Hello Everyone,
Just to update you on some problems Mental Nurse has been having recently.
The Forums
The forums died following a badly implemented upgrade. Entirely my fault but effectively unfixable without me just deleting a bunch of database tables and recreating a blank forum. I do not want to make a blank forum as some forum software is being developed by the creators of wordpress and i would prefer to use this. If at all possible when the new forums are put up I will try to transfer over some of the more important threads.
User Registrations
A month or two ago I had to implement some additional checks on new users registering with the site as we were getting a huge amount of dodgy Russian spam / pharma / Viagra type registrations. The system should now ask people to solve a captcha and respond to an email to confirm they are human and can read badly typed words. For a little while a box got ticked that meant people needed their accounts approved by myself or Z. Not sure how but it was not meant to happen. When I unticked the box some registrations got stuck in limbo.
For those still having problems please email myself or Z ( zarathustra or mentalnurse at mentalnurse dot org dot uk) and one of us will create your account by hand and make sure everything is working well for you.
Everything should be working now for new new people if problems continue I will disable the plugin and delete the spam users individually, again, again and again.
Future Plans
Plans for the site this year.
Bring back the forums in some shape or form.
Find out how many NHS trusts are blocking Mental Nurse.
Encourage more lurkers to comment.
Encourage regular commenters to do guest posts.
Take advice from the cheap seats on how to improve the sight.
Ah! Great Minds.
Just been through the logs of the blogs I’m involved in, I’m getting a comment ratio of about 1/450. The is hugely frustrating for me. I mean you get a visitor from rural Malaysia, who spends 14′:35″, obviously painstaking working their way through a post in a foreign language – and then they just leave without a word…
The NHS blocking thing – there’s a lot of it about. Try a freedom of information request to the N3 service provider (I think it’s at this stage, it’s all still in the hands of BT). It’s £50, but It’ll make a great post…
The forum thing – having the newest post at the top of the tread makes following the conversation really difficult…
Am waiting for this to come of beta for the forum
http://bbpress.org/
I might also get pricing for subdomains so things look a little tidier. I would also like to do a Planet Mental site as a kind of one stop shop feed aggregator.
Ooo – In the spark of ambition, I see visions of Greatness…
The Autism Hub ( http://www.autism-hub.co.uk ) started off as a feed aggregator but has expanded to include a private discussion forum that has a far wider membership than just bloggers (It is also condemned by our enemies as Neurodiversity’s secret high command). It’s also becoming an effective lobby group (we even presented at Learned Conferences).
I’m inordinately proud to be a member.
My plan was something more like this http://planet-if.com/ but it runs on python which I know less about than PHP. The plan would be for the forums and the planet to be both subsections of the main Mental Nurse site. The forum to be integrated (one user reg for site and forum) though possibly looking quite different and a bit more open than the main blog. The planet would be more a starting point for those without extensive google reader lists.
The problem being Mental Nurse is already breaching limits on bandwidth regularly but the hosting company are fairly understanding. But the more I add to the site the more likely it is the hosting will have to be upgraded to something more … expensive.
Would be nice to have more for users to do when not reading the blog, private messaging one another would be nice. More things to help build a sense of community and encourage everyone to join in.
Ideas are welcome.
Bandwidth issues… Please don’t go down the Google Ads route.
Even a my modest little blog was offered £80 a month sponsorship… An opportunity I chose not to pursue, perhaps unwisely. Is there a renegade nursing union that wants to advertise somewhere a bit edgy? I’m sure one of them Australian Nursing Agencies would be in like a depo at 16.59 on a Friday evening.
And then there’s the Mental Nurse T-Shirts. A good design and you might suddenly find yourselves very a la mode.
Sponsored OSB Baiting?
A CALENDAR!? A Mental Nurse naughty calendar! OMG That’s it!
Chances are I can find something within budget. Can’t imagine anyone wanting to sponser the site and it would not happen anyway. Mental Nurse is a labour of love by all the authors. I do remember doing Mental Nurse and mugs a long time ago but I had to use Cafepress which was based in the US. Also it was overpriced. I do believe there are some Mental Nurse mugs in actual existence though. I have one in my cupboard.
The ideas was just a request for ways people would like to see the site improved.
My NHS trust don’t block this site.
I have been considering another post, but am still mulling it over in my head. It’ll be about being newly qualified (surprisingly!)
Happy 2009 Mental!
Well they block it on the computer I use at work. Unless you bypass the filter (easily done). Possibly that is a bad sign
They don’t block it at my Trust. Am interested to know more about bypassing filters though…
I got blocked from the transport direct site the other week for ‘nudity or sexual content’. The mind boggles….
Just to say apologies to those who’ve been e-mailing me, but my e-mail account is on the blink and half the time won’t let me mail out, so it’s probably better to e-mail Mental rather than me.
I liked the case vignettes – not had any in a while. That’s my suggestion (I’m currently incapable of original thought) – bring back the case vignettes.
Differently
I’ve noted a couple of comments on the case vignettes – not sure if they were both you, diff-sane – which made me think about some more ideas on it.
As author of the recent case vignettes I’m happy to attempt some more – but am equally happy to not get all precious about it if someone else wants to present some.
If nothing else emerges in this next week – I’ll see if I can put something together.
Thanks for the positive feedback.
This is the only comment I’ve made about the case vignettes. I mustn’t be the only one who misses them.
Differently
I like the vignettes, I would have a go at writing some more but most of the stuff I come up with is pretty basic and I’m sure they’d bore the majority of readers
The “basic stuff” is what we learn most from, I suspect CD.
A bit of site news.
The welcome page http://www.mentalnurse.org/index.php/welcome/ is going to be updated to become an introduction to Mental Nurse and a list of the best posts throughout Mental Nurse’s history. As well as anything else people may think in useful. There is a lot of content on the site it would be nice for people to be able to find the best bits easily.
Have just updated the Best Blogs link category to All TWIM Winners (apart from the self harm blog of course). Hopefully this will help drive more traffic to your sites.
Some of my plans for the site involve running more up to date software than my host allows. Am currently trying to find out if the hosting company can meet Mental Nurse’s needs or if we need to move. Will keep you updated.
ALPHA (unstable, liable to break your computer and kill kittens) forums are up and running at [FORUMS BEING MOVED TO NEW DOMAIN] login should be the same as your mental nurse account. You should be automatically logged in but that does not seem to be working.
Forums are being moved to a new domain (hopefully forum.mentalnurse.org). Might take some time to percolate through the system. Watch this thread for more exciting news.
Mental
Oh yes. Open for new user registrations again
Webmail also seems to be working better.
What I’ve learnt from Mental Nurse:
some people would welcome the prospect of a suddy, ex-army
mental nurse bearing down on them with a leer (thank’s
Mandy, for an image that’ll be with me for life)
I live in an area with an astonishingly low standard of
mental and social healthcare.
That watching highly educated clinical staff tearing each other to
pieces is extraordinarily entertaining.
That someone via the NHS N3 gateway 61 is following me all
over the blogosphere (they’ve been here too)
That I’m past caring and you won’t shut me up as easily as
Dr Scott Junior.
That it’s bloody hard posting a message here using a UNIX
Lynx text browser.
I love you Socrates. I am going to try it now. With links, w3m, amaya, fennec and every other obscure browser I can think of. You have given my life purpose.
Spooky. You have a stalker.
I won’t be content until I’ve reduced my computing machine down to a Babbage Difference engine run by a waterwheel (or an enslaved hippie).
Just tried the forum – seriously cool… (sorry, bit drunk, wrote all over it, like a lot of what I write, it’s not as fictional as I would wish, but I’m really not going to turn up on anyone’s doorstep)
I’m actually very drunk actually.
Going now before I make a fool of myself in a very not-mad manner…
Too late I’ve just had to kill the chat box
Will work on forum later in week. Thanks for the heads up Socrates.
My trust blocks mental nurse. Given that MH services for my area are all merged together in one big trust of their own; and thus the one I refer to is purely medical; I was initially amused as I imagined large numbers of my co-employees (there are 9000 of us) spending time on MN instead of working; which was their rationale for blocking ebay, facebook, flickr, myspace, youtube, bebo and the likes.
However, I soon discovered that anything ending in blogger.com, blogspot.com or wordpress.com was banned. I’m sure if I trawled the intranet I’d find a 17 page policy enlightening me as the reason for this. Interestingly, pro-ana and thinspo sites are banned (Yes I confess, I’ve tried to access them at work)
Hotmail was also banned for a time – with an on screen message telling us to go join nhs.net. Yet in a rare act of inconsistancy (cough cough) yahoo mail or gmail or anybody elses non nhs secure e-mail was fine.
Crazy Nurse, give your IT department a ring and tell them you use MN for work-related purposes, and can they unblock it?
We had to ring our IT dept a while back to ask them to unblock the ICD-10 website, because their software mistook the listing of sexual disorders to mean that it was a porn site.