Archive for 'Internet'

Admin Extra

Current Mood:Mischievous emoticon Mischievous

For the last six years (on and off) I’ve been a staff member of a rather large Community Administrators forum.  On 5th January I stepped downrom my position there.  The reasons are many, but I do not wish to bash the site in any way, so will refrain from commenting on them.

After I resigned I received a lot of messages all saying the same thing – that i should open a Community Administration site of my own, that I could bring a decent community together.  I don’t really think I have that much sway over the forum communities personally, and I’ve never raelly wanted to go up in competition aginst the existing Community Administration sites so had never considered doing such a thing before.  I don’t know, maybe it was just the right time, maybe these people’s comments caught me in the right mindset.  But, whatever it was, I finally took that step and agreed that yes I would build a Community Administrators Resource/Discussion forum and so Admin Extra was born.

I brought a team together on 6th Jan and we uploaded a vBulletin forum to our new account and set to work.  By Saturday the 9th we had our forum structure and skin in place, and started to focus on content and by Sunday 10th January 2010 we were ready to take the site live.  Within a few hours, our link had been shared and things just seemed to gather momentum.

Today is the 2nd February 2010, we’ve been open just over 3 weeks and have passed the 7,000 post mark.  Our activity and content is outstanding for such a new site.  We have interviews from some of the wellknown names of the Community world, amazing graphic downloads available free to all our members, help and support with running communities and a fantastic memberbase and staff team who have really gelled in our short time online.

So I’d like to invite all of those who read my blog (yes, we have a section solely about blogging and social networks too!) to come and join us at Admin Extra.

3 people like this post.

© 2010, Whimpulsive. All rights reserved.

Posted on 2 February '10 by Lisa, under Communities, Featured, Internet. 1 Comment.

Phone/ISP issues

We’re currently with TalkTalk for both our phone and our broadband (I use the term broadband loosely as we rarely get more than 1meg speeds).  We originally went with them because they offered a good deal where we could get two mobile phones which could call each other and the landline (and the landline could call the two mobiles) for free.  In September this year they sent letters out saying that was no longer going to be an option and so I called them to cancel the mobiles.  Imagine my surprise (or not!) when I discovered they were still taking the £20 per month out for the mobile phones for two further months.  Without the mobile deal it’s barely worth us staying with them for our phone/broadband now, and so I started looking around for other deals.

Sky looked to be the best – we already have Sky tv, so to boost it up to the sky Movies package, HD, phone and broadband it would take the full cost up to £68 a month which worked out £7 more than we’re paying now for Sky basic packages, Broadband and telephones separately.  So essentially we would get movies and HD for £7 a month more than we pay out overall now.  Good deal.  So we signed up to HD and movies and started the process of moving from TalkTalk to Sky.

Only it’s never that straightforward is it!

It turns out that TalkTalk use something called LLU which means if we ever wanted to change our provider we had to revert our phone equipment back to BT and to achieve that we would either have to go with a company who would charge an installation fee (Post Office wanted to charge £107 for the privilege) or go with BT on a 12 month contract.  And so the decision was made that we would return to BT for our phone package.

Now for the fun part (can’t you just sense the sarcasm?)

Our current contract with TalkTalk is up on the 2nd December and so to avoid any cancellation fees of £70 BT will have our line ready on the 3rd December.  This means we may be without a landline for 24 hours – not a big deal as everyone has our mobile numbers (yeah, we had to get a new mobile provider too and that’s a whole other rant!)  We’re not going to take BT’s broadband, however, as it’s ridiculously priced and not worth the money they want.  We still want to go with Sky.  But, and here it comes, we can’t order Sky Broadband until the BT line has been running 5 days.  That puts it at the 8th Dec before we can put the order in.

So, on the 8th Dec (if all’s gone well with the landline) we’ll put in a broadband order with Sky.  Apparently it takes up to 7 days for the router to arrive (which I’m not really bothered about as we’ll have our own router already) and it takes 15 days for broadband to be set up.  It’s December.. it’s going to be Christmas week… chances of broadband being switched on that week?  Minimal I’d say!  The week after is New Year.. I’d say the same odds apply… so we’re likely going to be without broadband for the whole of December.

I can cope with being off line for the month, not sure if I can cope with the hassle we’re going to get from the two lads who won’t be able to feed their Xbox Live addiction for the whole of December though……

1 person likes this post.

© 2009, Whimpulsive. All rights reserved.

Posted on 12 November '09 by Lisa, under Internet, Personal. 9 Comments.

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