Townsy will set up a West County Bulletin Board by Jan. 22

Townsy Sebastopol, the new locally developed website/app for Sebastopol, will be adding a bulletin board to Townsy before the sun sets on WaccoBB on January 22.

We are working on setting it up now and would love to have the help of some devoted WaccoBB users as advisors as we move forward.

To be clear, this won't be WaccoBB 2.0. It will be its own thing, as Barry requested.

If you'd like to participate in a small brainstorming Zoom meeting about the Townsy Bulletin board, please email me (using Reply Privately) your answers the following questions:

- What bulletin boards/forums have you used?
- Which did you like best and why?
- Have you ever helped design or administer a public forum?
- What topics (if any) would you avoid?
- What topics are you most interested in reading about and discussing?
- What did you like best about WaccoBB?
- How would you improve on the WaccoBB experience?

If you don't want to join in on the Zoom meeting, but would like to chime in with answers to any of these questions, feel free to reply publicly or privately to this post.

If you haven't visited Townsy Sebastopol before, see it here: https://townsyapp.com

Townsy Sebastopol appears to be connected to Facebook.
You become the product.

We plan to include all of west county in the Townsy bulletin board.

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Posted in reply to the post by Jude Iam:

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I guess what Dogenzip means by "connected to Facebook" is that Townsy Sebastopol, which is a local news app, allows you to share articles to your Facebook or Twitter accounts.

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Posted in reply to the post by Dogenzip:

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Posted in reply to the post by Laura Hagar Rush:

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Hi Laura,

So do you want to use forum software?

VBulletin is the mercedes benz of forum software, but there's a couple of free ones around now that are quite good.

But you will need hosting & the more people you have on the site posting at the same time, the more bandwidth you will need (just so you know.)

I recommend my hoster b/c they are very good at customer service & low cost with quality infrastructure & they don't CENSOR.

https://flarum.org/
discourse.org/pricing - a lot of sites have started to use this one. They have a free version & also a hosted version so you don't need hosting, but the link went to their Github page so I guess you have to inquire there.

The other free ones like PHP BB I'm not in love with.

Here's another link with all free ones.

I wouldn't go for bbPress for WP or simple machines, & there's some others there I don't like, but the top 5 look interesting & I've never heard of them except Discourse.

https://itsfoss.com/open-source-forum-software/

It is kind of complicated to set up different forums, then their subforums etc.

I suggest you get a Word doc out & create a list of the top forums you absolutely must have, then create subforums underneath them & you can always add more later.

You'll have to go thru the settings as well.

I hope you find some help as it's not something you can usually do in one day, but maybe you can do it in a few days if you have some help.

HTH

Hi HTH - Thanks for your thoughtful suggestions. We've decided to use Discourse. My son and I have set it up and are figuring it out. Barry is advising, and my developer Fox Scarlett is helping to integrate the board with Townsy. You may have read yesterday that Barry is keeping WaccoBB open for another two weeks to ease the transition. We are planning to open for discussion on Jan. 22 as planned, but the extra time will give people time to move from one board to another, compare, make suggestions, port conversations over, etc. Hope to talk with you soon on Townsy Cafe - West County.

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Posted in reply to the post by OurFreeSociety:

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Townsy Cafe West County is now up and operational. It's new, and all of us (including the moderators Jameson Rush and Laura Hagar Rush) are new to it. Please go and explore. Create and respond to posts, make suggestions for new categories.Think of it as a new adventure.

Find it at https://townsyapp.com