[smiffy]

"The forum holds no interest for me"
"I have no intention on spending time running it"
"I have no interest in it being open anymore"
"KHF is dead, gone and is not coming back"

So why couldn't this have been made clear last year?

What a shame that kyn appears to have nothing but contempt for the members of her own forum.

[HERB COLLECTOR]

My email address if anyone needs to get in touch.
john .  peters  1 3  6  4  at  google mail  .  com
Close up gaps and @ for at.

[Bilgerat]

OK, rant time.

I don't think anyone on this forum has been acting in any way which was disrespectful or intrusive. I emailed Kev and asked him to get Karyn to get in touch with one of the moderators. My email was polite, I introduced myself, apologised for approaching him out of the blue and asked him nicely if he would do the needful.

Kyn, if you're reading this, and I'm sure you're not, but in case you are, you are not the only one who has had to endure watching a parent die this year.You are not the only one who has ever lost a job. While I feel your pain (and I do), that is no reason to be rude. There is absolutely no reason at all to be so hostile to people whose only "crime" was to offer their help.

If the KHF is dead to you, hand it over to people who do give a monkeys about it. You are behaving like a spoiled kid who's bored with their toy, but won't let anyone else play with it. If that's your attitude, then good riddance, I'm sure that between us, those of us who do give a monkeys about the KHF will just start a new one.

Rant over.

[Lutonman]

I too am sad and somewhat surprised at the response from Kyn. Filmer01 you have nothing to be sorry about and were only trying to seek a way forward for those of us that remain.

We did indeed understand what she was going through but silence to genuine pleas for help created yet more questions. I have lost my sister this March to cancer and marked her birthday just two days ago, so I understand the need to grieve but life still goes on and I still need to deal with daily and work demands.

The question remains what do we do now? Its clear we cannot rely on the forum being open for long so at least copying our own posts perhaps is very urgent.

[filmer01]

I was greatly saddened by Kyn's new post, in the public part of the Forum, for all to read.

As we had been posting off-topic she may not have read those posts supporting her and also not realised that her silence had only fuelled our efforts to contact her.

Unfortunately silence does not communicate its reasons or intentions.

When we found that only Established Members could start a new topic, I went ferreting around the membership list and was surprised to find that we have two Administrators, Kyn and Kev. Kev had last logged in at Easter, so could have read some of our posts about how to continue the Forum.

However, I was intrigued to note that he had never, ever, posted on the Forum. I therefore tried to contact this Administrator with a view to them being able to unlock the Forum. I did this by the email button on Kev's profile, but because that took ages to clear I was suspicious that it had not gone, so I sent a PM to the same effect, as well. So it was I that started the hunt for Kev, sorry.

As I said, greatly saddened, as it is likely to mean the loss of a great resource, with irreplaceable contributions from the likes of Peter Challis.

Where shall we meet in the future?

[Bilgerat]

Well, a small sign of movement today. I reached out to Kev some time ago and got a response from him this afternoon. Kyn's dad is very unwell and coming on top of her mum's recent passing means that she has a lot on her plate right now.When I reached out to him, I explained why and asked him to ask her to get in touch with me or one of the other moderators. He is going to get in touch with her and ask her to get in touch with one of us. Watch this space 

[smiler]

The way I see it is if I start a thread or contribute to somebody else's I am giving that information to the forum, ITS THEN OUT OF MY HANDS AND THE FORUM DOES WHAT IT WISHES WITH IT.

[filmer01]

A couple of other issues that I can see.

Getting  copyright permission is obviously more difficult if the member has died. Can their heirs do it, and how do we find them? Same goes for members who have drifted away over the last 10years.

The clue to the other problem is in the title of thing, it’s a forum, which involves multiple members commenting and adding to the initial post. Does the whole thread belong to the person who initiated it, as trying to get each contributor to consent would obviously be impossible, partly due to the first problem. Just consider the Slip Coaches thread!

No doubt other issues will be revealed, which makes it all the more important to salvage the forum in its present form.

[smiffy]

One of the problems is there are something like 800 members that were lost when the forum was taken offline. These members can't give any permission as they can no longer login.

I've been wondering what the copyright situation is regarding Wayback Machine - you can enter a URL for the KHF and find 170 snapshots taken between 2008 - 2019. The coverage is only partial, but there are a lot of posts that have been archived (including some from Bilgerat, complete with photographs).

[Bilgerat]

Dave, thank you for your kind offer. I think if getting in touch with Kyn doesn't work out, then if we copy the old Forum piece by piece, this will not only take a huge effort, but will cause other problems. I discussed this matter away from here with someone else who is an expert in these things. If we go ahead, we run a very real risk of the new Forum being blacklisted by Google for being a copy of the old one. There is also the issue of Copyright, which I'll need to do some research on.

Should Plan A not work out, then Plan B is going to have to be to create a totally new Forum from scratch and leave it to individual members to copy their own work across, or at least re-publish it on the new Forum.

We have until August of 2020 until the license for the current Forum domain runs out.I'm not sure if it renews automatically, in my experience, it won't unless the hosting agreement is renewed and a fee paid.

I know we all want our Forum back, but I think we're going to have to be patient for the time being.

[Dave Smith]

Having, over the years, submitted quite a few articles about the 2nd World War as " I was there", if anyone wishes to keep this history please feel free to do so. Is this all that is needed?

[smiffy]

If kyn has no further interest in maintaining or even being involved with this site anymore, I cannot see why she should not hand it over to those who want to see it continue. There may, of course, be something beyond her control which is preventing this from happening.

As for copyright, for posts for which no permission to copy has been obtained one solution could be to simply include direct links from any new site to the relevant thread or topic on the KHF. However, this would be dependent on the current site maintaining a presence, even if it's just read-only.

[Bilgerat]

You may be right Nemo and Lutonman, like I said, that was my understanding of the law and I'd need to do more research into the fiendishly complex field of copyright before committing to anything.

I'm hoping that it won't come to that.

[Nemo]

and/or the copyright owner (eg. the owner of the copyright of a posted image).

[Lutonman]

The only potential pitfall I can see is the issue of copyright. My understanding of the law though is that copyright laws only apply if material is copied for financial gain. The copyrights of each article are owned by the article's creator, so we really ought, where possible, to get the writer's permission to copy articles across to the new site. In which case, if any contributors are looking in on this thread, please give your permission to copy your items to the new site.

I don't believe that this is correct, just copying posts will infringe copyright unless the poster grants permission.