I've updated the forum software, and thanks to some very generous donations we now have the domain name that you see right up there in your address bar.
Old links and bookmarks to https://rrpub.gjcp.net will work exactly as they did before but will redirect to the new name. You don't have to do anything.
Report bugs by PM to me, or by email to gordonjcp@gmail.com if you can't log in.
Incidentally, I could do with some photos for the banner bit at the top. I'm going to have a dig through some of the posts and see if there are any photos I can nick a 168-pixel-high slice from, to use in the banner - well, if no-one minds. Obviously any identifying marks will be cropped out, and if you're not keen let me know and I'll leave your pics alone :-)
Is there a Defender sneaking in???
I think that's why he needs some more pictures, to push it out again.....
Some of the ones from Rutland Rover's post in the LRO show thread would be good if he doesn't have a problem with you using them.
Funny, on my phone the Def hasn't arrived yet...
Your phone has good taste, it's blocked it......
I'm happy for my photos to be used on the site.
What a fun day that was...
It spat all its coolant out from an unknown location, luckily just as I was parking up so no risk of it overheating and causing damage.
Sat for hours in a supermarket carpark, had the car towed from Coventry to the workshop in Peterborough, picked up from there by my girlfriend and on the way home a deer ran out in front of her car and demolished the front of that!
The AA sent a guy from the local Land Rover dealer, which was unexpected and nice to get a proper LR trained tech with experience of the model. IIRC, he thought it was the valley gasket.
Turned out to be the timing cover gasket. It had split on the top right corner where the water pump pumps in to the engine block.
It's been fine ever since :D
Can we wind up the "threads per page" count? Usually its adjustable by user but this software doesnt seem to allow it. A few of the subforums have a pile of stickies at the top, which means you only see 4 or 5 threads before it reaches the end of the page. Similarly when viewing a long thread, it splits to a new page after only 10 posts which seems somewhat short...
I set them all to 20, how's that for you? It's an admin-adjustable thing but I agree it could really do with being a per-user setting - I'll suggest that to the devs :-)
yeh thats better :)
Cheers
I'm thinking about sticking some analytics on the site, quite likely Piwik (Google is well down the list - I want control of the data, not some shady company). I'm seeing quite a lot of visits from not-signed-up folk and it would be interesting to see how they're getting on with it - as well as the regular users.
If there are significant objections then I won't, though. I know some people don't like "web tracking", but I figure since you've already signed up you're at least somewhat happy to hand over some info.
If I knew what you were talking about I might or might not have an objection. But as I've no clue, then it's your site so do what you think needs doing.
Go for it Gordon, we're being tracked everywhere else on the internet if you're just doing it to build the site then good on you.
Not a problem here.
Analytics are useful (if only for the sake of curiosity !) but it mainly all depends on how/if you intend to Commercialise your Site in the future (with Vendor Ads. and the like - and then you may need detailed Member/Visitor profiles etc)
(Not going to bore you with my objections to 'Cookies' either but suffice it to say that on the 'other' Site one time I registered/blocked 38 Third-Party Cookies.. and from their names I could see they were nearly all Marketing functions/organisations masquerading as 'Useful Data' Collectors..... so overall of more use to VS than to Members.. and "it's a slippery slope" !!)
Fuck commercialising it. If people are happy enough to chip in a few quid here and there to pay for the domain name and maybe even a bit of the hosting bill I'm happy enough. If the site becomes large and busy enough that it actually needs significant resources to run, I may need to work something out.
Getting some analytics on would let me see which pages are being hit a lot (and therefore, what could be optimised) and which pages aren't really being looked at (and maybe work out why), among other things. Right now things aren't too busy, but since updating the forum software (when the new banner appeared) the database has had about five times as many queries as it did before (just under five million, compared to about a million on the old version). Part of this is down to the forum software working a bit harder, but the site has definitely got busier :-)
Ouch ! My remarks were not meant as a criticism but just to point out why Web Sites normally deploy such "Analytical Tools".....
Often the best way to find out why some pages (but not others) get hit is just to ask Members etc... eg. via a 'Comments' thread ? I don't know but I suspect the site got busier because what you are doing is much closer to what John Brabyn did (ie. before VS etc blatant Commercialisation).
Similarly if you are collecting data on Visitors it always helps just to State what data you are collecting rather than the 'standard' messages
(eg. "Cookies are your friends"... & etc)
PS: How do we contribute ??
Got it Gordon, you answered my PM and no prob from here.
About getting more visitors, I imagine some P38 owner is a bit fed up with his poor mileage and googles 'Range Rover thirsty', no wonder Google comes up with RangeRovers.pub...
Tony.
PS: How do we contribute ??
Well, V8 Developments do these lovely engines, you know... :-D
When we bought the domain name a few of the regulars just sent money to my personal paypal address. Now I'm okay with that for a one-off quick fix type thing but if I was going to "officially" solicit donations for running the site I'd probably set one up specifically for it. Or, maybe Patreon or something similar, I don't know.
As for commercialising things, if we had enough users and enough traffic that I actually needed to throw money at hosting I'd probably be looking into selling merch. We're a long way off from that, but the more I think about it the more having some merch for sale sounds like a good idea :-)