Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 / Z88 Forums

As is Mark

I had an interesting discussion on the QL Forums last night which underlined how important it is that careful consideration is given to this and how best to take things forward. Namely, the author of the ZEsarUX emulator is still struggling to add QL emulation because information on the QL specific ULA and 8049 co-processor is very limited.

I was reminded of the Yahoo group - https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/QLHARDWARE/ where Nasta (one of the QL hardware designers in the 90s - he developed QubIDE and the Aurora high colour motherboard for example) was an active participant and we think quite a lot of hardware information was uploaded to that group back in the day.

Unfortunately, the group was restricted access, where the owner / moderators had to approve your application to join (to stop spam) - after all of these years (the last posting on the group was 2014, both mine and Dilwyn's access is no longer valid, and emails to the group owner / requests to be re-admitted to the group are just left unanswered - presumably because the group owner is no longer around, or doesn't use their Yahoo account any longer, so never sees the requests.

I have emailed Yahoo to see if there is any answer to this, but I doubt it as they have no reason to accept that an email from a private individual to ask for the owner's contact name, or access to the group, is for the betterment of the Sinclair QL.

There are probably various other sites etc which have continued on free hosting, where the site owner is no longer contactable, but the information would be best gathered and centralised - at least some form of Sinclair Museum could potentially be accepted by a hosting company as a means of archiving the data from these old sites.

Hi all.

Sorry to hear it has come to this already, especially when i just Joined up! (DOH!)

Oh, and Hi Rich, (Your Bud here from Sunny OZ )

Hope this finds you all Well, and watch out for those Busses, you can wait all Day for a Bus then 5 come at Once! (Try Dodging that Barrage)

I am a bit dubious about all the Work and Expense involved in setting up a Public Limited Company or even a Non for Proffit.

Could'nt a Bunch of us, a Trusted Few, have Access to the Site and Run it together as a Consortium or similar??? Then if someone had to Play with Traffic, the other 4 could continue the Good Work!

Just a suggestion

oh... I Hope this means you are still going to Provide Keyboard Membranes for your Various Machines??? This is a Valuble Resource, that No-One else seems to be doing?

Darren in OZ (amigman07)

amigaman07 wrote: I am a bit dubious about all the Work and Expense involved in setting up a Public Limited Company or even a Non for Proffit.

Could'nt a Bunch of us, a Trusted Few, have Access to the Site and Run it together as a Consortium or similar??? Then if someone had to Play with Traffic, the other 4 could continue the Good Work!

Yes the site could be handed over to a consortium (although finding enough people to work together on the Z88 and QL Wiki sites is more problematic). You still have the problem as to who would own the domain name and pay for the server hosting. If it is one individual, then you have the problem (again) as to what happens if something unfortunate happens to that individual.

If you want a classic example of how things can go badly wrong, have a look at the mess which surrounds RCL and The ZX Vega+ where even though there is a limited company, domain names, campaigns, paypal accounts and hosting were in the names of former directors, not transferred when they left, and then a huge falling out prevented it from being resolved, so at least 2 domain names have now been bought up by those determined to attack RCL.

oh... I Hope this means you are still going to Provide Keyboard Membranes for your Various Machines??? This is a Valuble Resource, that No-One else seems to be doing?

Yes for now - I just can't get to the post office as often as I used to!

6 months after I started this topic, I am pleased to say that at least the QL Wiki is being taken off my hands - it has been exported and converted to a DokuWiki database, although it has yet to find a permanent home, administrator or willing hands to update it.

No-one has approached me in connection with either these forums, or z88world.com

Remember the whole point about this thread was to find a safer, secure future for these community sites which I set up.

Unfortunately, my health has not improved and I am having to focus my efforts on paid work (as people will have possibly noticed - I have made very few contributions to the forums over the past few months).

I don't have the time or energy to continue administering these forums - and I did promise to disable them at the end of the calendar year, unless someone else takes them on.

So, 4 months to try and sort something out .... There's a challenge!

I would offer my help in this but I am think it would be better to leave this forum in UK hands.

Paul wrote: ↑Mon Feb 13, 2017 11:30 am Paul is on the list

It's not correct that no one offered help.
It's not the kind of help you were looking for.
I offered to administer the forum. But I am no institution or company.
I am still willing to take over the forum.
I do have help from the ZX-Team.
One of us has a professional web hosting company and is willing to host it.
Still we are a team but no company.
We would very much like to keep it going.
Kind regards Paul

i do hope that the forum continues it would be a great shame to lose an English language forum, whilst the german forum is good for me the only way to use it is via google translate which can be extremely hard going...

regards andy

Paul wrote: ↑Fri Aug 25, 2017 5:58 pm
It's not correct that no one offered help.
It's not the kind of help you were looking for.
I offered to administer the forum. But I am no institution or company.
I am still willing to take over the forum.
I do have help from the ZX-Team.
One of us has a professional web hosting company and is willing to host it.
Still we are a team but no company.
We would very much like to keep it going.
Kind regards Paul

I recall a comment in the thread that the ZX-Team were also thinking about the best way forward for their own forum.

After all this time, no organisation is going to be put together to take over the running of the forums and other Sinclair related websites which is unfortunately a lost opportunity.

By all means if the Z88 Forum and ZX80/ZX81 forum can be moved over to the professional web hosting company, and the domain names transferred that would be great. I still have concerns over how you ensure continuity based on past experience - for example, since I set up these forums, they have gone through 3 different web hosting companies as the companies ceased trading or simply turned off the website!

However, that is something for the ZX Team and other forum members to consider moving forward.