Webmaster's Blog

[mickeyduck]

OK we just had a brief outage - only a few minutes from the looks but interesting all the same...

Nice to see my monitoring gizmo's working fine. Even if there's nothing I can do to rectify matters if things go pear-shaped...

=)

[mickeyduck]

OK - due to the WCN servers impending doom, I've today migrated the site and forum to servers in the US of A.

Upgraded the forum to phpBB3 in the process.

Got a few things to tidy up yet but at least the whole shooting-match ain't gonna disappear now with the WCN server...

Feedback anyone?

[MoNk]

Yay! Nice work
I'm guessing this means no more threads falling off the end of the world as well?

Avatars are off if you didn't notice. (on in my user control panel)
Not a big deal obviously :>

[mickeyduck]

Hmmm... according to the board's back office avatars are on. The path to the images is correct in the back office. And the actual images are there too so some other thing's gone got broken...

Having had a bit of a look into ti I think the safest thig would be for folk to simply re-upload their avatars.

Oh well... can't expect everything to go perfectly I guess.

The Garage has fallen off too of course as its developer didn't bother making it phpBB3 compatible but I'll figure out a suitable replacement yet...

And I've upped the "fall off the face of the Earth" of posts in the General section from 30 days to one year. This ONLY applies (as before) to topics in the General section (no other stuff auto-prunes) - so if not posted to in 365 days topics in the General section will auto-delete. I mean we need to stop this beastie dieing of bloat somehow, right...?

[Benckj]

Lookin good Charlie. I'm sure there will be a few teething problems but you have made some definite improvements. Starting to look and perform much like the overseas forums. Keep up the good work.

[warrenb]

looks good Charlie, but am finding it extremely difficult to see which threads or posts have new content. I know there are animated icons that show it, but being colour blind, this new forum has now become extremely difficult for me to browse.

[MoNk]

Not that this really solves the issue: But I use the "View new posts" button on the main forum page instead of viewing each topic section.

[MRtoo]

So that's why my email notifications are re-appearing again

[mickeyduck]

Ok - if anyone finds the new style just too hard to handle, I've enabled an alternative one which is a lot more like the previous iteration. Just go into your preferences and change the style and see what you think...

I've changed Warren's for him so it'll be interesting to see if he gets a bit of a fright or what...

[MoNk]

Yeah I think that is much nicer.

My issues with the other style are avatars on the wrong side, and the borders between individual posts wasn't as defined as I would like.

[warrenb]

thanks Charlie. That is much easier to read

[mickeyduck]

A wee update, 2 days in...

Having adjusted the Registration page, I no longer get about a hundred bogus bot-registrations a day, and now have a mechanism that makes it really easy to determine if it's a genuine human registering, even if some folk choose the most bizarre user names...!

Take a look here (NOT logged in) if you want to see what I mean:
http://www.mr2.org.nz/phpbb3/ucp.php?mode=register

One immediate side effect is I can now OK the new accounts of real people without them getting lost in the dross. Eg 3 new folk registered yesterday and 5 new folk registered today! I'm stoked. This is panning out...

I'm going to start a Motorsports section for things like track days - not necessarily club events, but to encourage folk who are into the sporting side of stuff to get together via the forum... and another section for anyone to post Events of General Interest. (NOT Club-sanctioned events... But simply a place to announce cool stuff folk might be into.)

Catchas.

[baldockboy]

Its' all looking really good Charlie (very impressed) and very smooth migration.

Now if I can only find a really good avatar..........

[Rabid]

Its' all looking really good Charlie (very impressed) and very smooth migration.

Now if I can only find a really good avatar..........

I thought that was a personal photo

Its looking and working great thanks Charlie

[mickeyduck]

Blimey Gary... You think his personal photo's bad, what about yours...???