[nos-bbs] To be or not to be

[George [ham] VerDuin]

That is my question to the NOS user group in ending this year.
Greetings and happy holidays to everyone.

SO -- a few years ago I discovered JNOS2 and found it to be just what I 
wanted.
Jnos has the feature set that scratches my itch very nicely.
Yes -- I have only been around for a little while in this camp.
In my process of discovery and application I discovered some things that 
troubled me.
   First, to discover jnos in depth, many sources of information needed 
to be uncovered -- reading "C" is not my favored approach to learning a 
new application.
   Second, to tailor my installation to my needs was torture, it took 
many(?) mis-steps -- in-depth example configurations are hard to find.
   Third, to hone performance required many hours of reading dumps and 
computing optimal settings -- defaults are provided but not the basis 
for the numbers.
All of this is just fine, no complaint from my QTH, it can be a valid 
part of the ham hobby.

While tapping the resources of this group, it seemed reasonable to give 
something back.
My first choice was to publish a work bringing the various source info 
together into one document.
I chose the jnos1.10 doc as the basis [same as jnos2], got permission, 
and began merging.
During this labor, it hit me that I was engaged in tying together a 
group effort.
I also saw that the day after my work hit the streets it would be 
out-of-date.
These things brought me to the wiki -- a collaborative tool used 
elsewhere to give structure to a project.

With mostly clerical effort, I converted the material I was assembling 
into MoinMoin WIKI format.
For a while the wiki seemed to whet some appetites, and the search 
engine feature got a fair amount of use.
The feedback from the community was mixed -- positive and disinterested, 
not negative.
I carried the hope that the wiki would "catch on" and folks might come 
to rely on it to replace surfing.
More to the community concept, I hoped others would publish their own 
success stories via the wiki.
A well used wiki contains answers as they develop and never goes 
out-of-date.
It appears none of that actually happened.

Today, the wiki is sick.  A bug crept in during an automatic upgrade 
from V1.6 to V1.8.  The fix escapes me.
More importantly to the question:
   -->nobody has noticed the absence of wiki since it went down.
It seems like I have successfully perfected an appendix transplant -- 
nice(?) but nobody can use one.

The bug is repairable.
My question to this group today is:
    Is it a waste of effort to put jnoswiki.no-ip.org back on the web?
If the NOS community is to grow, newbies (like me) might use the wiki as 
a resource.
The reflector hot button of today "adjusting the content at the jnos 
prompt" deserves to find it's way into wiki.
Yet the wiki is not today's research tool for users who want to attempt 
new features.

Building the wiki has provided the discovery I needed.
If others expect it could be useful in the future I'll fix the bug in 
the server.
It's a story for some other time, but we won't be casting off the dock 
lines and sailing the seven seas, so the wiki could continue to live 
here IF it gets used.

I wish everyone the best for the holidays, and a prosperous 2010.
73
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