Content And The Lack Thereof At Sm.net

Dear SM.net Users,

And I use that term loosely since there is little for any of you to "use" here at SM.net.

Those of you who have registered and visited, I imagine, did so in the hope that the site would have and provide the type of content and experience that would make it a useful resource for the greater community of single molecule research scientists.

I spent considerable time and effort putting together a site that had many features that would allow it to serve as a place to exchange information, arrange meetings, advertise open positions, and exchange methods and software. The idea was to provide a virtual meeting space that would accelerate exchange of ideas and help accelerate the development of the single molecule field. Having a online community allows for information not present in formal publications to be disseminated. I still believe that there is a valuable role for such a website to play in this and any other field of research.

It is clear that this has not happened, and for that I am principally responsible.

The original site was completely destroyed by hackers shortly after launch. Key elements of the site that were not recoverable and the whole site needed to be redesigned from scratch because certain features of the original site contained the security holes that were exploited to vandalize and ultimately destroy the site.

The new version (SM mark II?) suffered a similar fate. Though the site was not destroyed, repeated vandalism required upgrading software to incompatible versions and elimination of the download functionality. To prevent further vandalism of SM III security measures were put in place that have successfully prevented vandalism. However these security measures made the site, in effect, a closed community without a community.

I write this letter to solicit suggestions as how to make this site more useful. Please reply to this posting with your suggestions for the most important features to be retained or implemented in a new and, I hope, useful SM.net (Mark IV?).

Volunteers to assist with administration of the site would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,

David Talaga

Downloads Section Has Returned.

We have now installed the downloads section. It appears that some other uninstalled features of the bulletin board software have also appeared, namely "gallery, blogs, live chat, live chat" Please bear with us while we track down any other unintended consequences of our recent software migration. If you find any bugs or errors please report them in the web site support forum.

Thanks,

-dst

Update To Site

As you may have noticed the site received a face lift recently. We were having significant problems with hackers vandalizing the site. It is my hope that this new software will be more secure. The down side is that it may take a bit of time before we can implement all the features of the old site.

It is my hope that the site will be stable and we can now flesh out the content.

Best Regards,

David Talaga

Update To The Downloads Section

We have now implemented a new downloads section. This new module allows us to have a "required citation" field (or any other field we like) to allow proper citing of any contributions our users might make. The new module also automatically creates a support topic in the forums to allow discussion of the submission. We can further customize the downloads section if neccessary in the future. Your comments are welcome.

Welcome

Welcome to SingleMolecule.net! This website exists to support the exchange of ideas in the international single molecule community.

Please explore the site, register and contribute!