chradio
Member
Behind every feed is a volunteer feed provider*.
In this post I will be sharing what motivates and demotivates me as a feed provider and why my feed may remain gone.
From day 1 I have been pretty impressed with this concept of sharing scanner feeds and the dedicated community behind it. I have great respect for the community, but one of the policies needs to be changed as I will outline here.
I have been hosting the Chapel Hill, NC police feed for over a year now, but ran into a bit of trouble recently when my feed went down like this:
week 1 - down - out of town, unable to diagnose
week 2 - down - feed computer won't boot, put on todo list the non-trivial effort of recovering boot disk
week 3 - down - extremely bad case of the flu. priorities: survival, survival, living another day, work
I started recovering from flu right after week 3 and fixed the boot disk, but the feed had been deleted. I completely understand that that the admins need to be able to make feeds active and inactive as well as adjust the directory given to streaming apps, but that is no reason to delete and make me re-apply for the feed all over again. I deal with more than enough bureaucracy at work to not need it in some volunteer activity.
I opened a trouble ticket and requested the feed be deleted, but was told to re-apply. Pretty much a slap in the face for the well-meaning volunteer who has taxes and work to catch up on after being dead to the world for a week.
Now some folks might be motivated to keep a feed online to have a premium account. I am not one of those folks. I listen to the feed I produce and if I am listening to another feed it is merely because I have donated my scanner and am now unable to use my own scanner.
I will offer to put my feed back online if the admins care to recreate my feed (and, preferably, its archives). Otherwise, this feed will remain offline and I will merely continue as I am doing now and stream it to my own private streaming server or carry my scanner with me. The admins need to revisit their volunteer-demotivating and punitive reapply after 21 days policy. It may seem like some necessary toughness, but its not.
Sincerely
CHRadio
Providing post UNC/Duke basketball mayhem and other interesting events via police feed since 2012
* Some feeds may not be volunteer. I don't really know. But it doesn't change my point for those that are.
In this post I will be sharing what motivates and demotivates me as a feed provider and why my feed may remain gone.
From day 1 I have been pretty impressed with this concept of sharing scanner feeds and the dedicated community behind it. I have great respect for the community, but one of the policies needs to be changed as I will outline here.
I have been hosting the Chapel Hill, NC police feed for over a year now, but ran into a bit of trouble recently when my feed went down like this:
week 1 - down - out of town, unable to diagnose
week 2 - down - feed computer won't boot, put on todo list the non-trivial effort of recovering boot disk
week 3 - down - extremely bad case of the flu. priorities: survival, survival, living another day, work
I started recovering from flu right after week 3 and fixed the boot disk, but the feed had been deleted. I completely understand that that the admins need to be able to make feeds active and inactive as well as adjust the directory given to streaming apps, but that is no reason to delete and make me re-apply for the feed all over again. I deal with more than enough bureaucracy at work to not need it in some volunteer activity.
I opened a trouble ticket and requested the feed be deleted, but was told to re-apply. Pretty much a slap in the face for the well-meaning volunteer who has taxes and work to catch up on after being dead to the world for a week.
Now some folks might be motivated to keep a feed online to have a premium account. I am not one of those folks. I listen to the feed I produce and if I am listening to another feed it is merely because I have donated my scanner and am now unable to use my own scanner.
I will offer to put my feed back online if the admins care to recreate my feed (and, preferably, its archives). Otherwise, this feed will remain offline and I will merely continue as I am doing now and stream it to my own private streaming server or carry my scanner with me. The admins need to revisit their volunteer-demotivating and punitive reapply after 21 days policy. It may seem like some necessary toughness, but its not.
Sincerely
CHRadio
Providing post UNC/Duke basketball mayhem and other interesting events via police feed since 2012
* Some feeds may not be volunteer. I don't really know. But it doesn't change my point for those that are.
