calma
I have been away for longer than two months and I just went to living indonesian forum and noted is has change totally, not only the format but as well the many of the posters usually posted there are they not anymore there.
Anybody knows what happen with the forum?
Terimakasi banyak
tel522
the owners of the forum in the us applied new software with many problems , at this time the administrator chose to be offline for a couple of weeks , the moderators in frustration started their own forum
https://forum.expatindo.org/forum.php , most of the active members "jumped ship" to the new forum , a familiar format with all the usual experts on law ,immigration, etc , check it out !
spicyayam
I am surprised they upgraded to vb5. Most webmasters think vb3 was the best software, vb4 promised a lot, didn't deliver for many people, but is still fairly widely used. Very few forums went with vb5 and instead either stayed on the same version or moved to another software such as xenforo. Expat forums tend to generate more controversy, than say a tech type forum. I know of a couple (not related to Indonesia) that despite being successful were closed down for being too difficult to manage.
Also fb allows anyone to start a discussion group, without all the hassle of hosting, software etc.
Atlantis
Hi Begonia,
To try to make a long story short, the admin decided to run an upgrade to vbulletin, which was absolutely not necessary, without even consulting us (the moderation team), and without even conducting a test.
As if it wouldn't been enough both admins went on holiday (wm) and on a business trip (Paman) and didn't give a toss about the community for 12 days. Last, before leaving and after having run the damn "upgrade" they dare posting an announcement on the board saying that "we" conducted an upgrade, with the "we", in the mind of any user who would have been using LIIF , being obviously associated with the members of the Mod team, or at the very least me who have run this forum for 8 years while the admins comfortably stayed in the back. In your time there, Begonia, I guess you haven't often heard about the admins, see them posting or being active for the community. No worries, even me who was seating front row, would have hard time to write two paragraphs about their involvement in the past 8 years.
As anything so unprofessionally prepared and conducted, the so called "upgrade" turned to be riddled with bugs and a nightmare for all. Nothing was working, users where signed up in other users account, moderation tools weren't working (anyway since it was a pain in the neck to post we ddn't have much too moderate and it was not the most annoying of the sh1t we had to deal with) and since there was no sign of life given by the admins, despite emails and PMs by users, no one had any feking idea about how long this situation would last.
After over a week of total ignorance by the admins of the problems the users had, we (the Mods) decided to collectively resigned and we started to talk among us about setting up a new platform with the same objectives we always have had. On July 12th we acquired the domain name expatindo.org and it took us only two days to launch a fully functional forum, thanks to the hard work of both El Goretto and Dafluff. What they have done in so short time is just bluffing. Believe me these two deserves a LOT of praise for the successful launching.
On July 14th we started to see the first registrant knocking at the door and three weeks after most of the hard core posters who have done the wealth of LIIF have moved. Also, many who had stopped posting over the years, have joined us as an unexpected sign of support. I am pretty certain that if you take a look at it you would recognize many username which you may have not heard from for some years. In just three weeks, 131 users have signed up, posting over 5500 posts in 370+ threads
In this whole mess, the most pathetic has been the reaction of the admins: though we were expecting to be banned (even though there was no real reason for it, save for Dafluff and I who publicly called out the admins incompetence), we didn't expect to be defamed and to have our user account stolen (basically they took control of it by resetting our password and modifying the registered email address so that we could not acquire a new password).
In 2008, when LIIF moved to vbulletin, it was moribund. This is when I started to mod it and post. The first three months have seen very poor quality content, with only young and naive Indonesian females wanting to date a bule, people wanting to propose a garage sale...etc Yet, month after months of posting about legal matters we managed to look a bit more credible and we aggregated more and more quality contributors to make what LIIF was until recently. Being thrown under the bus by the admins the way we have been was rather inelegant. Without our work and without the posts of the whole community, they would have never been able to raise the interest and/or keep the interest of the many sponsors they have.
Apologies for having been long, Begonia. Hope that everything is well with you.
Salam,
O.
