This Forum

[Rowy]

I find this forum a bit confusing. It takes some time to get used to the nerdy approach, although it might just be me. I'm probably not the brightest bulb in this esteemed company, and I hardly dare to complain because Kristofer looks a lot like my old professor, and I do not want to be put in the corridor to contemplate my sins. So I guess I need to think a bit harder. Or, as someone once told me: No one promised you this would be easy.

Well, at least it will keep the riffraff out.

 

[Marylyn]

Nerdy? In what sense, may I ask?
It hasn't really had enough time to flourish yet but it will if it can attract all kinds of composer, some well versed in theory, others more intuitive.
I had a professor and he ok, disliked "teaching" which he looked on as teaching us procedures rather than creative composition but he introduced me to someone more inspirational. I've forgotten most of any theory I learned and now work commercially if at all. But for myself I work from the heart, not the procedure manual!

[Rowy]

You don't study composition to learn how to compose. All you do is study what has been. You decide what will be. But at least you know what you're doing. You need to know the rules in order to be able to break them.

[Marylyn]

If you say so.
So, back to my question (which obviously you aren't obliged to answer) why does this forum seem nerdy?
The ask arises from nothing TOO much has happened here yet. I understand this forum arose from the ashes of one that, looking back in its past, seemed to attract a wide variety of 'composers'. It seemed to change after an 'upgrade' which suggests it may have been more a downgrade.
But things are as they are.

[Rowy]

The use is not intuitive. So far, I could use every forum I joined without too much effort. And the features are usually more extensive. An example is Vi-Control. There, you can upload an audio file with your post. The structure of Vi-Control is the same as that of Piano World and almost every other forum, although I must mention here that I limited myself to German and Canadian forums for a while and one or two French forums. Unfortunately, there is no forum in my language for composition.

You're right, things are as they are and this forum might be a "free version" with limited possibilities. I was a member of this forum long time ago and it was almost dead. Thanks to social media I guess.

[HS Teoh]

What happened was that the owner of the previous site suddenly decided to shut it down, as far as we know, without any warning. So virtually everything was lost. The current owner, who was an ex-member of the previous site, decided to revive it, but because he found out about the shutdown long after it had already been gone, it was not possible to recover the original data. So the only option was to restart from scratch.

[Rowy]

Thanks. I don't think all is lost. Some posts must still be in Google's cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JIqWqX8VsrMJ:...

[HS Teoh]

Well, the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://composersforum.ning.com/) also has backup copies of the previous site, though the last backup was taken a few weeks before the shutdown. Also, it's not guaranteed that every page was backed up, there may be "holes" in what was archived. So in that sense it's not a complete loss. But still, what was archived is not so conveniently accessible anymore, and isn't in a form that can be easily imported to the new site.

[Kristofer Emerig]

The Wayback Machine was my first stop upon discovering that the forum had vanished. The last archive date was June 10, and there were no indications of trouble.

The Wayback Machine's archiving isn't "deep" though. It captures the landing page, indexes the site, and might crawl a few pages (a bit haphazardly it seems). The content preserved (or at least provided) is not sufficient to recover discussion threads.

I did find my last posts to the forum before being banned while cleaning up my laptop. I must have sensed my impending doom under the new regime. I would attribute my banishment to one of two two possible posts (one to Fredrick Zinos, and another in the fund-raising thread), although, they hardly seem ban-worthy. I think it was inevitable at that point. I have a few other funny snippets, too.

[Saul Gefen]

That's nice...

 

Thanks

[Marylyn]

"What happened was that the owner of the previous site suddenly decided to shut it down, as far as we know, without any warning."
(no formatting like italics available).
I had rather feared it might be a tragedy. If he shut it down wilfully then that's disgusting. As I understand people had paid contributions toward keeping it going, valid until November.