Dear IMAC Members,

As anyone involved in the IT industry knows, online technology, threats, and solutions are constantly changing. Sometimes for the better, but often times the tools we use and need to maintain don’t keep up with the threats. This is the situation we find ourselves in with our IMAC forums.

Our current forum software has served us well (or so many of us believe) for the past several years, but it has not kept pace with the global threats. To date, we have been very dependent on mostly volunteer efforts by a couple individuals to prevent unwanted intrusions and hacking. Many times a day spiders, hackers, robot user registrations, and a host of other threats intrude the forums. These attacks require daily backups and restorations. Recently, we lost three days’ worth of discussions. Our frontline troops in the fight are tired, and it has reached a critical point where those individuals are no longer willing or able to keep up that fight. To that end, it’s time for us to take the next step and seek a more sustainable professional solution that allows us to maintain and enhance the forum function.

We are exploring a couple of commercial forum products that will integrate with our website and be portable when we begin exploring new options for our website in the near future (for many of the same reasons). IMAC has grown into an international organization, with new opportunities internationally, and we need to grow our tools to match.

With that in mind, we want the members feedback on what we want the forums to do, as well as try to address any frustrations you may have had with the forums. This is not a promise that every idea will be implemented, or every frustration addressed. Sometimes the need for security or other conflicting requirements outweighs the need for convenience, but we at least want your input to make conscious decisions. For example, we already anticipate the new forums should make it easier to upload photos, resize pictures, and link to other social media. Subscriptions and notifications should also be easier to manage.

Thank you for your input, your understanding, and your patience as we try to make IMAC better.

The Board of Directors

BOD,

Thank you for recognizing a need and facilitating feedback from the membership.

Keeping up with security (many of us did not know the background volunteer work going on- thank you to volunteers for that) is crucial. Also crucial is the ability to coordinate with social media since much of our immediate communication takes place through SM outlets.

Our ability to continue to have an accessible platform to engage in dialogue and discussion is absolutely necessary to maintain a viable “International” Miniature Aerobatic Club. I’ve seen some great advances in communications and resources occur over the past few years, most of those improvements come from better organizational communication, through SM and our forums.

Maintaining similar access and functionality with the stated potential improvements would be more than acceptable to me.

Please continue to keep us posted as we move forward.

Thanks,
Daren

Ok so we need / want a new forum package that seems to be 'plug and play' is what I'm interpreting to help resolve all the hacking-type activities that are occurring with the current package / platform. When I read the laundry list of difficulties being addressed by our administrators, are we saying that simply a forum change will cure these problems ?

Call me skeptical but I seriously doubt that a relatively minor package change (in the grand scheme of the overall site) is going to change much in terms of administrative workload. Am I wrong here ? Seems to me that we're still going to have the same issues with a new package - true ?

The current package and website has been running for about 5 years now. Might be time to upgrade / migrate to an entire site / platform that reduces workload. Simply a forum change - no matter how much it may be needed - seems a bit of a band-aid on a broken bone to me.

Thanks for clearing that up. I didn't get that from what I read.

To all who read this,

I know that I come across as someone who does not care for nor wants to see IMAC return to its former glory, nothing could be further from the truth! I love IMAC and love all of the special people that I have met along the way. We all have a very specific common interest that is giant scale aerobatics. I may not agree with you, and you most certainly don’t always agree with me but that should never interfere with our common goal to keep IMAC moving forward. I sincerely hope that whatever decisions are made moving forward pertaining to the website are made with complete transparency and with the same principles that any other business would utilize. IMAC is not just a club or an organization, it is a business and should be ran as such.

Kudo's to our volunteers. What, and/or more importantly, why is IMAC paying a $321/month "website Maintenence fee" to Memory Bank for? IMAC paid $15,000 to get the website to it's latest version. Maybe the question of how we continue would be better answered if we knew exactly what we are currently paying for?
2017 IMAC.JPG (160kb) downloaded 20 time(s).

IMAC Website Invoice.JPG (36kb) downloaded 7 time(s).

Doug,

The point the Ron and myself are making is that a significant amount of membership resources have been and continue to be funneled into the website. Unless you go digging into the back room information files you would never know that the monthly fees had been reduced. Regardless, the point remains the same as posted above.

Thanks for the feedback. Considering the plans that are being explored, is it reasonable for members to anticipate that there will be a budgetary change and/or lump some fee (s) ? Do you anticipate the cost to be more or less than what we had in the prior website? Would these changes occur over the tenure of the existing BOD and/or future BOD's ? How does the BOD intend to make these choices? Would there be a recorded vote on the minutes? Bidding?