Discussion Forums

The community server of The Namibian containing virtually thousands of dicsussion threads created by over 7000 users in the past couple of years appears to be down again. No reasons for this have been published on the website of The Namibian, however a swift search on Netcraft reveals that someone probably made a boo-boo with the domain registry: a change is reported here today, aparently someone forgot to think about the community server (which is run on a subdomain).

While the main server of The Namibian does not seem to be affected, the admin of that website seems to forget that practically 80% of all site content is now unavailable to users again - no Community, no Cartoons, no Feautures, no Links, no Shop, no Towntalk, no Travel, no Voting Booth, so practically all interactive sections of the website are down, all you get is the various news sections.

Let's see how long it will take The Namibian to recitify the situation this time - the last disruption (starting in December last year and ending only in February 2007) ranged nearly two and a half months, so I'd say we'll have a "discussion dry spell" on that site for quite some time to come. In the meantime you can of course also utilise the Namforum Community to air your view - with less trouble regarding dumb word filters or admin that never respond.

UPDATE 22.10.2007:

So their server is up and running again - at least for now. Thats a continous downtime just 2 days short of one month for that machine again. While I think I may know IT managers that would kill any admin of a server for downtimes exceeding 24 hours, one question remains: how long before we have the next outage? And thereafter: how much longer will it take that admin to notice the error - and then correct it?

Well, let's see what happens...

Quite an interesting effort is the Tsumeb Discussion Forum of the Tsumeb website run by the Tsumeb municipality.

Using phpbb2, this forums has a clear structure, dealing with issues in the categories of community work, tourism, festivals and important news from the Tsumeb chamber of commerce. With only 112 members (at least at the time of writing), the forum community is still small, yet the few articles so far to be found there give an interesting insight mainly into the business world of Tsumeb.

Moderation is strict (you have to register, forums are moderated by the administrator), but aparently that helps quite well to keep the usual riff-raff out of these forums.

In addition to the forums, the Tsumeb Chat also invites people to share their opinions on a more "real time" level - without permanent "tracks" you'd usually leave in a forum. Here you also have to register first to be able to contribute, yet as is usual in most chats, no moderator intervenes when you post things - however your posts also expire already after 5 minutes too, so this is no permanent "white board" that only gets cleaned once the screen is full.

Penning Street Productions has also included a Penningstreet discussion forum section on their website. Using essentially the same script as otjisomething.com.na, this too is an unstructured guestbook script.

The difference here is a specific target audience:

Namibian filmmakers are making a big difference which will embrace new ways of thinking locally and beyond our borders. We believe that film should provoke, evoke, stimulate and inspire. We want actors, directors, producers, writers to expose themselves to new ideas, different perspectives. We want them to communicate their thoughts, dreams and aspirations. Most of all, we want to encourage them to produce films that changes minds and challenge the status quo.

The discussion has currently just started - at the time of writing, 40 posts have so far been made, so there is plenty of room to really get your tounges wagging about the state of filmmaking, writing, acting etc. - take a look yourself, and contribute where and when you think you should

UPDATE 04.10.2007: This main site seems to be down - only a blank page shows. The discussion forum is aparently still up and running though - but even there the last post dates from May this year.

Another Namibian site that contains a discussion area is otjisometing.com.na. The essentially link to a guestbook hosting service to provide their Otji-Discussion - an unfortunately completely unstructured display of opinions on a variety of topics.

Since essentially no administration takes place, anyone can post on these forums - there is also no need to provide a "real" name, email-address or any other credentials that would clearly identify a user. As such, it's pretty much a "bar brawl" type of discussion - sometimes quite inspiring, other times just plain laughable, especially as numerous little bent egos compete on who#s got the bigger mouth.

At the very least, it certainly has some entertaining factor...

UPDATE 10.01.2007:

Aparently the website of Otjisomething is no more. The forum however lives on, as that is being hosted on a different server, with nobody having removed it from there so far, so you can still continue to discuss whatever rocks your mind there.

It is really a pitty that so many Namibian websites dedicated to communities go down these days - what could be the reason for this type of "starvation"?

UPDATE 04.10.2007:

The discssion forum has finally also been pulled. After months of people only posting spam here, another public discussion forum in Namibia has died a slow death. Let's hope this trend does not continue...

Let's start introducing some Namibian community sites. The site that basically started it all (and essentially also inspired this blog) was definately that of The Namibian, still one of the major sources of news about Namibia.

Way back in 1999 they introduced and later refined The Namibian Community - a WebCrossing based discussion forum that has since grown into the biggest online community site of Namibia. The exact figure of how many Namibians truly communicate their thoughts isn't exactly known - yet the community itself already comprises of 15720 users.