How about this.

I changed some permissions on the forum sections. Here is the breakdown:

Lounge - completely public to view.
New Members - public.
Taking Actions - only visible to registered users.
News - public.
Off Topic - registered.
Media - public.
Site News - registered.
Suggestions - registered.

The above is done.

Further I will make the Taking Actions forum visible only to users with 30 or more posts. I have to change some code in the forum for this though. So before I do that, what do you guys think?

I think all forums should be made public, I don't see the reason why to restrict them. Just because one or two alipacs visit this site? It's not worth it. You guys are too paranoid...and restricting the taking action section is a really bad idea, like we don't have that many users with 30+ posts...
Just leave things how they were, they were working perfectly. Focus your time on the chat...now I don't even get an error when I get kicked off the chat. It just kicks me off and I'm still inside the chat, but not connected, it's hard to explain it.

EDIT** I just figure it out..you have 44 members with 30+ posts..out of 194 members that post. That's ~25% of the people that actually post something.

This is true. Lower the number to 20 posts or more and the user count is 57.

As for making the taking actions forum available to registered users only, I'm torn on the issue. It would be nice to have a place where people can post an event and not worry that the wrong eyes will see it and attempt to sabotage it on the one hand. On the other this potentially cuts people off from participating in these events. However, how many of these people will be willing to participate in something if they are even afraid to register on this website.

I'm still open on the issue.

EDIT: And I am working on the Chat. The problem is I have a VERY hard time tracking the issue down since I cannot replicate it on my end. I pretty much have to go through the code line by line searching for the issue. I have extensive server side and client side error logging on the thing and I still cant find the slightest trace of the issue. Part of it is related to server performance, but still it should simply lag in that case. I think the fixes will be incremental untill I get the issue cornered.

What's the point of that when most of our "taking action" information is the same as COSA's. Read the taking action section and you will see that there are users that post 1 post just to say that they just called their senator. Take a look into this issue a little broader...you don't know the number of people that view the taking action section and actually take action. With that being said, I think it's a bad idea to privatized that forum because we're not informed that well on the people that visit that part.

So far you're doing a good job on the forum and keep it up.

Thats a valid point. What if I made the taking actions forum public and created another highly restricted forum section that is available only to those with 30+ posts. I don't know what people would want to post there though...

I know I can't please everyone on this issue, I'm just brainstorming here.

Well if it's a brainstorm you want, why not try a section where people can post things that don't need to be publicized, things like small events and such. I know there are post that don't need to be so public. Probably this is one of them. So far everything is looking good, maybe that chat needs some fixing, but it's probably my crappy computer too. Here's a suggestion that can improve the chat, I don't know how you program that thing and I'm pretty sure I would never be able to do that. But...how about instead of displaying the last lines within an hour to just the last 10 lines. Because when someone loads the chat and there's 10 people talking then it takes about 2-4 minutes to load the thing, I think this would reduce the load time to less than 30 secs.

Every time someone loads the chat all messages older than 1 hour are deleted from the server. Thanks for pointing this out. I'm on a high speed connection and it takes a max of 5-10 sec to lead for me. I'll lower the time to 10 minutes. So messages older than 10 minutes will be purged everytime someone logs on.

I have a blazing SBC connection, but I think it's my computer that's slow. I just MIGHT buy a new one.

If u get rid of all the porn your pc will be much faster :wink:

is this true Nick?