Randy:

I'm not the greatest with computers, so I hope I've put this "Answer" in correctly.

It will take me a while to get used to the format of this site as compared with our old site at BioSpecifics.

But, with you & Wolfgang involved, I'm sure our new site will be better than the old one.

Also, in the last few days I've copied onto my computer two threads from our old site that are near & dear to me -- "N.A. in California"; &
"Dr. Benhaim." Is there a way I can somehow Email them to you & thus get them transferred to our new site? I think you have my Email address from when I registered for the new site.

Mark

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While I'm glad you found us, it is a tragedy that BioSpecifics has allowed it's Forum to be ground to a halt by Spam. Hopefully they will realize what it's going to take to save their Forum, but meanwhile, welcome to Wolfgang's site! We are gland you are here. Go ahead and register and say Hi. Might as well use your old BioS name so we know who you are.

Thanks

Randy H.

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I was wading through the posts at BioSpecifics. I do not think that most of the posts are worth saving. Factual posting such as current Drs who do NA should be saved. News about AA4500 should be kept current. Debates about NA vs surgery are valuable. Perhaps a very few other topics are woth saving, but most topics and posts can be discarded.

I have empathy with Wanker's argument and I myself would tend to save only a few important threads and let the others sit at Biospecifics. But what is important? I realized that the choice much depends on whom you ask ad we don't want to become a censor. We therefore started to recover all threads, to the extent that the are still available (BioS deleted some because of age or spam, e.g. my personal favorite "radiotherapy"). Clarence was able to remove the spam and we are currently working on an interface to pump those posts into an archive board in this forum. We still might cut off some old, outdated threads but will probably keep the majority of them as historical archive.

We expect to read in about 10 k posts or so which brought up the question how many posts our forum sw can handle with good performance. It might (or might not) motivate us to move onto a new forum platform. But no need to worry: alle users and posts will be moved automatically, only the user interface might slightly change. We will announce it before we do it (should we do it at all). Anyway, that's what is holding us up a little but we are working it and will come up, probably within the next 4 weeks, with some sort of public archive of the posts from the BioSpecifics forum.

Wolfgang
PS to Mark_D: of course the archive will include also your two favorite threads! And we can also move them into the current Dupuytren board.

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I was wading through the posts at BioSpecifics. I do not think that most of the posts are worth saving. Factual posting such as current Drs who do NA should be saved. News about AA4500 should be kept current. Debates about NA vs surgery are valuable. Perhaps a very few other topics are woth saving, but most topics and posts can be discarded.

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Thanks, Mark! In return I promise that we will come up with some sort of archive of the old BioS posts. It might take 6 - 8 weeks because we first have to upgrade our forum software to the next release and that will not be available before 2nd half of February. But then many of the good BioS posts will become accessible again, and without spam! (the expurgated version ...)

Wolfgang

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I was not sure about this site for quite a while. I liked BioSpecifics site much better. I was even willing to hang in there when the lamers struck. I hoped for better days. Perhaps BioSpecifics would clean up the mess. Well, I do not think that will happen now. This has clearly become to best DD site on the web. It is growing fast and the topics are well disscussed. Congrats to Wolfgang for hanging in there until his site bloomed.

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Hi Mark, I am sorry about the learning curve of the new layout! I will do my very best to explain it, let me stand in for Randy:

Additionally to the BioS forum this forum is split into boards. I think this is an advantage and you will probably agree that the BioS forum was a little messy. Here is a short tutorial on using this forum:

How to see all threads:
Pick a board, e.g. Dupuytren. When you click on the board you will get a list of all threads of this board. The thread with the latest post is on top (as in the BioS forum). Different to the BioS forum the list is split into pages. You can see the number of pages on the top right or bottom right of each page.

How to create a new topic:
To create a new topic click on "new topic" on the upper left of the page listing the threads (topics). Enter your post and, as in the BioS forum, the title of your post will become the title of the new topic (= new thread, in this forum threads are called topics)

Sort sequence:
For the time being within each topic the first post is on top, the latest at the end. I agree with you, I would prefer it the other way round. But actually most forums are organized with the first post on top. But with a little programming this can be changed and I am in the process of learning what to do. Just bear with me, it won't take long.

I hope that helps getting around better and I am sure that eventually we all will be able to handle this forum easily. At least it is spam free!

Wolfgang