Moderator Stuff Update

[mithrandir]

Well, I've been busy alot the past few months, so I haven't gotten much done in VSP. Still working on it, occasionally. What I'm trying to do, as I have talked about before, is clean out and organize the old puzzles in VSP. Eventually, I'd like to have them all in a format such that they could be easily posted in an archive on the main site, or something like that, if Minty wants. To this end, I am working backwards through VSP. Anything obviously non-puzzle related, I move or delete. Chestnuts are deleted(usually repeats are easy to spot as well, they mostly have links to the original). Also insanely hard puzzles with no answer that were posted by someone I haven't even heard of are usually trashed. That still leaves alot of puzzles. So, to help organize them a bit, I am starting to(with some help) separate out the most common types. These are being closed(so they are easy to see). Right now, I am working on chess and 3x3(etc.) puzzles. After they are closed, they are separated further by being moved to the archives forum(which contains only old chess puzzles right now). Hopefully, with Kevin's approval, someone can eventually be given access to the archives(whether moderator, or someone else that volunteers), and organize these into something less space consuming. I was picturing a spreadsheet with columns: Posted by, Board setup(in forsythe or something), Problem(Mate in 3 or whatever), and Original author, if any. There might be some better way to do it. After the chess ones are finished, the 3x3s could be done, and then another common puzzle type, etc. The GL could eventually have a very large collection of puzzles of all types, easily accessible.

I'm not really sure what Kevin has in mind for all this, but whether he has plans to use this work or not, I'd hate to see all the puzzles we've got on the forums get lost and wasted because of a space glitch. So, I am going to continue working on this when I can. I would love to have help; the only problem is that the software only allows for one Moderator per forum, and I am of course very reluctant to start sharing my password with everyone. If anyone has any ideas, though, I would love to hear them. I know Hy has messed around with the UBB, so this question is mostly for him(but if anyone has any thoughts, do share ): would there be any way for us to dump all the vsp files to a temporary server(or several), on a free webspace provider or something like that, and have it set up so we could do this organization there? I know we have got to be using a lot of space on the GL server... we were over the alloted amount several months ago, and with VG going crazy, we've probably hit 300 MB by now. I want to keep as much, if not all, of the material on this site, but if there's a way to keep from costing Kevin extra money, he'd probably appreciate it.

Anyway, enough rambling. I'm tired, and I still have to clean my room. Bah. Any thoughts, questions, ideas, rants, complaints, etc. welcome and encouraged.

[This message has been edited by mithrandir (edited 06-16-2001).]

[Lepton]

super