TOPIC:

Similar to the Member Downloads section of the website, create an Officer Downloads section that is restricted to the officers of the club.

Club name and number???? What is your question?

I don't have a question. I provided an improvement suggestion. Is this not the right place to submit that? The suggestion was for FreeToastHost, not my specific club so I didn't think club name and number were pertinent.

I would like to support the idea of creating a file depository visible only to site administrators. My intent is to allow for storage of web backup files.

FTH is not intended to be a secure file hosting service. There are many such services on the Web already.

To add to Brian's comments, as the system has matured, we have started to become more aware of storage requirements, and realizing that it is just not practical for us to promise to store everything forever for every club.

This is because the server fee is donated, all labor is volunteer (including development by me), all software tools used are open source, and we really do not have a budget.

For the system to continue to be viable, something is going to have to give. Eventually, I will probably have to implement some sort of expiration scheme for old, unused files, and old unused data that would mark them for eventual deletion. This will of course require a lot of thought and planning, but the reality is that even if we do add new storage features, you should also expect us to eventually start implementing limitations in order to keep the system viable.

This reflects the tough choices that we sometimes have to make.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR COMPLETE AND TIMELY RESPONSES!

Steve,

Didn't realize the storage concern. Many, many clubs have storage of the manuals available locally. I did this for our club fairly recently from downloads available at International and documents scattered at FreeToasHost sites around the web.

My recommendation is to provide 1 simple web page with links to those resources at International. Then make that page available to all clubs asking them to delete any local repositories.

I think simply having that standardized web page available locally then having a policy that we are not allowed to store soft versions of files readily available from International would significantly reduce storage.

Knowing the problem, I could create such a page for our club's site but I think this should probably be done on a larger scale.

TI moves the links around quite a bit, and It would require us to monitor if the links where viable and find new links.

Since the files are available at TI and can be found with the sort feature on the TI website i see no reason for FTH to duplicate this.

As manuals change so often and also all of the TI manuals are copyrighted and should be sourced from the TI servers to ensure you are downloading the latest version.