When all this comes to an end...

[francis]

When the MA comes to an end, what will happen to this forum?

After a couple of months we're already at over 200 posts. By 2005 there's going to be a whole load more.

David - have you got any plans to harvest the information, links, studies etc from the forum, or will it get pulled down with everything lost?

Sifting through the noise to get to the "worthy" info will be a mammoth task. How best to manage this?

[David]

That is a very good question. You may not have noticed but I have been taking particularly useful links and adding them to our Resource Page (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/webpage/resource.html). I'll probably also create an FAQ including things like the Print Screen technique etc. Other than that, well there is a search facility. The forum will continue into the future and won't end when you guys leave. We hope to keep the course going for years after that :).

My major concern is whether this forum (software) is robust enough to last over the long-term. Perhaps I'll need to move to a MySQL/PHP solution like phpBB which I use for my public forum at CADTutorForum.net (http://www.cadtutorforum.net/forum/index.php). That has a much better and more flexible search system.

However, this flatfile/PHP forum has a number of advantages. It's completely portable - I can easily move it (as is) to any new location. Also, I have a local backup which I keep up to date. So, the information will never be lost but the format may change.

It's very difficult when planning a forum to know exactly how it will be used (if at all). I've had quite a lot of experience setting up forums over the years and it never seems to get any easier to predict usage. Anyway, these are musings. The bottom line is that I am actively harvesting information from the forum and the data is safe over the long-term.