[2025-01-25] - Tinker Different Board Meeting Minutes

[Androda]

January 25 2025 Board Meeting​

Attendance:​

Kai Robinson, Colin (This Does Not Compute), Justin (jdmcs), Bruce (Branchus), Jacob (Androda), Jeff (trag)

Note that Kai and Bruce are no longer members of the Board, they attended to assist in knowledge transfer as stated in the Board Governance Policy under "Board Succession / Transitions to New Board".

Absent:​

Josh (Drake), Eric (eric)

Agenda:​

Item 1:​

Welcome trag to the Board, and discussion about Board Roles for trag / jdmcs

Notes:

• trag's board role is Public Relations Liaison
• jdmcs remains as Director of Policies and Guidelines
• We are missing a President, that role remains vacant

The official list of Board Members is:

• Josh (Drake) as Vice President
• Jacob (Androda) as Secretary
• Eric (eric) as Director of IT/Ops
• Justin (jdmcs) as Director of Policies and Guidelines
• Colin (This Does Not Compute) as Director of Admins/Mods
• Jeff (trag) as Public Relations Liaison

Item 2:​

Discussion around messaging in the case of member bans

Notes:

• There was some debate about whether a user should have their specific infractions listed with their username in a "banned list"
• It was decided not to handle bans in this way, as public statements of this kind are always controversial

Item 3:​

Discussion on forum funding

Notes:

• Presently the Tinker Different Forum is largely funded by the Board of Directors, with a few subscribers and one-off donations helping out
• Total operating costs are around $60 per month
• We would like to display Forum Badges for donators and fix up the styling of the donate buttons, but showing Badges will require software updates due to how the existing theme handles them (it doesn't)
• The "what's new" section doesn't show the ko-fi donation link
• The TD store link looks totally different than the ko-fi button

Action Items:

• @eric and @fogWraith to coordinate a maintenance window for updating the Forum Theme
  • Preserving custom CSS is a notable item here during the update
• Volunteers from the Board are requested to look at updating the button CSS for ko-fi and adding it to the "what's new" page

Item 4:​

Tinker Different Merch Store Changes

Notes:

• We are still looking for a better print-on-demand handler to replace the existing TD Store, as the existing store is fairly manual
• Branchus did some investigation here, and is going to try again

Action Items:

• @Branchus to try again on getting a new TD Merch Store set up (thanks for your help!)
• @Androda to remove the 2024 calendars from the TD store

Item 5:​

Resources Section makes text collaboration difficult

Notes:

• Our Resources section is wonderful for single-file upload handling, but lacks Wiki features for documentation
• Only the original creator of the resource can edit, it appears, without special configuration, but we would prefer community collaboration

Action Items:

• The Board will investigate Wiki plugins

Item 6:​

Forum Archives

Notes:

• Tinker Different's infrastructure has space available to host readonly archives from older dissolved forums
• These should be converted into a flat-file HTML format to avoid running insecure old forum software

Action Items:

• @trag will reach out about old forum archives