PDA

View Full Version : 3. President's Welcome



Lyle Craver
05-02-2015, 12:24 AM
I would like to extend my greetings to the voting members and spectators for this May quarterly meeting of the CFC voting members. We have a number of discussion items on the agenda as well as a few developments which have arisen since the notice of the meeting went out three weeks ago. The current discussion threads will deal with results for allocation of voting members by province, a discussion of provincial life membership fees, the question of the Canadian Open (which still might take place in August) and discussions which we have entered into with Premium Chess the FIDE chess server. In addition, under new business we can enter into discussion about the disarray in our website at the moment which seems to go online and offline on a regular basis. Lets have a productive meeting. On to the discussions....

Vladimir Drkulec
05-03-2015, 11:07 PM
I would like to extend my greetings to the voting members and spectators for this May quarterly meeting of the CFC voting members. We have a number of discussion items on the agenda as well as a few developments which have arisen since the notice of the meeting went out three weeks ago. The current discussion threads will deal with results for allocation of voting members by province, a discussion of provincial life membership fees, the question of the Canadian Open (which still might take place in August) and discussions which we have entered into with Premium Chess the FIDE chess server. In addition, under new business we can enter into discussion about the disarray in our website at the moment which seems to go online and offline on a regular basis. Lets have a productive meeting. On to the discussions....

The chess.ca website seems to be in dissarray as I mentioned in my edit of Lyle's original post. The website is going down almost every other day. Resolution seems to be able to fix it temporarily when we bring it to their attention but they also seem intent on washing their hands of us and have handed over downloads of much of the website so that we can go elsewhere and stop bothering them. Bob was working on a schedule of migrating in August when our web hosting contract runs out but they have informed us that we will have to accelerate our schedule.

Lyle Craver
05-04-2015, 11:06 AM
Question: if they are saying stuff like that have they identified issues with our site that are problematic for them? Are there specific things we need to function that they are unable / unwilling to provide? I can't imagine it's a matter of too many hits.

Vladimir Drkulec
05-04-2015, 02:09 PM
In one case they changed permissions and we were no longer able to upload the member database for example. At this point we simply need to make the move to a new site and sort out later what the problems are. My suspicion would be that it has more to do with the attention and resources we command than any issues with our website. In Windsor most people that I know use hostpapa without any issues that I have encountered. There is support for Drupal though in the long run I think we should probably think about moving away from this platform as it can be a bit opaque.

Lyle Craver
05-04-2015, 09:26 PM
So suppose we were moving hosting servers - what supported software would make a prospective host a great fit for the CFC?

Vladimir Drkulec
05-04-2015, 10:13 PM
So suppose we were moving hosting servers - what supported software would make a prospective host a great fit for the CFC?

I would go with a company that supports everything with 24/7 technical support.

Paul Leblanc
05-05-2015, 12:17 AM
We paid $19,125.25 for this website in July 2011.

Vladimir Drkulec
05-05-2015, 02:25 AM
We paid $19,125.25 for this website in July 2011.

Yes we did. I think we overpaid by about $14,625.25 based on the cost of a similarly complex website that I saw done in Windsor but that is water that has long passed under the bridge. The level of support does not seem to be there. We should be able to continue to use the same website on a new host with a lot more bandwidth and hopefully more control.

Aris Marghetis
05-05-2015, 10:56 AM
I remember at the time voting on an $18K proposal, and I regret that "NO" people like myself were not able to convince the "YES" votes to reject that proposal, etc. :(

Vladimir Drkulec
05-05-2015, 04:35 PM
I think that everyone voted the way they did based on the available information. There is no point in commiserating about it now. We just have to find the best path forward without regard to what happened previously. Chess is a good metaphor for this situation in that we have to deal with the situation on the board as it exists now and not on what existed previously and might have been approached differently.

Valer Eugen Demian
05-07-2015, 12:38 AM
... There is support for Drupal though in the long run I think we should probably think about moving away from this platform as it can be a bit opaque.

Have been running 2 Drupal sites for years now with no problems whatsoever. Just want to give everyone a balance opinion on it...

Vladimir Drkulec
05-08-2015, 11:29 AM
Have been running 2 Drupal sites for years now with no problems whatsoever. Just want to give everyone a balance opinion on it...

No doubt you are running it without problems because you designed the websites in question. In our case there is no documentation of anything. Some things are very simple to change if you happen upon the right part of the website others take more time.