Regular Donations

[620Z]

Well I for one have been getting extremely horny everytime I log onto the site recently. Not sure why. Well....... It might have something to do the the seemingly new adverting banners for Cougar life and I think another grab a granny site. Ha ha keep them coming Gav. Newly single my self I just wish they worked.  .
If we ever get real desperate we can pull some cash out of the Viczcar bank account.
Cheers
PS I to am a big fan of the sight although some of the main contributors have gone quiet. Swings & round abouts and life's changes for us all.

[gav240z]

I have suggested ways to help keep the costs of hosting the site down, rather than just wait for more donations to keep it running.

Hosting your pictures on a website and posting links here is a good one, rather than just attaching pictures but it seemed to go un-noticed.

Hi mate,
Actually it's not so much disk space that is the issue as it is processing power for the end server. i'm not sure if the forum software is just incredibly inefficient or if it's just how forums are, but I tried several things to bring processing consumption down a couple of years ago and it didn't work.

Also remotely hosted images is a good idea, although this in itself has issues such as:
 - Bandwidth exceeded for images
 - Hotlinking causes them to be blocked
 - The image is removed and then you get the missing images

I've been to many forums with threads that are a couple of years old have missing images (when I could have really used those images also!) so there is a flip side to this approach.

If I ever get time I plan to make some updates to the site and perhaps consolidate the site into the 1 software package this may help make it more manageable and feature rich along with giving more flexibility to others to help manage the site.

[gav240z]

chip in not working?

Try the refresh button could be a cached version of the homepage causing the old chip in widget to be displayed.

[gav240z]

Well I for one have been getting extremely horny everytime I log onto the site recently. Not sure why. Well....... It might have something to do the the seemingly new adverting banners for Cougar life and I think another grab a granny site. Ha ha keep them coming Gav. Newly single my self I just wish they worked.  .
If we ever get real desperate we can pull some cash out of the Viczcar bank account.
Cheers
PS I to am a big fan of the sight although some of the main contributors have gone quiet. Swings & round abouts and life's changes for us all.

If your getting that kind of advertising it might be because of the kind of websites you visit .

I get friggin car insurance banners lol... yet I don't need any more insurance.

Honestly many of the banner systems target advertising based on previous interests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6dTtcYBBFI

[gav240z]

As RB30X mentioned a way to reduce site costs it got me thinking about other alternatives to hosting and ways to make our online community easier to manage.

Google App engine allows you to leverage a hosting environment and run your software using the processing power and scalability of Google Data Center's etc..

So anyway I got a bit distracted while looking into this and came across this long post...

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html

I thought it was very interesting and it got me thinking about our own forum software and some of the assumptions these tools make and how they affect the way conversation flows online and how new members discover a site, sign up and become part of a community.

Anyway if you have some time give it a read, I would like to improve my programming skills this year and perhaps a project like converting Auszcar.com to a python based framework is what I need?

[dat2kman]

Do the large number of one postets, ie those that sign up just to tell us about one thing, or sell one thing, and never to be heard from again,, occupy site space, which may cause an overload of data stored?

Is there a way to purge the one post only sign ups out?

I got a pm couple days ago re the ARCRally Calder forum challenge, from a newbie sign up, that, lets face it, after that event is done and dusted, we will not hear from again.

BTW i looked at a forum banner advert a couple weeks back, and have now booked a holiday in Vanuatu, at end of March, see, it does work!

[gav240z]

Do the large number of one postets, ie those that sign up just to tell us about one thing, or sell one thing, and never to be heard from again,, occupy site space, which may cause an overload of data stored?

Is there a way to purge the one post only sign ups out?

I got a pm couple days ago re the ARCRally Calder forum challenge, from a newbie sign up, that, lets face it, after that event is done and dusted, we will not hear from again.

BTW i looked at a forum banner advert a couple weeks back, and have now booked a holiday in Vanuatu, at end of March, see, it does work!

No 1 time posters take up very little space. In fact their impact on site costs is negligible. It's almost non-existent. The forum itself is CPU intensive. The usage of the CPU is what forced us off shared hosting (Cheap Hosting) - not disk space.

That's why I'm looking at Google App Engine - it's free for the most part, but if you start using a lot of CPU resources you start to pay based on your usage, which is still very cheap compared with most web-hosting costs.

The problem is this requires porting to a new platform. I'm not a great programmer - I'm thinking it's something I need to improve on for a variety of reasons so a project is what I need.

The problem I see with this is porting might mean we loose some forum functionality, to be honest I know some people may not like this idea and have strong opinions about why they like things the way they are, but I think most forum software is difficult to use, bloated with unnecessary features and susceptible to things like forum spam, bots etc..

There are many advantages of going to your own custom built software, but it is a lot of work. So it's something I'm going to look into for the future.