On-line forum for Germans from Russia Researchers

Hi, I played with PhpGedView, now trying out Webtrees.


Any others interested in this type of online gedcom collaboration?

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Ted Poppke

My Genealogy Site
Facebook
Sheridan County, ND GenWeb

I like the collaborative aspects of Wikitree (www.wikitree.com) but I've been too busy to give a real try. Maybe after the Spokane convention.

The software that we and GRHS use is "The Next Generation of Genealogy Site Building". It's usually known by its less cumbersome acronym of TNG and it has proven itself to be a great way to display your genealogy on the Internet but it is probably serious overkill for a personal site.

Have you considered contributing your GEDCOM to our database and then putting a URL on your website that points to your Family tree in the BlackSeaGR database?

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Regards, Murray
BlackSeaGR Forum co-Administrator
Gauer Family Website

Newbie here

I noticed you use TNG here. I've used it in the past, integrated with Joomla, and have been playing more recently with Wordpress integration.

What I'd like is something much like what you have at BSGR: a collaborative database, a blog and a wiki (and, maybe, in the future, a forum, when or if I get enough users).

However, Joomla integration has just proven way too complex. Every time Joomla updates (1.0 to 1.5 to 1.6 to 1.7) it breaks the integration bridges, and one's stuck on old Joomla waiting for when or if the php gurus get around to updating them. Then one has to stay on top of all the other modules -- forums, wikis, you name it. Too Much Work!(tm)

And as much as I love Wordpress's ease of administration, there are integration hurdles there, too. And then I get the nagging suspicion what I end up with is a blog-with-genealogy rather than a genealogy-wth-blogging site.

May I ask what you're doing here at BSGR?

--Nathanael

Hi Nathanael,

We are using TNG for our "webtree" function, Facebook as a blogging and social network connection and PHPbb3 for community discussions like this. Facebook is the easiest to use but even that requires some attention from our Facebook expert.

Gayla is the one to speak of our TNG implementation and I am the one responsible for setting up and co-administering PHPbb3. I can see you have already discovered each of these tools has a significant learning curve and ongoing administrative load associated with making them available to people on the Internet.

For PHPbb3 we had to almost immediately expend a lot of energy fighting off spammers who used automated tools to register new users with bogus emails and spew dozens of spams as new topics on our forums. All of my attempts to use Captcha to protect our forums were not successful and we finally went to manual registration which seems to have solved that issue.

Even now there are new features like RSS feeds and Mods to the base PHPbb3 software that are waiting because of lack of time to research or because of the complexity it adds when upgrading the official base PHPbb3 software. We are all just volunteers here so there is just so much we can do and I am so proud of what we have already accomplished.

We have discussed creating a Wiki but there are already a couple of German-Russian Wiki's out there (e.g. http://wiki-en.genealogy.net/Russia and https://wiki.familysearch.org and https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Germans_from_Russia) so it seems like reinventing the wheel.

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Regards, Murray
BlackSeaGR Forum co-Administrator
Gauer Family Website

"I can see you have already discovered each of these tools has a significant learning curve and ongoing administrative load..."

To put it mildly I've attempted sites in the past, and they've always folded under the weight of administrative and update duties. Which is why I'm aiming for something a bit less ambitious this time around -- the trees, a blog and a wiki. Skip the CMS, forget Community Builder, don't worry about TNG integration, and hold off on the forums until (and if) demand rises. Ancestry.com has a perfectly good mailing list already; use that.

So who's Gayla (nobody by that name in the member list) and how do I get in touch with her?

--Nathanael

It's tough to build communities on the Internet for very specialized topics (like family research). Even though genealogy is popular and there are probably millions of descendants of German-Russians and BlackSeaGR has made a significant splash in the GER-RUS world, building an active discussion group is a tough road. I have the only Gauer surname website on the internet and I tried a discussion group. I was forced after a year to just let Ancestry do it (http://boards.ancestry.com/surnames.gauer/mb.ashx).

Gayla is gdo-researcher and she can be reached through the private message feature (PM) on this forum.

_________________
Regards, Murray
BlackSeaGR Forum co-Administrator
Gauer Family Website

Hello, this is Gayla. You can send me email at database@blackseagr.org

I use TNG for my personal website www.ohlhauser.net as well as for the Black Sea German Research website. I love it and it is so easy to use and work with.

You can email me at the above address and I will answer any questions that you about using TNG.
Gayla

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Gayla Aspenleiter
Black Sea German Research Webmaster and Database Administrator