Shared website development and/or hosting

[Titanus Eramius]

On Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:32:57 +0200
Jussi Kekkonen <tmt at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> The biggest "why" for me is the fact that maintaining the platform
> (themes etc) and content tends to take more work than there's doers.
> If basic contents would be done with bigger team, translations would
> be easy to do and more easily organised than creating contents from
> scratch. All the rest is easily thrown to wiki I'd say.
> 
In this I agree 100% and I think it should be the main reason for
working towards a common site. In DK we have around ~350 active
members, but only 2 admins and 2 mods, which (in my opinion) means some
things just don't get done.

However, I too disagrees in having one forum only, since a fair part of
the danish users don't do english (at all). One solution might be to
have 5 "top level forums", so one first chooses language (DK, SE, NO,
FI and EN*), and then can browse the localized forum.

My rationale for thinking this way is the great value of past threads
in a forum, and collecting the knowledge of Scandinavia within one
site would be reason enough for me to work towards one site. Having all
this in one place, would also mean the search-function would show
results from all of the forums.

A large site like this, would also be able to have a wiki and other
nice things which we currently don't have in DK because we lack
manpower.

One very big downside to all of this, could be that our forums would
loose their sense of nationality and become "too big" for some users.
This is why I think it's important that a common site would have
individual sections with individual language and so on.

In the end, however, we all have to remember that we are doing this for
the users, not us.

On another note, I would like to know what software and hosting
solutions you are using. Just out of curiosity.

In DK we are using Wordpress for the entire site, and then phpBB for
the forum. They are both a bit bloated (in my opinion again) but the
support for both of them is good, and problems can always be fixed.

For hosting we're using GleSYS in Falkenberg, Sweden, running a
standard VPS with Debian (we have a good reason...) for 23€/month. It
really kicks ass over normal hosting like one.com or the likes.

Med venlig hilsen Nicky
Admin and so on in DK :-)


* Might not be a good idea, but if we have forums for Scandinavia, we
  might as well have for english and maybe Islandic and other "nordic"
  countries.