Am I seeing this correctly? Wikispaces going away as of this July  

 

It's news as of this morning and not a joke. This message by Messydesk from the VAMworld message board "Stay tuned for a VAMWORLD migration strategy."
Should prove to be interesting at the very least.

I hope Vamworld gets transferred somewhere without any issues. I love Sotheby’s site and live there a lot...

As you know Bobby, it's not the software, it's the scale. Any fool can hand code a web page... coding 100s or 1000s of web pages and serving them to 1000s or more simultaneous users that is difficult.

An analogy:

If I want to go to the coin show this Saturday, I hop in the car and drive. If a couple of us want to go, we meet in the side lot of Walmart, you park your cars and hop in mine and I drive to the show. Not THAT much more complex for 3 or 4 vs. 1.

If I want to take the whole club to the ANA show in Irving, now we need a bus. Place to meet and park more than 2 or 3 cars. Maybe hotel rooms and food. How often does the bus stop for bathroom breaks.

As you scale up, the logistics get much more complex... beyond linear.

I'd be surprised if VAMworld is anywhere near the size of CCF. At least now I get my wish to see the place migrated off of the wiki platform.

I am hoping that they come up with a solution as well. I think the Wikipedia-type system as Bobby is mentioning would be awesome because it allows both real-time editing and a discussion page for each topic. However, both Wikipedia and Wikispaces' discussion/forum systems are terrible. Perhaps the CCF VAM forum could become the official or semi-official VAM forum with the blessing of the SSDC, in exchange for some sort of compensation to Bobby; this would be an improvement and also funnel some traffic to CCF for generating PPI ad revenue & maybe even CCF subs/SSDC memberships.

I wonder if John et al. have talked to the ANA about a numismatic grant to help re-establish the website, or perhaps enlisting the aid of donations from SSDC and NSDR members? I'd be more than willing to contribute. Some of the things I had briefly discussed with him & others at ANA in regards to the VW site a couple of years ago might be more feasible on a new platform, e.g. a page on each VAM for user photos of their own examples of that particular VAM and its diagnostics.

Perhaps the new website can also integrate with the SSDC Registry website to more of an extent than it currently does, allowing automatic updates of Registry populations instead of requiring tedious manual page-by-page editing.

A new website with better usability and a better design might bring increased public exposure, memberships, and more importantly, donations, which could be used to fund more scholarships to the VAM classes, promote VAM Thing, and help publish more VAM-related books.

No plans for that, don't even know where that came from.

They are absolutely welcome to use our forum though.

I still prefer to attempt to attribute my Morgans myself before asking for help. I saw where the VW data/info will be available until the end of July 2018.

Is downloading the recommendation? Is that safe for technically difficient users? Does it require significant storage space?

You can see where I'm going with this. I'm just trying to figure out where I can go in the future with the demise of VW. I used their photos to attribute most if not all of my Morgans.

I posted in CCF new additions to my collection and sought attribution confirmation here.

Your thoughts and patience with me are appreciated.

I was unable to register - their Captcha scheme is completely unreadable and I exceeded the number of allowed attempts trying to get it right.