Howdy Everybody,
Gotmead.com will be making some changes based on feedback from our members in order to help streamline the forums, enhance our content outside the forums and generally give visitors a comfort zone about advice they receive from other Gotmead.com members.
Member Profiles:
This is an area of concern for many of our new members and patrons. Currently there is really no way to tell if you are exchanging messages with someone who has been making mead for ten years or for ten days. Remember that sheer volume of posts does not equate to practical mead making experience in any way shape or form. We have received numerous messages from new members, guests and hangers-on asking how they can tell if someone really knows what they’re talking about. Well, we have a short term solution for that.
Effective immediately we are requiring that all of our registered users and patrons go to their PROFILE and select the FORUM PROFILE INFORMATION menu selection. There is a text box for PERSONAL TEXT which appears right below your avatar. In that PERSONAL TEXT area you will enter the following TEXT: “Meadmaker since YYYY” where the YYYY is the year you started making mead. For example if you started making mead in 1999 you would enter Meadmaker since 1999. This will give newbies a better idea of how long someone has been involved with making mead. Take a look at my avatar and you’ll see how the text will look below it.
Based on the growing number of queries from new users about what advice to take and what advice not to take this is a good way of giving them a comfort zone for making that decision. Again, this is something that needs to be done immediately. We will be hounding you and in cases where we know how long someone has been making mead we will fill it in if we don’t see that you have done so. We realize that modifying your profile may not be something many of you know how to do so feel free to PM us with questions. If we get a lot of “how to” questions we’ll whip up something a bit more visual. Based on the debates, discussions, ideas and general badinage from within the Gotmead.com community, I feel that nobody posting here lacks the ability to do this.
Also bear in mind that multiple user ID's take up space, time and administration and are not in alignment with our Acceptable Usage Policy. Please do not register multiple user ID's going forward. Yes, there are some folks (moderators) that have multiple ID's. We're moderators so we need limited rights on certain accounts for testing and non-patron testing. Again, please do not register multiple user ID's as you will be asked to use one and not the other. If you continue to post under multiple ID's one of them will be removed by the forum moderator.
Mead Recipes:
Our recipe section in the main website is in the process of growing and expanding. There are many recipes that have been entered into this area. Some of them are good recipes other of them are not good recipes. Personally I’ve seen recipes that I remember from back in the eighties floating around on the UseNet. Many of those recipes have not been tested by anyone here at Gotmead.com so Vicky and I feel that we need to have a some way for our members and visitors to know if the recipe they are reading is actually all it’s cracked up to be.
With that in mind we’ll be annotating recipes that we know for certain work well, and have actually been made by a member of the Gotmead.com administration and extended testing team. There will be a “Gotmead.com Trusted” stamp on each recipe we feel produces mead that tastes good and is consistently reproducible.
The BrewLog:
We have so many BrewLog entries on a daily basis that the forum is being flooded with peoples’ daily progress entries. This is fine but it poses a couple of issues for the people that don’t want to read other peoples’ daily updates. Some people are posting multiple times a day and it really clutters the posts that are pointing to active discussion threads of interest to the Gotmead.com community at large. The recent posts section is beginning to look like a mead journal rather than a forum for discussing mead and mead related issues.
Therefore, Vicky and I have decided to open up the BrewBlog to those members who are dedicated to informing the mead world about every little change in their mead on a daily basis. I think this is a great thing for those of you who want to get really granular with the detail on the progress of your batch. So for those people who want to focus on chronicling each of their batches a new vehicle for your logs will be coming soon. Once we open up the BrewBlog, we’ll be locking down the BrewLog to any new entries. People will still be able to browse those entries; they just won’t be able to post there.
Another issue is that there are some people who think that the BrewBlog is a permanent and secure storage space for their mead making and brewing notes. Remember, this site is not intended as a permanent storage space for your critical notes. If the site takes a hit or is hacked and we lose data as a result, we will get back whatever we can. But, if there is something you absolutely cannot live without in your BrewLog and/or BrewBlog entries SAVE IT LOCALLY AND STORE IT SAFELY. We will do our best to get everything back, but, it ends there. No whining if you lose something and didn’t have a backup copy at home.
UPDATE 09/23/2007:
We will be updating Got Mead? in the near future to a new look and feel. It is important that if you have something you absolutly positively cannot live without in your recipe, brewlog or any other post, that you copy and save it to your local computer. We will be testing these forums, and the rest of this site on a separate server from a separate provider in order to ensure a smooth and loss-free transition to a new forum environment and main site layout look and feel. Please bear the preceeding admonitions in mind carefully and save the things that you do not want to lose. Remember that we will do everything we can to ensure that your posts are preserved, but, if we experience issues during the process of transfer it is better that you have copies of those files/comments/posts and attachments.
You have been warned!
OK, so these are the first of several changes to the site that will be coming down the chute. We are spending a lot of time trying to make this a resource that is worthy of the great participation and growing community of members we have here at Gotmead.com.
adTHANKSvance for your continued cooperation and support,
Pete “Oskaar” Bakulic
Gotmead.com will be making some changes based on feedback from our members in order to help streamline the forums, enhance our content outside the forums and generally give visitors a comfort zone about advice they receive from other Gotmead.com members.
Member Profiles:
This is an area of concern for many of our new members and patrons. Currently there is really no way to tell if you are exchanging messages with someone who has been making mead for ten years or for ten days. Remember that sheer volume of posts does not equate to practical mead making experience in any way shape or form. We have received numerous messages from new members, guests and hangers-on asking how they can tell if someone really knows what they’re talking about. Well, we have a short term solution for that.
Effective immediately we are requiring that all of our registered users and patrons go to their PROFILE and select the FORUM PROFILE INFORMATION menu selection. There is a text box for PERSONAL TEXT which appears right below your avatar. In that PERSONAL TEXT area you will enter the following TEXT: “Meadmaker since YYYY” where the YYYY is the year you started making mead. For example if you started making mead in 1999 you would enter Meadmaker since 1999. This will give newbies a better idea of how long someone has been involved with making mead. Take a look at my avatar and you’ll see how the text will look below it.
Based on the growing number of queries from new users about what advice to take and what advice not to take this is a good way of giving them a comfort zone for making that decision. Again, this is something that needs to be done immediately. We will be hounding you and in cases where we know how long someone has been making mead we will fill it in if we don’t see that you have done so. We realize that modifying your profile may not be something many of you know how to do so feel free to PM us with questions. If we get a lot of “how to” questions we’ll whip up something a bit more visual. Based on the debates, discussions, ideas and general badinage from within the Gotmead.com community, I feel that nobody posting here lacks the ability to do this.
Also bear in mind that multiple user ID's take up space, time and administration and are not in alignment with our Acceptable Usage Policy. Please do not register multiple user ID's going forward. Yes, there are some folks (moderators) that have multiple ID's. We're moderators so we need limited rights on certain accounts for testing and non-patron testing. Again, please do not register multiple user ID's as you will be asked to use one and not the other. If you continue to post under multiple ID's one of them will be removed by the forum moderator.
Mead Recipes:
Our recipe section in the main website is in the process of growing and expanding. There are many recipes that have been entered into this area. Some of them are good recipes other of them are not good recipes. Personally I’ve seen recipes that I remember from back in the eighties floating around on the UseNet. Many of those recipes have not been tested by anyone here at Gotmead.com so Vicky and I feel that we need to have a some way for our members and visitors to know if the recipe they are reading is actually all it’s cracked up to be.
With that in mind we’ll be annotating recipes that we know for certain work well, and have actually been made by a member of the Gotmead.com administration and extended testing team. There will be a “Gotmead.com Trusted” stamp on each recipe we feel produces mead that tastes good and is consistently reproducible.
The BrewLog:
We have so many BrewLog entries on a daily basis that the forum is being flooded with peoples’ daily progress entries. This is fine but it poses a couple of issues for the people that don’t want to read other peoples’ daily updates. Some people are posting multiple times a day and it really clutters the posts that are pointing to active discussion threads of interest to the Gotmead.com community at large. The recent posts section is beginning to look like a mead journal rather than a forum for discussing mead and mead related issues.
Therefore, Vicky and I have decided to open up the BrewBlog to those members who are dedicated to informing the mead world about every little change in their mead on a daily basis. I think this is a great thing for those of you who want to get really granular with the detail on the progress of your batch. So for those people who want to focus on chronicling each of their batches a new vehicle for your logs will be coming soon. Once we open up the BrewBlog, we’ll be locking down the BrewLog to any new entries. People will still be able to browse those entries; they just won’t be able to post there.
Another issue is that there are some people who think that the BrewBlog is a permanent and secure storage space for their mead making and brewing notes. Remember, this site is not intended as a permanent storage space for your critical notes. If the site takes a hit or is hacked and we lose data as a result, we will get back whatever we can. But, if there is something you absolutely cannot live without in your BrewLog and/or BrewBlog entries SAVE IT LOCALLY AND STORE IT SAFELY. We will do our best to get everything back, but, it ends there. No whining if you lose something and didn’t have a backup copy at home.
UPDATE 09/23/2007:
We will be updating Got Mead? in the near future to a new look and feel. It is important that if you have something you absolutly positively cannot live without in your recipe, brewlog or any other post, that you copy and save it to your local computer. We will be testing these forums, and the rest of this site on a separate server from a separate provider in order to ensure a smooth and loss-free transition to a new forum environment and main site layout look and feel. Please bear the preceeding admonitions in mind carefully and save the things that you do not want to lose. Remember that we will do everything we can to ensure that your posts are preserved, but, if we experience issues during the process of transfer it is better that you have copies of those files/comments/posts and attachments.
You have been warned!
OK, so these are the first of several changes to the site that will be coming down the chute. We are spending a lot of time trying to make this a resource that is worthy of the great participation and growing community of members we have here at Gotmead.com.
adTHANKSvance for your continued cooperation and support,
Pete “Oskaar” Bakulic
