid app, we only have one through the good graces of mtrax. GCA doesn't own it, control it or develop for it, but the data is from the GCA DB.
Excluding posts from the forum which is pissing people off. It's a challenge to balance between spammers, commercial sellers and those who are flogging "personal" stuff. A little paragraph of history. GCA was founded on Free and Open. The original forum was ad driven and was taken over and moved to an ad free hosting by i!. When the great split of 2004 happened, the mantra was Free and Open with no rules on cache placements and no cost, ever, to access the data in any way that was possible. This was before the current developers and administration joined, so it goes back a long way. As the drive was to avoid ads on the site (forum and cache pages), the "no-ads" has been at the forefront of any decisions to include or not include content in the forum. This line has been cross, reset, moved, blurred, challenged, argued about, stubbornly enforced, gamed, and a whole host of other things that have contributed to pissing people off. I admit culpability in most of the pissing people off. This situation will never be clear, but unless the overall mantra changes, ads in the forum and on cache pages will not be allowed. The way in which they get treated will have to change though.
Developer passion can become an issue. We have had 4 developers over time. ideology. Ribblit. CraigRat. caughtatwork. Your current developers are CraigRat and caughtatwork. There's a risk in only having two and I would like to have more. Partly for when the current two devs are not available or worst case, lose interest overnight and packup and leave the site in the lurch. We'd be looking to place an ad in the GCA forums and facebook page to recruit a new developer or two to supplement the team and bring new ideas to the site.
GCA does have a facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geocachi ... 9041697791
I hope I've got all the questions answered. A lot of the discussion is not in the form of question and answer, it will be in the "what if" or "how can" type scenario. As I said, there's a discussion in the senate which sooner or later will need to be brought to the wider community, but for the moment stays there as the senate is the first place for these discussions, as per our non-existent charter.
Please keep providing feedback.
Good or bad.
Positive or negative.
Try to avoid any personal attacks by phrasing them as improvements e.g. "caughtatwork really pisses me off when he does xxx" might become "moderators / administrators / developers could be more considerate of other people feelings when stating a point".
Bring out new ideas.
Brainstorm.
If you think of a thing you would like to do, put it forward (like the recent discussion about radio towers which got a few comments, then sort of died).
If you think the sit should be improved, tell us what.
We know the site navigation needs improvement, so we're not blind to the challenges.
We'd also like to spread the work around, so if you have a talent (developing, designing, sales, marketing, making lots of posts of facebook, media, information packs, technical writing, anything) that you would like to bring to GCA, put it forward and it will be added to the talent pool.