Dave's View from the Cheap Seats - Or RV Forum vs. the Serenity Prayer

[dedmiston]

I'm not in AA, but I love their Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Many of you know who I am and probably even more of you don't know me at all. I joined the forum in 2004 when I was shopping for my first Toy Hauler, and then Admin and Mellow Mike tapped me to serve as a moderator the following year. I've served as a mod this whole time, and then this time last year Admin turned over his responsibilities to me and I took over as the Administrator of RV.NET. It's been a dubious honor, because it came with all of the responsibilities to keep the community running (along with the rest of the Moderation team) but none of the actual power to make any changes to the platform (servers) or the forum software: lots of responsibilities with very limited power.

I don't think most members here appreciate the inevitability of these forum changes though. Rewinding the clock a little, here's the situation we faced. Our options with the old RV.NET software platform were:

1. Do nothing and just wait for the site to crash. The technology was obsolete and nobody was left at Good Sam who knew how to fix any of the code. Given enough time (probably just a few more months) the forum was bound to collapse under its own weight and there wouldn't be an RV.NET anymore.
2. Keep bickering with each other on the old site until Good Sam saw the site as a liability and pulled the plug altogether. As a moderator and administrator I've been privy to the metrics behind the site for years, and the one-two punch of the decline of our technology plus the pandemic left us in a dire condition with just a small handful of active members and TONS of infighting over lockdown conditions, a faltering economy, and political polarization. The forum got smaller and the members got uglier. Not good. It couldn't continue that way, even if by some miracle the site didn't crash.
3. Spin up this new site in tandem with RV.NET and allow members to post in both locations until this new community was deemed perfect by all concerned and then lock down the old site for archival purposes and leave the data were it was on the old site.
4. Spin up this new site, migrate all the RV.NET data, and then shut down the old site once the data migration was complete (which is what Good Sam has done).

Hopefully all will agree that options #1 & #2 were undesirable enough to be ruled out as non-starters. The 3rd and 4th options were more desirable and both were researched and analyzed as possibilities, but #4 won out as the chosen option. Many of you obviously disagree with this direction, but having worked in the tech arena most of my career it's very clear that the direction that Good Sam took was the best solution even if it's painful in the short run.

What's not obvious to most people is that running the sites in parallel and allowing people to post in either site until eventually locking down RV.NET would have been a disaster. Our most valuable asset is the decades of posts on RV.NET. Unfortunately the most broken piece on the old site was the Search, so most of the treasure chest of data wasn't even available to us anymore. I happen to know though that migrating that massive amount of data was a HUGE undertaking of time and research, which translates to a significant payroll investment that Good Sam committed to, all to benefit members like you and me. They did us an enormous favor by ensuring that our years' of posts would continue to live on. Not only that, but they maintained our member accounts so the historical data would actually be attached to us members who are still here. This was an incredible undertaking and It's disappointing to me how few members seem to appreciate this.

Good Sam made this commitment early this year and has been researching options and planning the changes for most of 2023 (hopefully I've got that right). 

And now it's November and we've got this new site, warts and all. And for the detractors, imagine it as an incredible new car with a paint job that you hate. But guess what: we can repaint it. It's still a kickass car though. And all of our favorite stuff is in the trunk and we didn't have to sell any of it.

Here's where the concepts of the Serenity Prayer come in though: There are things that we can change and things that we cannot. We need to admit this though (all of us) and then figure out how to move forward.

Things we cannot change:

1. The fact that RV.NET is gone to us. It's gone. Period. There's no going back.
2. The fact that we have to sign-in to the forum often. Part of this is configurable and the time period has been set to the maximum. But the third-party platform that Good Sam selected as our host has a requirement to sign-in more often and use more complex passwords. We can't change that.
3. The fact that the site looks different. Yes, it's different. It's a different site and it was redesigned from top to bottom. Can it be changed? In many ways yes, but it will never look like the old site and it really shouldn't anyway.

I'm sure there are more items to add to this list, but my point is that we all need to shift our viewpoint and see that some things can't/won't be changed, no matter how much we complain.

Things we CAN change:

1. I doubt most of us think of this very often, but the first thing we can change is ourselves. We come to this community with a set of expectations, and maybe we need to look at ourselves and see which of these expectations we should change so that we can be happier people. We just finished the Thanksgiving weekend, so hopefully we're still in the mindset of gratitude. How thankful are we that we can just post a photo in the middle of a post without having to save the file to another server first? How thankful are we that the site hasn't been unavailable or slow ONE TIME since it came online? The old site's performance was horrible and embarrassing. This new platform is incredible by comparison.
2. Settings in your account: You can tweak the configuration preferences in your account to change the number of posts & replies shown on any page. I've increased mine and the display is actually pretty nice compared to the defaults. You can also chose whether to sort the posts oldest to newest or newest to oldest.
3. Other site "look & feel" aspects: Your feedback is invaluable to evolving this new community into a look & feel that the majority of us will be satisfied with. But wanna know what's not valuable at all? "This site sucks and I'm outta here." Uh. OK. Not sure what we can do with that and we'll be sorry to lose you, but that's your prerogative. But contributing meaningful and specific feedback like "Please add the Truck Camper forum back" is a massive help. There's a huge difference between providing actionable feedback requests and just saying "this site sucks".

I've rambled on long enough now, but I'd like to challenge you all to accept the features that we cannot change and to stick around and contribute the input that the Good Sam team needs to satisfy the membership moving forward. The feedback has been mostly negative, but I'm optimistic that we'll get through this initial phase and find an equilibrium that satisfies the majority of our members old and new alike.

I guess my parting thoughts are to remind us all to keep things in perspective and remember that this is just a website and changing the look and feel isn't the end of the world and doesn't truly impact our lives, especially since the current state of the Community is just Phase One and that Good Sam is continuing to make improvements. Please be kind and respectful to the Good Sam crew though, because they're human just like the rest of us. And don't forget that the Moderation team are all volunteers and we're helping out here out of a sense of service and giving back to the RV community we've loved for so long.

Happy Trails,
Dave

[MNtundraRet]

I meant I joined 12/06/2007. Typo in my last post. It would b nice to edit our post for typos.

[mkirsch]

Pretty sure you can edit.

EDIT: Yes, you can edit. Click the little down arrow in the upper right corner of your post. That opens a dropdown menu, and the first choice is, "Edit."

[MNtundraRet]

I am not seeing "Edit" as a choice. 

I don't know why you have "Edit".

[Dave_in_TN]

Weird thing is, I edited a post of mine yesterday in this thread, but when I click on the arrow now on one of my posts it does not give me the Edit option.  I'm logged in, but it's not there now. 

[MNtundraRet]

You were right about the edit. I tested a new reply and noticed I could edit it if needed. Evidently, we only have a short window to edit. 

[joerg68]

It is not unusual for forum software to give you a limited time window during which you can edit/correct a post that you made. I guess that is what is happening here. 

Small experiment: Post edited after a few minutes.

[joerg68]

...aaaaand no more edit option after > 30 minutes 

[Dave_in_TN]

I've scrolled through all of my "Replies" and it seems they go back to early 2013.  I know I posted/replied in the period between my join date in 2006 and 2013, but those aren't showing up.  Not a big deal to me, but I offer this as anecdotal evidence that perhaps posts older than 10-11 years old didn't migrate over? 

[MNtundraRet]

I should have added that count (3400) showing on my RV.Net window sticker was only a counter that increased for each post or reply. It did not represent the actual total of replies less black-holed (removed) posts. We needed to run a special search looking for our own posts under author to stored archives. I taught myself many of the early programing languages back in 1972. 

That is why I was asked to help run the Comcast forum in 2016. I reported a number of serious coding flaws that would allow someone to break into their forum.

My last search in the archives was over 5 years ago. 

[MNtundraRet]

I joined back in 2007. Currently' I see I have around 750 replies / posts so far. I printed a window sticker for my RV about a year ago. It shows I had over 3400 posts / replies.

Are the old storage drives still available, and can these older posts ever be recovered?

I have no problems with the new forum and am getting used to using it. You guys are doing a great job recovering the old data and transferring it here.

[dedmiston]

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@MNtundraRet wrote:

Are the old storage drives still available, and can these older posts ever be recovered?

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The data is all here. Click your own name and you'll see all your old posts and your responses. 👍

[MNtundraRet]

I see only 766 out of my 3400 posts so far. I will watch for more, but I suspect the oldest data may not have been recoverable, or maybe it was deleted to create more space for newer posts.

[dedmiston]

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@MNtundraRet wrote:

I see only 766 out of my 3400 posts so far. I will watch for more, but I suspect the oldest data may not have been recoverable, or maybe it was deleted to create more space for newer posts.

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Hmmm. That doesn’t sound right. Maybe @evanseegmiller can weigh in on that. 

[MNtundraRet]

It might have helped if you had stickied your post here as the first one we would see when signing in the first time. It would have saved a lot of grief. I'm really surprised how many people can make up their mind on their first post. 

[dedmiston]

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@MNtundraRet wrote:

It might have helped if you had stickied your post here as the first one we would see when signing in the first time. It would have saved a lot of grief. I'm really surprised how many people can make up their mind on their first post. 

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In hindsight, yes. It's been...how do they call it..."a fluid situation".