You’re very welcome. I hope that the forum will accept my apologies for having referred you to a “paid for web site”.
You’re very welcome. I hope that the forum will accept my apologies for having referred you to a “paid for web site”.
Jon, I don’t think anyone really minds beyond the powers that be….
I don’t think anyone really minds beyond the powers that be
I was tempted to not reply to that swipe, Jason, but clearly an additional explanation is called for…
There is very little value in posting an internal link into the COPA forum, for two reasons:
My job here is to keep EuroGA nice and readable for all. But, it is not a paid-for aviation newspaper and it is up to everyone here to contribute.
Otherwise, Jason, you can always start up your own site on which you can post what you like. It’s easy these days. Start with a web server, set up index.html… learn unix, HTML, javascript, CSS, C++, TCP/IP, PHP, security config… well I am sure you know the process. There are adult education courses for that if you don’t. You would have to run a different online persona to get it going, but that should not be hard 
I guess what he wanted to say was just that an occasional link that can cannot be opened by all does not inmediately ruin the forum experience.
There was a question and then a link which gave a very specific and helpful reply to the question. Sure, he could have sent the reply off the forum (pm). But again, as long as one doesn’t contniously run into blind links, no big deal.
Yes – a good way to deal with it would be to say Here is a link to some info but you need to pay $50/year (or whatever) to read it. Then people can decide whether they want to click on it or not.
But that still leaves us with the issue that “we” are trying to build an informative aviation community site.
I know that on the internet people link all the time to other stuff, which is normal, and the odd broken link doesn’t matter, but the end result tends to be that nowadays anybody “online” is facing a tsunami of crap anytime they look for something. Try googling on any topic that interests you. Even if you are skilled in the search terms, most of the hits will be irrelevant, drivel, or expired. I see the access history here and loads of people read old threads so if e.g. the pics have gone missing (because they have been removed from dropbox, imgur, etc) that obviously detracts from the information value (totally, in many cases). People find the old threads because the stuff here is mostly informative and relevant, and modern-day google is very clever in digging out high quality material. (Sadly, there is a lot less high quality material online than many would hope for). Your writeups, boscomantico, are great – because it’s all there, in one place, informational and self contained. Incidentally google cannot index material hidden in a pay site (well it can on some of them, who set it up to let google in, but I don’t know of any discussion site that has done that).
I would personally rather have a broken/invalid link every now and then than these discussions, which i find more tiring (I already have my own website! ;-))
I understand what you’re saying Peter, but you should relax a bit. That LAST paragraph to Jason was unnecessary. Makes us feel like in boarding school, and I’m still so glad I’m out of it ;-)
OK, we have a truce then. I hated school too… it was a boys’ school, no girls (= a total waste of time) 
Mine too, no girls … ;-(
I even suffer today when I see my kids (12, 10) see go to school every morning …
To be fair, there are some publicly accessible parts of COPA, and it was an easy mistake to make linking to a post in the members only section. If you’re permanently signed in, you wouldn’t even notice what you’d done until someone pointed out that they couldn’t access it.
This all does seem to be a lot of fuss about nothing!
Just to put this in context, as the offender that posted the original link:
I posted it because:
1. I knew that the OP flies a Cirrus and believed him to be a member of COPA where the thread is located
2. The question he asked refers to an issue that I believed to be specific to the way Skywatch is installed in the Cirrus
3. The problem is one that a number of other Cirrus pilots, me included, have had and which is not easily solved
4. It’s impolite to simply pinch and cross post things from one forum to another. I don’t do it from here to there, I do exactly what I did in this case and post a link.
5. I didn’t send a PM because I thought it might be useful to other Cirrus pilots or COPA members (not all of them fly Cirrus) who, like the OP, hadn’t seen the thread to which I linked.
For what it’s worth, I can’t for the life of me see what’s wrong with that or how it diminishes this forum one iota. On the other hand, I think that suppressing that kind of post achieves exactly that.
Oh, and Steve is quite right, I drew no distinction between the public and private bits of COPA as I am permanently signed in.
