Jonni wrote:

There is without doubt and enormous amount of useful DIY information
both within the group and on the accompanying FAQ website but I for one
am great fan of being 'shown' how to do something as well as having it
explained.

Yup, that can be good.

Has the group ever considered or discussed the possibility of
introducing short video clips to cover some of the FAQ material?. I
think this would be an invaluable addition to what is already and
excellent source of information. In keeping with the community aspect,
anyone could contribute to site and most importantly everything would be
free!

I am all in favour of more graphical content - there are plenty of times
where a diagram or couple of photos can save plenty of words.

Video clips are also "nice", but I can see there will be several
problems that would need to be overcome:

They take a certain amount of effort, cost and time to produce. I can't
see many people setting about a major DIY task just so that they can
video it, i.e. things that are easy to produce in a commercial setting
with real money being spent, are not always easy or possibe to reproduce
for "nothing". So it will be a matter of people filming stuff they were
doing anyway, which can be quite a time consuming burden and hinderance
to getting the real job done. The most likely alternative would be a web
based "storyboard" with photos and descriptions - taking some photos as
a project progresses is easy enough to do - this is far simpler to
produce (and a number of regulars have done this over the years).

Hosting would be another issue. Video content would result in a massive
use of hosting bandwidth. This may be a problem that can't easily be
solved without spending real money. (for example my "static image" loft
conversion site generated some 180MB of traffic in its first 15 days,
however over a few months that has fallen to a reasonably constant 70 -
80MB / month and a few hundred visits / month. That is a fairly trivial
amount of traffic in real terms. However with that site there are no
large files to be downloaded - the entire site is under 1.5MB even if
you read *every* page. Adding 20MB of video content could easily result
in 40GB / month of traffic - not quite so easy to lose on the back of a
small comercial hosting package like ours.

Some examples of a short vid clip could be:
1) Adding extra sockets

Storyboard site or even a book can show this well enough I would suggest.

2) Mixing plaster correctly

Yup, could be worth having as video.

3) Installing down lighters

as per 1

One problem I foresee is that perhaps all videos may not be considered
as demonstrating 'best practice' - so a peer review\feedback system
could be introduced so that other could grade the accuracy of the info
in the video

Having decided that something is "not quite right" in a video, how do
you go about correcting it? Append a big block of notes or get the
poster to go rip it all down and start again ;-)

Looking for constructive debate on this - thoughts?.....

My starter for ten.

--
Cheers,

John.

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