FoA meet 9/7/12 [Melbourne]

General FOA Organisation
1

Thanks everyone for coming this evening. I will let Rolly do a full update, but the crux of it is: Everything with FoA is going to be ok, and things will only get more awesome.

Blakey, Brendan, sorry for making eyes during my ‘role of the moderator’ rant - but you get it, no more needs to be said :wink:

n.

PS I take that back: Edit does not work. Fuck.

2

HA!

Looking forward to Rolly’s overview.

3

Sorry that makes no sense - I meant I take back my comment that editing works for me :slight_smile:

4

I read that last edit as “FoA does not work, it’s over”.

Ha!

5

You’re just saying that cos you missed out on the free beer, pizza and meeting lols!

6

A little bit.

7

haha, didn’t you say last night that you were the only one who could edit posts?

you don’t have to be sorry at all. joltar, nick was just concerned that on some controversial threads we - well, mostly me - were having the last say, then locking the thread. and it’s a fair point - it is kinda a dick way to argue. from here on in, as soon as a thread starts to go south, we’re just gonna lock it.

all in all a good meeting - i certainly came out of it more stoked on FOA than i’ve been for a while.

8

and i missed the whole meeting thread.

im still catching up on the 19 pages of threads from when i was away… plus doing DDCX stuff. :frowning:

9

http://www.fixed.org.au/forums/f13/facebook-sale-group-24165/

Between this and BNA/BMU/BV/gumtree it might put a dampener on trading access being one of the benefits of paid membership.

10

maybe we could make an annoucement, informing everyone of the pending changes to FoA and letting them know that the place won’t survive without their help?

11

We should add access to The New Timer as part of the deal.

12

I doubt his facebook page will gain traction - I imagine he’s doing this because I keep asking him to stop selling Velocity wares through the for sale section.

Re announcement of upcoming changes/support Rolly will do this on Monday - I want to clean up the bugs on the forum this week too.

13

can we delete goose’s thread in FOA’s best interest?

14

I would not be opposed to that.

15

dude, we have enough trouble giving it away for free.

16

So what are the pending changes?

Did you guys make some decisions or was it more of a chat about possible options?

17

Hurry up with the minutes and actions rolly!!

In a nutshell:

  • ideas floated to raise cash to pay for hosting, need a few thousand a year.
  • Advertisers are fleeing. Bike shops are tightening belts, can we reach out to other businesses that meet our demographic? (eg Coffee Supreme?)
  • Skimlinks appears to be working for affiliate link $, amount of income TBD.
  • Premium membership to come in, main benefit apart from warm fuzzies and some sort of merch is trading access. (Kinda feel this will push a lot of trading to other forums unless erle’s offering his sweet deal links here. we’ll see I guess)
  • Need ongoing income, not one offs, hence annual memberships.
  • FOA benefit / endorsed events to be run soon, some with proceeds to FOA, some just under the FOA banner eg:
    * Roller racing at domestique next thurs (TBC)
    * Annual Warby trail ride on cup day
    * Puzzlecat, in deepest winter
    * FOA February
    * BCC/FOA Keirin night at DISC
    * FOA endorsed WNR to be like the old Wed Fix (sans fix!)
    * It’s foA not foM, so we’ll need more help here for outside Vic.
  • Promotion of FOA in other channels (TNT / DDCX / MGG…)
  • Moderation to be more invisible
  • Rolly to stop slacking off and make the forums sustainable and awesome.
  • other stuff that rolly has written down that I can’t remember.
18

By “invisible” moderation, is that what Brendan meant, because at the moment we’re doing the whole “last word then thread lock”?

Are we just to lock / delete threads before they get out of control, but not put our opinion in?

19

A few other questions re: hosting / bandwidth…

Do having more sections (like the polo and tricks section that don’t get used much) and allowing signatures and other little things like that cost more in server / bandwidth costs?

20

Fuggin tab stops stripped out of my post…

yeah, no more last word & lock.

as I understand it, bandwidth costs come from pages served, so if a forum is dead, then it’s not being served except from occasional google trawls etc. Hosted images will bump it up (speaking of which, I note the new software defaults to rehosting images when you use the insert image button), plus cyclebucket is a FOA website.