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A Message From Paul


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Hi everyone,

 

I think it's time for everyone to simply start using the new forums. They really do work, and we'll all learn to love them (or not, be that as it may). I will not re-activate the old system. The folks on this same system I just implemented for my regular job (http://www.readersdigest.ca/forums) are finding their way around just fine and are having a good time. This same system is also used on many of the largest and most successful discussion forums on the web (look at the amazing discussions on www.egullet.com).

 

The old site systems took me well over 200 hours of programming, often staying up until 2:00 AM in the morning, for months on end. I have a family with 2 young kids and a full-time job and a house to look after. The new forum system should be more than adequate to allow a nice way to fulfill the basic functions of allowing a long-term, permanent, no-cost and feature-rich way for concertina enthusiasts from around the world to communicate. This board fixed many of the problems that people were complaining about with the old system (and which I had no time or desire to implement... programming an effective search engine for example, is no trivial task), so you need to take the new features along with some changes. I've played my concertina about 45 minutes total in the past 6 months, so sorry, but I'm not about to give those 45 minutes up because some of you don't like the colours or fonts of the new system.

 

Sorry folks, but I really don't have anything more to say on the subject. If you want to know how to do something, ask politely by posting a message, and please don't right away complain that a feature is not there just because you don't see it staring you in the face after you've been using the new system for all of one hour.

 

And in case you're wondering, Concertina.net has always been consistent, at the same address, fast, and popup-ad and junk-ad free because I pay for good service (averaging about $35 US per month) and don't use those junky free hosting services (most of which have of course gone out of business). This web server has in fact been running for 210 days with no restart (zero downtime). Yes, I do have some paying advertisers now (thank you!!), but the site has been around for 7 years now. That's over $3000 just in hosting fees. Before you bash me and send me nasty email and yell about how you're not going to come back to the forums now because you can't figure out or it's harder to do this or that and takes 2 minutes more of your time per day to follow a discussion, please just take a deep breath, calm down, and think about how awful it was when you just sat there in your bedroom (like I did), trying to learn to play concertina from a book and cassette tape, and with no other contact with any other players, and no information about how to learn or where to go get involved with some sort of community or festival or concert or store or course or teacher.

 

So my message is: keep on squeezin' folks.

 

Cheers,

 

Paul

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