The New Minutus Forum is Online!!!

[Peter Walker]

I am glad to announce that your new Minutus Forum is now online and can be used as of now via the website or the TapaTalk app. In this message, you will find all you need to know in order to get started.
Website: https://minutus.forums.group
Emails : minutus@forums.group

Please bookmark the website in your webbrowser, as that is where all the discussions will happen. You will find that the complete archives of your group can be read there and when you read each topic, you will find links to 10 similar topics at the bottom of the page - an ideal way of finding any more similar posts. You will find the forum really opens up your archives like never before, allowing you to access all that Information that was hidden in the archives and was not even accessible after Yahoo deleted the online archives. This alone shows the power of using a forum system.

Sorting the Archives
At the moment, you will find all the previous posts in the Minutus YahooGroup Archives in one long list of 23525 topics on 941 pages. This demonstrates a major limitation of mailing lists like YahooGroups and groups.io - There are no categories to sort the topics into. Forums like ours allow messages to be sorted into an unlimited number of categories making it much less daunting to look up the topic you are interested in. Luckily, the phpBB forum software makes it easy to move topics into other categories and to do this we need some volunteers to look through the topics and move them into appropriate categories. If we have say 10 volunteers, that would be about 2350 topics each to move. As the process is easy and fast, those topics could all be moved to the appropriate categories within a few weeks. So, all we need are some knowledgeable volunteers capable of doing the sorting. If more categories are needed, just tell me the names of them and I will add them for you. If you want to volunteer, send me a message and ask to be added to the list. The more that take part, the faster we can have this job done.

Posting and Replying
Please note that while you can reply to any of the topics in the Minutus YahooGroup Archives, it is NOT possible to start new topics there. To start a new topic, first select the appropriate category on the list of forums on the home page and then on the red New Topic button. You will then be able to enter the new subject line and your message. There are a number of formatting buttons as well to help you make your post look good. If you want to add an attachment, you will find the tools to do that at the bottom. When you are finished, I suggest first clicking on the Preview button so that you can see what it looks like and when all is good, click on Submit. You will find a full User Guide on the phpBB website: https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/

TapaTalk App for Smartphones and Tablets, availble here:
Apple App (iOS): https://itunes.apple.com/app/id307880732?mt=8
Google Play (Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... o.activity

TapaTalk Free App
Once the app is installed, search for Minutus Forum in My Groups and join it. TapaTalk will work with over 200,000 forums so if you belong to any others, there is a good chance it will work with that, too. My own Rife Forum is one such example.
TapaTalk is free to use, but ads will be displayed between some of the posts. These ads come from TapaTalk and do not support us. There are two ways of upgrading the app to remove those annoying adverts:

TapaTalk Pro App
This is available for a one-time charge that will remove the adds on any devices linked to the same Google or iOS account. Note that if you have both iOS and Android devices, you would have to order the Pro version on each platform. The ads free status is with the App, not with your Tapatalk account. But a lot of users enjoy the simplicity of the Pro App and it is cheaper than a VIP account.

TapaTalk VIP Account
Tapatalk Free App upgrades in a more regular cycle with most up to date features and functions. If you sign up for the VIP subscription, your Tapatalk user account will be Ad free. If you are using Tapatalk on different devices (iOS and Android) and log in using that VIP account, no ads will show no matter what device you are on.

If you use devices on more than one platform, then the VIP Account is the better option. If you intend to keep on using this forum and others for more than 3 years, then I suggest buying the lifetime subscription which is still very affordable. Forums.Group does not receive any commission on this at all.
1 Month = $0.99 (first moth free)
1 Year = $9.99
Lifetime: $29.90


Username and Password:
On the banner at the top of the page, you can read instructions on how to obtain your Username and set a new Password.
Start by clicking here: app.php/user/forgot_password

You may have received an email from us giving you a password. Unfortunately, those passwords did not work, please disregard.

Please note that for technical reasons, those members that changed their email addresses at any time in the past and made a post, will have an account for each email address. This was unavoidable as there was no reliable way of associating the various email addresses to one account. It will be possible to merge those accounts into one, but not yet.

Emails sent to you from the forum will come from the email address: minutus@forums.group so please whitelist that address in your email systems so that they do not end up in your spam folder. Make sure you have no email filters that reject emails from Germany (we have seen that happen in the past) where the forum is hosted. That means that German laws apply to the forum that support free speech.

Your entire Minutus YahooGroup archives, from the beginning up until April 7, 2020 can be found in the Minutus YahooGroup Archives section. You can browse through the old topics and even reply to them. However, it does not make sense to post new topics in that section, when there is a range of new sections to choose from. We have therefore removed the capability to post new topics, there.


What about the posts made on the YahooGroup after April 7, 2020?
I put out an announcement on that day that the final backup had been made. I pointed out that all messages posted after then cannot be transferred to the forum. There have been more than 60 posts made since then and I ask those that posted them, to simply re-post any important messages on the forum, themselves. It will be a chance to practice posting on the new forum. I will not be trying to transfer those posts, myself - you were all warned they would not be transferred automatically.


Where are the Files and Photos Uploaded to the YahooGroup?
They can all be found here: share and attachments can also be found in the respective posts as well. In future, you can upload files by attaching them to your posts.


Can I continue to Post via Email?
The simple answer is NO! It is a forum, not a mailing list. It is designed around reading the posts online or via the app. A daily digest, that includes the posts of the day, will be sent out via the YahooGroup. One email a day instead of each individual message as it is posted. Previously, the YahooGroup was the opposite, every post was sent out individually and there was no digest any more. I have seen a lot of messages asking for a digest again.

You can however individually subscribe to any topic that interests you on the forum and new posts to that topic will be sent to you via email, directly. Just remember that replying to those emails via email will not work. The forum does not have a mechanism to receive emails and add them to posts. You have to write your answers or new posts on the forum. This is the biggest difference to using a mailing list like this one. Again, use the app and you will not even notice this limitation as you can easily write replies in the app that do get posted on the forum.

You will find that it makes a lot more sense to view the list of topics on the forum and selectively read the ones that interest you. If you use the app, you can use the forum as if it were in your email account – just a different app and the posts no longer get mixed up with your personal emails. The forum is as accessible as your smartphone for all posts, not just today’s.


No need to read every new post anymore, just the ones that interest you.
You are all currently used to reading every new post as it comes in, good or bad, interesting or boring. You probably delete most of them so that your email account is not overloaded. It is always about today’s topic and the discussions from a year ago or 10 years ago are long forgotten. This leads to the same questions being asked again and again because nobody looks in the archives, even if they were there for you to look at (they will be again on the forum).

A forum gives you a long list of topic titles and I suggest you get a group of people to sort them into categories. You can easily browse through the topics or search for something and view those posts again really easily and you can even respond to those older topics, again. It is then no longer about the topic of the day; you now have a vast selection of topics to look at and you can selectively read the ones that interest you.


What will happen to the YahooGroup and groups.io?
The YahooGroup will be used to send out a daily digest of new posts made on the forum (please forgive me if this does not work perfectly on the first few days, it is still being perfected). We ask you to stop posting to the YahooGroup and for everyone to now use the forum, instead. The forum will be sending out daily digests to the Minutus YahooGroup, so that lurkers can continue to read new posts via email and respond by clicking on a link in the email. It will not be possible for responses to be made via email, just post them on the forum, instead. The YahooGroup will become an announcement only group for those digests.

The groups.io group will be frozen and at some point, deleted. The relevant posts have been transferred to the forum and is therefore no longer needed.

How Can I Unsubscribe?
Once you have logged in, click here to go to your personal profile page. There you can set the first three options to No and the forum will not send you any more emails. You nay however still receive messages via the YahooGroup. You will need to [url=mailto:minutus-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com]unsubscribe from that as well to stop those emails[/url].

Your account will remain on the Forum and you can just ignore it. If you want your account removed from the forum, you will need to contact us directly.

If you have any feedback, simply reply to this post, below.

Anyway, the forum is open now and you are welcome to start using it.

Happy Easter!

Regards

Peter Walker
Founder of the forums.group platform.
https://forums.group