I tried to post this as a new topic but wasn’t allowed, so I’m posting it here.
One question, why is Oriented eternally “in beta”? I mean the site’s been up for over 2 years. People visit, use it, are active on it … but every time I visit I get the “while Oriented is still in beta” popup.
Hard to take it seriously if it’s always in beta. My advice: stop saying it’s in beta or have your big launch party and get on with it.
Just a friendly suggestion.
[({})] or whatever - maybe you need a Chinese name, so you won’t need to change your Engish name so often.
Taiwanese are very helpful people – often give more than you ask for or want – sometimes misguided – maybe the guy behind you was just being helpful in the Taiwanese tradition.
Is there anywhere on oriented that provides a good list of links to ‘Taiwan Sites’. I’m not talking about links to sites of Taiwanese community organistions of interest to foreigners (which Oriented does well), but links to other sites about Taiwan like Tealit etc?
If not, where is a good list of ‘Foreigner in Taiwan’ general links?
Hi, I have a few suggestions to make for the forums since you mentioned you will be upgrading:
ie Can you order the post Last In First to Appear (LIFA) instead of now which is First in First to Appear (FIFA)? This way when you have just added a new post, it automatically goes to your post instead of the earliest post for the “discussion thread”.
2)The next question is : Would Oriented be interested in adding a “China-Taiwan Business Section” to the major categories under the Discussion Forums?
This would be a good excuse to bring in all sorts of news about China.
Recently the papers esp in Hong Kong have been full of news about investing and starting in China (Shanghai especially) and WTO. Taiwan is joining the WTO at the same time as China which I think is around next month Dec 10. There are more and more Taiwan people in China (I think about 0.5 million in Shanghai- last month). Dong-Feng tv channel is running a documentary series on “taiwan ren zai da-lu” as you know.
I think definitely the time is ripe to open a discussion section on China/ China-Taiwan Business.
Thanks
Many moons ago, these forums displayed the number of views as well as the number of posts. I thought that this was informative, but it is no longer here. Can you bring that back? It is a fairly common feature of most other forums.
Thanks.
quote[quote]Do you think it would be better if the users can 'click' straight into the most recent post instead of the first/oldest post as now?[/quote]It would be nice to know how many people would prefer it either way: LIFA vs. FIFA (Do I smell a poll coming up?)
This would affect all the forums, however, and as such, could mess up other people’s links to paricular discussions.
Thank you for the suggestion, but I do not anticipate this change happening soon.
quote:
The next question is : Would Oriented be interested in adding a "China-Taiwan Business Section" to the major categories under the Discussion Forums?…I think definitely the time is ripe to open a discussion section on China/ China-Taiwan Business.
When we carved out the Culture and History forum way back when, a convincing case was presented to us that there was enough interest to justify it. This was done by showing the number of discussions and the presence of a willing moderator: cranky laowai.
At the same time, we have been burned by opening up forums that go almost no where after they are launched. Thus, we are cautious about opening up new forums without a case being made.
I hate to sound so negative – we are open to expansion, but we try to be conservative about it.
quote[quote]Many moons ago, these forums displayed the number of views as well as the number of posts. I thought that this was informative, but it is no longer here. Can you bring that back? It is a fairly common feature of most other forums.[/quote]I agree that it was an informative feature. However, I’m shy about re-installing it because for every discussion, several data files were created. Not only did this take up precious disk space, but it made backing up the forums a serious pain in the neck (and it already is a pain in the neck!).
Maybe more importantly, we made the decision NOT to go for-profit with ORIENTED dot ORG. This diminished the urgency for (even slightly more) sophisticated monitoring for the dot-ORG forums. Granted: while we would like to make moderating a dot-ORG forum as easy and informative as possible, none of the moderators have (yet) expressed a desire to count views.
All that said, it really comes down to space. our webspace isn’t free. And we have zero revenues. We are planning a couple of innovations to somehow cover the webhosting costs. If these work, and we can expand our webspace, we could put the view counting back in. As I’ve said above, I certainly liked the feature.
Thanks for writing in.
When you write a post and then accidentally put the wrong password in or otherwise have to hit the back button, you will find that all your post has vanished. This is really vexing. Hitting the back button should not remove all the text in the message box!
Wolf,
I know this is an extra step you would probably not like to go through, but try copying the text of your reply before you submit. Then, if there was a problem, you can always paste your text back in later on. Not only useful for these discussion boards, but for many other web pages.
If you’ve had to retype long entries on more than one occasion, then this should help you out.
I will try again with this, maybe it was answered already.
Why not have the polls in the Monday e-newsletter? Having a unified place for the polls and the chance to get a better sample size would be great.
Guys what’s the story, where have all yesterdays threads gone? Will they come back on later on? What are you fiddling with? Plus most threads have a few days of info wiped clean off. Well that’s what I just noticed in the ‘days of the week’ thread anyway.
While I realize this is probably bottom of the list as far as Oriented’s problems go, here’s one that might be easy to fix:
In the forums, “active topics” always resets at midnight, as computer logic dictates. But humans (being the flawed orgas they are) tend to think of a day as the preceding 24 hours. Thus if you visit the forums at 12:01am, there are zero active topics. Not very encouraging for newbies huh? Is there no way to make the query bring up posts for the preceeding 24 hours rather than “posts since midnight Taiwan time”?
Hi monkey
Thank you for your suggestion. The Active topics list is dependant on the “Clock” setting of this forum. If we change the clock setting (say we offset it 12 hours), then posting times would be confusing.
I find the “Active Threads” page very useful and wish it wasn’t so restrictive. The developer has been asked many times how to change it (like adding more days, for example)
In the front of the website (www.oriented.org) is an active threads list that does NOT reset – unfortunately, I’ve only set it to hold 8 listings.
Would it be interesting to have a “Last 100 posts” page somewhere? I’ve been planning something like this that would appear on a print version of freeclassifieds.com.tw for a long time.
Regards,
Erm … a print version of that site? How would a user click on it?
Hi monkey
They wouldn’t click on it – but hopefully, they would read it and pass it around.
The idea was to print out ads (for housing, personals, buy/sell) and distribute them around Taipei in restaurants and bars. This way, ORIENTED would “reach” those who don’t regularly go online (offline readers could be reached by the online writers). To place an ad for free, one simply goes to freeclassifieds.com.tw – then once a week, the most recent listings would be printed out and stacked at favorite hangouts.
If this gained popularity (that is, we could regularly fill 1 to 2 sides of an A4 sheet), then perhaps ORIENTED.org could sell advertising in this print edition. Personal and buy/sell ads would remain free to readers, but small business (like travel agencies, bushibans and language schools) would be asked to pay.
All income would be used cover the costs of ORIENTED.org’s webhosting and the print costs. In a best case scenario, if actual profits were realized, these would be shared among those who’ve helped create the website.
A lot has changed since this idea was first proposed. The software to easily convert the online version to a near print-ready hardcopy was not acquired. Response to the freeclassifieds.com.tw website was disappointing. The logistics in distributing were underestimated – even in southern Taipei alone.
It could still happen – but not unless other people get involved and make sure it takes off. If you know someone interested in getting involved, I would like to speak to them (in August )
Can you believe i even kludged together
http://jidanni.org/tmp/oriented_junk_scripts.zip to slightly ease the
pain of reading and posting to Oriented on my offline modem linux
system “until he agrees to use non proprietary software” or whatever.
By the way, I upgraded from junkbuster and now those banners of
Hartzell with his plaintive look are history, replaced with “Privoxy
blocked http://oriented.org/cgi-bin/banners/data/o150x400.pl?iframe.
See why or go there anyway.”
What ever happened to Angst?? :s
Angst just won the Guanxi lottery! 
Bumping the first thread ever.
I’ll take a stab in the dark and guess @Bu_Lai_En is either Blane or Brian.
I remember his many appearances in this barroom.
I wonder how many of these OG posters from 99, early 00s are still in Taiwan…