Topic: FSC Biodiversity Forum - gone
Did you ever visit that bulletin board forum? Set up I think by Charles Roper at FSC as part of their Biolonks project. Not overwhelmingly busy (we've only 166 messages on mapping here) but a nice design and packed with useful tips about QGIS and Rich Burkmar's various toolkit for mapping, their Identikit and even some iRecord help topics.
The Biolinks project ended in December 2022 and Field Studies Council shut it down.
I still use it for reference so I made enquiries when I couldn't find it any more when looking for words of wisdom from Charles and Rich
FSC are in the process of finalising the transfer of Biolinks resources to their website, but a bulletin board doesn't lend itself to such a process I think.
Here's the message I have from the FSC team:
Thank you for getting back to me.
I don’t think I realised in your initial email that it was a forum run by BioLinks – whilst I’m unsure of the technicalities behind transferring this I assume as the project has now come to an end, there isn’t any scope to do this. The transferring of information over that I mentioned before was related to blogs posted by BioLinks.
It does sound like it was an invaluable resource, so I can only apologies that this has closed without little/no warning.
I’m not entirely sure what your options are from here, particularly as you seem much more knowledge in bulletin boards than I do. Is there scope for you to begin your own? You seem well versed in how to run them and certainly have the appropriate knowledge of Natural History to encourage usage. I appreciate you’ve probably already thought about this, but I’m happy to provide words of encouragement if that’s the only thing holding you back.
I don't think I have the time or quite the expertise to run it again. There are also surely some small costs.
Is anyone else interested in taking it on? I'm guessing from the reply that it could be handed over for someone else to run. Perhaps slightly repurposed to fulfil needs of NBN (this entire mapping section), NFBR, LRCs (they do a lot of QGIS mapping) or Recording Schemes (several more Dipterist RS are interested in QGIS)
Expressions of interest please, I can email you the FSC thread if you contact me
Darwyn