Hey Hey We're Back On Line, Dont you just hate computers

Hi all,

Well, as you can see the forum is back on line. Thanks to Citroen-XM and his boss for pointing me in the right direction for the fix and to Chris Light who put up with my pestering the living daylights out of him.

For the IT literate the cause was a change of syntax from SQL 4 to 5. The eventual fix was entering a couple of brackets in two files.

Cheers

noz

Hi Noz, welcome back, we were getting a bit worried about you.

Peter

wow its like slipping on an old pair of slippers
Well done Noz!

D

That was some sleep you had there..

Good Stuff Noz,

I shall inform my Boss that YOU have suceeded.. Glad to have helped, and got this site up again.

Paul

.
Just when I'd almost given up hope on this one...........

Great news

Well done Noz......

and Paul......

and Chris

.

Bloody 'ell!...............Speechless!

Welcome back!

Well, this is great
But . . . My Controls does not work

Hi all,

Thanks for all your good wishes. Like Dean says, its like slipping on a pair of your favourite slippers.

Apologies for the 'My Controls' not working. We still have two corrupt tables in the SQL database. I've tried to repair multiple times but they will not repair. Please bear with me. To begin with I thought all problems were down to the same factor. It seems we have (had) multiple problems overlaid which made the diagnosis difficult.

since the forum software is very old we are investigating the migration to a new, free form of forum called SMF from these people http://www.simplemachines.org/
It looks like they have a conversion module from IPB v1.2 to SMF. Watch this space.

cheers

noz

FFS go with vbulletin....

The personal messages feature is sadly missed too.

Some of the guys out there "lost" when this site went AWOL could be pm'd
or better still, could an announcement email message be sent from this forum
by Noz to explain what's been going on? Some regulars have never been heard
from again and never found th 'backdoor' disabled original site or Ciarán's
alternate "co uk" version..

It would be a nice way to kick start this forum again if that's what people want?
I don't have a problem having more than one Xm specific forum, so long as they
all have an owner/administrator with a long term commitment to keep them
running - the car and owners/forum members deserve these fantastic forums and
the knowledge/experience and enthusiasm of their contributors.

A discussion about the future plans for this particular forum and some comment
from ChrisL could help steady the tiller, no?

Andrew

This post has been edited by Andmcit on April 17, 2010 11:23 am

Hi Andrew,

A mass email was the first thing I tried when the forum started working again. That's when I found out that the email or 'messages' system was not working. I can't do anything about it at the moment I'm afraid but I'm still trying.

As I said, please bear with me.

Cheers

noz

Lez,


FFFFFFFFFFFFFS, could you expand on that a little? It was a bit short on details. Is VBulletin something of which you have personal experience? Is there any particular version you'd recommend? How much does it cost? Any other decision-making factors?

cheers

noz

Hi Norrie.
Glad to hear from you once more, I was going to take a run up to see you but the faults with the car and then the weather held me back and I knew you were a busy man too.
When the site first went down I offered the services of a lady friend of mine from Denmark who taught these differant computer courses on the Internet hosting programs for years, she is retired now and aims to do it on a small scale from home, she offered to do the job free, would even have hosted it for a period on her computer till something else was sorted out. I put this to Chris and I am sure, to you too, her help is still available if required. Just ask.
PS Sorry about the email about Mr Gate's money, don't know how it happened and have had to reinstall Windows XP and delete my contacts list because of it, and Facebook too.
Bob.

Its good?

Most of the forums i spend a lot of time on use it, its one of the easier ones to set up and has nice little plugins and addons, themes etc.

I set a forum up with it, worked really well, dont have it now i could not afford to pay the hosting so it all vapourised but it was wonderfully reliable.

mp3car.com

digitalcar.co.uk

http://saabforum.org/saab-forum/cmps_index.php

http://www.volvoforums.org.uk/

Or another top10 is phpbb

as used on,,,

barryboys

the other site (co.uk)

http://www.deloreans.co.uk/forum/

clifton moor racing - please affix cap and turn backwards




I think phpbb sems to be a bit more flashy and seems to allow for swish graphcal content, but thats not to knock the others, and VB seems to have as large a user group etc

I used VB for what I did simply because it was free by some deal with the hosting company i was using, they had lots of addons for forums and blogs and video diarys etc, I will be using them again, soon as i get fluid in the cashflow department.


Problem with small users forums is cost, its ok if you can find some free hosting, then its ok, but being free usually means being limited in one way or another, and having to pay for hosting means the forum then has a debt to cover either via adds or subscriptions, it can take as much as 150quid a year for a forum due to bandwidth and storage, and most gather this from club sales of keyrings/caps/jackets etc, but if its a small group of tightwads, your down to the free bit again...