********* Overview of How Forum Features are Determined **********
Hello, All.
Just for anyone who’s interested, here’s my understanding of how the software that underlies the forum is structured—and therefore how it provides various features (such as how topics are ordered in the topic list). There are three layers:
(1) The software package that provides the “platform” from which a programmer created the Upasika Life Forum sometime late in 2006. This software package was either purchased by Abhayagiri, or it is available for free (I don’t know). In any case, it came from a professional source. Note that many forums have no doubt been created from this same software package. Each of these forums has different features and can be considered a separate “implementation” of the software package. Each implementation was created by a programmer who worked with the tools provided by the software package.
(2) The Upasika Life implementation, which is the result of the programmer’s work in 2006. This is the Upasika Life forum as we know it. I don’t know who the programmer is who did the work, but I don’t think he or she is readily available for making adjustments to the implementation. Part of the implementation is a control panel (this might not be the exact name), in which system administrators can configure the implementation. That is, administrators can set “switches” to indicate how they want various features to work. For example, they might be able to set a switch that determines whether the most recent posts are displayed first or last within a topic. The specifications that a system administrator has made by setting these switches, one way or another, can be called configuration settings.
(3) The configuration settings that have been decided upon by the system administrators of the Abhayagiri web site. The configuration settings determine some of the ways in which we interact with the forum, but (frankly) not very many of those ways. On the whole, the way the forum works was determined by the software package and the implementation. The primary system administrator is Ajahn Sudanto. Sakula is a system administrator too, but her area of responsibiltiy is primarily adding new Upasika Life forum members. I’ve declined to be a system administrator.
So . . . to get to the point of all this: If we see some forum feature that we’d like to change, it might or might not be possible to change it. If it’s determined by a configuration setting that’s on the control panel, then we might be able to change it by talking to a system administrator. But if it’s not determined by a configuration setting (that is, if it’s “hard coded” into the implementation or the software package), then even a system administrator can’t change it.
Note that Sakula and I are moderators of the forum, which means that we are more concerned with the content of the messages and topics, and less concerned with the technical features of the forum software, implementation, and configuration. Nevertheless, we’re the ones who can most immediately respond to your technical concerns. And this topic is the place to speak up about them :-)
If I’ve said something that isn’t accurate, please someone correct me. This is all IMHO.
Dorothea
