What's next for YarisWorld?

[tk-421]

I've been wondering about this question for a long time. The lack of admin engagement leads me to believe that they have no incentive to keep this site running indefinitely, especially since the vendor payment system -- basically the only known way to send money to the admins -- has been broken for a long time.

Lack of admin engagement has brought a lot of drawbacks to YW. For example:

• we have no idea how frequently backups are being performed on our data
• we have no access to those backups anyway, so if admins close shop we will likely still lose everything
• mods have almost no admin privileges, and can't be of much help when there are software or user account issues
• forum software hasn't been upgraded in a while and it's showing its age
• there is no mobile version of the forums and they are barely usable at their current state
• ever-growing amounts of spam and limited ways to deal with it are a big concern

Considering that many members here have invested a long time and effort to bring great content to YW, it would be a big loss for all of us if said content were suddenly lost for some reason or another. We have already gone through a big attack a few years ago in which the admins were caught unprepared and a big chunk of data was lost as a result.

My proposal

With that in mind, I propose a clean break from the current platform in which:

• admins are active members of the community
• said admins have complete access to our community-generated data and have the tools to maintain it
• there are democratically-elected trusted members with special privileges
• there are premium features for paid members and sponsors
• current data is not lost
• made from the ground up to work on mobile and desktop environments

Of course, all of this would have to come at a price. There are costs associated with hosting a high-traffic site, as well as installation and maintenance. Having said that, the costs to do this have actually gone down considerably since YW opened its doors in '06.

I would therefore like to gauge interest with YW members to see if this is a service that you guys would consider supporting. I am completely open to suggestions and feature requests, so please feel free to post them here.

The nerdy stuff

I would really like to give Discourse a try. It's a community platform that is built around threads instead of forums. Threads can then be tagged and searched just like in gmail, making everything much clearer and efficient to use.

Hosting and backups are of course both extremely important issues. I have dealt with both of these professionally for years and would personally recommend a distributed virtualized solution such as DigitalOcean which provides redundancy on many servers transparently. This takes care of server load issues and should guarantee smooth sailing all year long. The best part of this is, if we don't like the service, we can export our virtual server and move it someplace else very quickly.

For more information on the forum platform and their philosophy be sure to read http://www.discourse.org/about/ and try out a live demo here: http://try.discourse.org/

New features

A new home should also bring in new community features and guidelines. A few ideas:

• A way for trusted members to gain notoriety in the community
• A way for trusted members to democratically elect new moderators
• Donation and/or premium options in which members can show their support for the community and receive nice swag in return
• A way to channel donations to admins and moderators
• an official store with special rates for premium and trusted members

Feedback
I'm really curious as to what you guys think about this, so please post your thoughts and contribute as many details as you can. I think we can come up with a pretty great platform if we put our heads together…

Thanks for reading and much .