From August 2011 (or earlier if enough people say that’s what they want) the DIY COW forum currently hosted at UKPuzzle will move here. WordPress formatting options are scant when it comes to posting replies, so there will be some tweaking to do; your suggestions are welcome.
DIYCOW Weekly cryptic clue-writing contests
Hittage
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DIYCOW 
Hi Anax
Could you say more about the limitations of formatting etc? Hard to know what to comment on at this point…
cheers
Dram
The main problem will be starting new challenges after the weeks’ winners have been announced. On phpBB it’s simply a case of starting a new thread – here, the winner has to start a new blog entry, which I suppose is a bit like temporarily owning the blog!
It is “merely” a case of granting admin permissions but that’s potentially hazardous; and I can’t be constantly online waiting for a winner / new challenge to be announced and then set that up on the winner’s behalf.
These aren’t huge obstacles, but they need a bit of thinking about to get round properly.
Perhaps Anax one solution would be for you to create the posts in advance with titles such as ‘DIY COW wc January 1 2011’ as placeholders. The judge setting the word and the competitors would then post their entries as replies and you could perhaps change the title of the post to the word to be clued later on – if you are not prompt in doing so it won’t matter because we can find it by the date.
Hi Dram
It’s possible – not 100% certain yet – we may continue with DIY COW as it is. The UKPuzzle website seems to attract online poker sites who are willing to pay decent money to advertise there. If they want to chuck money at me for doing nothing I’m happy with that; it doesn’t mean I have to update the site.
Dram’s Idea is not a bad one. Also if you have a number of moderators then it may be possible to have the winner send a message and for **Someone** to post the new challenge.
Format is an issue but probably not insurmountable.
I guess the main problem is the question of Ownership of the post (and the blog!)
Just a thought – I have had to enter my username and email address here to reply (although I am logged in eksewhere as a WordPress acccount holder). That night be a headache.
In any case, given that the DIY COW is down again – thanks for the judging, Anax, and “Onwards and Upwards!”
The simple truth is that WP is weak compared to a phpBB forum. It has its plus points; comment nesting can be a useful thing and you can quickly hone in on latest posts – but the layout of phpBB is very familiar and you get much more on a page.
This WP account was set up at a time when I planned to get rid of UKPuzzle, but although that site will no longer be updated its advertisers make running it worthwhile, so I plan to keep it – and thus the DIY COW forum.
The immediate concern is getting the mySQL serverside problem sorted out so we can return to the place we call – and that feels like – home. Sadly that can only happen when Web-Mania decide that customers who pay for their services warrant some level of meaningful support.
One recurring problem with the forum was the weekly judge’s write-up, which was having to be split up into several posts – even that could be problematic. I would propose that, once phpBB is back online, the weekly review is offered as a downloadable PDF. As well as addressing the formatting issue, saving the PDF to your system gives the added benefit of something you can read at leisure and print off if you wish.