Hi Andrew,Bigfella237 wrote:I apologise in advance if this makes me sound like an A-hole but I won't be doing any more edits until I can be sure I'm not wasting my time.
With the 28 new sites and most of my Sunday spent doing updates on the list, I put in around 16 hours of work here last week. That's including the hour wasted on Sunday afternoon when I couldn't submit the changes I'd made because someone else had edited the list while I was working on it.
If someone else wants to take over the maintenance of these lists then by all means just let me know, I can certainly use the time that would free up elsewhere, but I'm afraid it's all or nothing, at least without discussing it with me first?
I have a certain way of doing things. I do the research on the ACMA, then transfer that into a spreadsheet, then transfer that onto the map and the lists here. This way my spreadsheet, the online map and the lists here should always agree. Call me pedantic but that's just my way of making sure I haven't missed anything. It also provides me with a kind of backup should the map or the forum suffer some kind of data loss.
But when someone else comes along and starts making changes that I don't know about, it throws my whole system out of whack. I could understand if I was falling behind again, or was being overwhelmed (which is a close call sometimes), then I'd ask for help.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really very appreciative for the field work that everybody contributes as I just can't run all over the countryside myself physically checking on the various sites, I just ask for the courtesy of not having my time wasted.
Andrew
I guess you want a response from me on this one, it has taken a little bit of time as other things have come up (school holidays, etc) that have gotten in the way and I wanted to ensure a proper response. Yes - I edited the list with a few small updates on the Razorback site which appears to have interrupted your even larger post edit. I do apologise for the inconvenience caused - it was not intentional and I thought I was simply saving you some time. There's no intention of taking over your work here, I simply thought I was helping.
The workflow you have makes a lot of sense, and I'm glad you shared it here - if it was known to me at the time, I wouldn't have made the edit, and, in having said that, your process certainly makes a lot of sense and provides for a decent backup.
This thread is easily the most definitive resource and we all appreciate the efforts put into it. The work in editing that BBCode is massive, and the end result speaks for itself. It's a work of art. With this in mind I'd like to echo Grant's suggestion of using a decent text editor - maybe something like Sublime Text with a BBCode plugin that highlights the various syntax and parenthesis, which makes the task much less tedious. I've seen phpBB do other funny things at times - for example if there's a session issue for any reason, your post gets lost in a similar manner - but I'm surprised it doesn't have the brains to save the text entered while you review the other changes. How very frustrating!
In short, I won't edit the posts as per your requests, and I will post up whatever updates I have as per the normal process of putting it into a post and letting you collate the data and doing the updates.
Cheers,
Matt