Posted: 4/15/2008 6:11:56 AM EDT
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I am contemplating putting up a FTP site for ARFCOM users with a library of documents. I will need contributions of documents too. One contributed I will review them to eliminate repeats etc... There interest in this? |
| I have a "shitton" of stuff - about 2 gig. I would be willing to destroy a hard copy of that wonderful readers digest book on simple living and several volumes of Firefox so that I can convert them into PDF's. I have a scanner copier at work and can make either PDF's or print books.... so..... Im in. |
Theres also the "telephone game effect" Where as people take a named document and jack around with the name. An example of this(not in a survival document context) is. I run the external mail servers for my company, we block certain attachments going in and out. There are various email forwards of stupid stuff going in and out, one of these is a retarded thing where your given a math problem to add up the number of legs of cats and girls on a bus, the solution to the problem is the password to an excel spreadsheet. What happens is people get this, they don't like the name so they change "gatos" to "cats" or viceversa, or "are you smarter than a fifth grader" and they accumulate 5 copies on their machine all with the same name, and windows increments a number on the file name, such as "number of cats legs(4).xls", when they send it out, they just randomly happen to send this one, because its the first one they see. So the inbound and outbound mail quarenten is a slurry of "number of cats legs(42).xls, "are you smarter than a 5th grader(2).xls" "are you smater than a fifth grader.xls, "number of gatos legs(2).xls" "oh my god can you figure this out marty i know you cant.xls". Not only does this effect happen in daily conversation, and email forwards, it also happens in document repositories. I have only found 1 cure for this, and its the wiki user submitted document management methodology. No only does it pretty much cure this "telephone game effect", it leaves your documents open to allow constant updating so you don't have an outdated document. Yes I'm long winded about some things, but the point is coming up here in the next paragraph. Rather than just have an ftp server where people blindly upload and download slurries of shoddy and repetitive documents. Maybe the community could be better served by a wiki of some sort, where all are welcome to come and share their preparedness knowledge, now this doesn't it self offer a solution for offsite copies, but that would be easily remedied by a periodic administrative task, in which a person takes all those documents on the wiki, and converts them to some sort of usable offsite format, and offers them up for download, and archival by people that want to keep an electronic or paper copy of these documents, which many of us do. |
The Wiki idea is a good one. we use this at work for documentation and it seems to work pretty well. We still end up with some duplicates but not too many. If I recall there are some good free software packages that do this (We use OpenWIKI at work, which I think is free) Thinking out loud, it would actually be amusing to have a run on wikipedia, I wonder what people would think if tons of survival related articles started showing up there :) |
nice reply but if you read my initial post it isn't going to be blind uploads. I am screening all documents before they are made available for download, to cut out the redundancy. Uploads will go into a uploads only directory where downloads are not allowed. I have since decided I will make folders by date, as i add documents so that people come connect and compare their collection to the last update or few updates, so that they don't have to browse the whole collection to find "new" material that they may not already have. So maybe the community would be better served by you reading the thread and not picking out one sentence that doesn't even say what you infer. This isn't going to be a Wiki article, it's a collection of previously written (and new as they come available) books/articles/manuals. I appreciate your concern for the project, but the doomsdaying of it without reading the thread is not needed. |
I've got a doc library up and at our disposal and waiting to be filled if someone - say someone with skull avatar, maybe - is willing to administer it. I'm just sayin. |
As a librarian who has a good amount of available time at the computer each day, I would be happy to help and contribute in any way I could. |
Sorry, someone peed on my Cheerios and I yanked the entire site. And TheTransporter has been AWOL for about 2 weeks. |
I'm sorry to hear that. I was optimistic at the start of this thread. (And I have a bunch of thumb drives that need to be filled with good info) |
Could you elaborate please? I am confused how someone could derail this kind of an idea. |
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As a server neophyte, I'd love to see someone else set this up for me. This would be a fantastic resource for many people. I wish there was some way I could help, but it thus far I can't see a way. Any chance Tarsus could be talked into getting his stuff back up? |
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second Idea - Those of us with information - Create a document list for files that we would be willing to burn to DVD/cd. Using the correct file name. I would be willing to press out dvds and list the information I have - and mail them on a trade basis. I will give you a copy of what I have - and you send me a copy of what you have. I am not interested on selling or "distributing" information at this time. The first step would be to have everyone who has information saved to exchange it so that 15 people have all the files rather than 15 people with scattered info. In the second stage we could then figure out a fair, legal way to move information from the 15 to additional people. |