http://www.buellforums.com/ I know Ryan is still working on the site (at least, I think that's who I remember talking to about it), but I came across this forum here that I believe it uses the same backbone that our forums do, except it's more advanced and pretty easy to use. The colors are even very tasty (white on black, with red accents). I especially like the little chat box, and the drop down search function. Just a thought.
Me like it too... also, I'm thinking maybe the layout should have some Subaru colors. Or is that too lame/ricey?
I could get used to that! The only thing I've never been a fan of all the advertisments going down the sides. I like the listing of the individual threads. +1 for the Subaru colors in the forum!
I think it's too busy, personally. We don't have a bunch of things that need to be listed and shown in a portal. And the less "Subaru" it looks the more people can use it at work. Although it would be nice to have a forum style sheet for people to use that makes the forums look boring and plain or even make them look like a Microsoft productivity program like Word or Outlook.
white text on black looks cool but sucks when you are actually, you know, trying to read it or something.
True, it does make it a bit easier to surf at work, and it is a bit busy. But at least some of the functionality would be cool, like the drop-down search function and chatbox. You gotta give them credit for at least that.
I don't give them credit for those because they are more than likely just downloadable code plugins. If you look around in the site bug reports, you'll see a few instances where we reach 25% CPU usage and have to sit and wait for the site to come back. The problem with shared CPU hosting is that if you have large search indexes, shout boxes, chat rooms and such, you start using more CPU time on the server. And the more resources being used by chat rooms and heavy search code, the less that can be used for the usual browsing and posting. That bloated forum portal will require a large amount of extra CPU time for the extra database fields that would be added and used, and the extra database calls the site pages would be making to display that info. And the cost of a dedicated database server from a reliable host isn't something you want to add to the bill. Trust me on that one.
Why fix it if it isn't broken? I like the way the forum is currently. Its easy to navigate whether on a computer or my blackberry. A chatbox and what not isn't something that is needed around here, and I've seen it get out of hand on some of the other forums I've been on. I could be wrong but I'm sure its hard to moderate as well.
Also this. The last thing we need is more stuff to modeate. Also We have an irc channel run by ryan if you want chat.
Well, it is a VERY out of date Vbulletin system and they paid $40 for the theme. If I wanted to pay $40 to get that theme, we could have it up and running in about 10 minutes. The big thing that I see is all the adds. The whole site is way to busy. And like Jason said, we are currently coming to a cross roads. We are almost at the point of out growing shared hosting. What that means, is when we take the next step to a private network, out hosting costs are going to go WAY up. And when I say way up, I mean probably double what we are currently paying, so from 20ish to 40ish a month. Ya, ya, ya, someone always knows someone that can host for cheap. Ask Jason how that works out some times (No offense :emo. We are currently getting millions of hits a month, we do not want to use some fly by night hosting. Everyone complains about everything now, can you imagine what would happen when the host goes down?? That would mean no more MNSubaru, no more places for everyone to complain. Wait, what, Hmmm....... As for the theme and look of the site. I have something in the works, I just need to get to it. If it gets to be 90 and humid like they say this week, I will be spending a bit more time inside. I have about 6-8 things that I want to get updated/installed this week. Russ
Yes, I had someone say they could "Host it for free, dude." The difference between your buddy with the linux box hidden at work and my 'friend' was that my contact owned an ISP and had servers at different colocation facilities. t3hw00t.com's database was complicated and huge, much like what I'm talking about here. We had a viciously code heavy portal with lots of calls to the database, our search index was huge and all encompassing...you could search for 'the' and get results, and there were numerous add-ins and such. Dreamhost would move us to different database servers, and we'd crush them. Finally, Dreamhost said "If you want, you can pay for the higher class Dedicated Hosting service, or, you can go find somewhere else to host. We'll give you some time." So, through a couple friends at PRISM ACCESS and Edgenet.net, we got hosted for free on our own box at the colocation in Utah. Things were going great for a long time, nearly a year. Then, out of nowhere, the site goes down, and we have ZERO tech support because the owner is notoriously hard to get ahold of. We are down for 2 days when someone finally gets him on the phone and has him restart the webserver. After this I decided to start backing up the site often. The backups were unfortunately, done on the webserver. Anyway, strike two happened a month or so ago. This time, the colocation, without any notice whatsoever (to us) sent the server equipment for t3hw00t back to the owner in Boston. We didnt' find out about any of this till t3hw00t had been down for nearly 5 days. We kept getting spatterings of info about it, saying that our server would be in the Boston colo soon and whatnot, I haven't heard a thing from the owner since the second week of downtime. By the 3rd week of downtime, I just crawled back to Dreamhost and started our forums over again. SO, we lost over 3 years of forum posts and now have to start completely from scratch. The person we got the hosting from was a very good friend of Aegis' and was believed to be trustworthy. So, if you are saying to yourself, "My friend wouldn't do that to me," ask yourself this...Is your data and your website something that you wont miss when it is completely lost due to a friend? And when you lose it all, is anyone going to take responsibility? At least with Dreamhost, if they lose all my data, I have my reciept that says I payed X amount of dollars in hosting fees and now they are failing to deliver. With the owner of PRISM Access, we have no recourse. It was free. Now if you visit t3hw00t.com, you'll notice that there are about 1500 posts instead of the 70,000 that were there before.
Another thing about sites that are that busy -- compare how long it took to load that site. I just counted almost 4 seconds from click to fully loaded.... And that's CACHED. MNSubaru.com -- 1.something - and most of that was Stooooooooo's picture. I'll agree that a darker-colored theme would be nice. Even better would be user-selectable themes.
The problem with multiple themes with vBulletin is that themes cost money usually. Unless you code them yourself, but I don't know how to do that on VB and I don't think any of us here has the time or the motivation to do it. But yes, it is one of my favorite features on t3hw00t, though I never got around to making one that looks like an office application.
Themes can be added. On my test site I have 3-4 different ones. The themes that usually look good, cost money, and you can get free themes. The one from the buell site cost something like $40. Russ
Thanks for updating me on what's been happening on the tech side. Completely agree with what you guys are saying and fully understand what you're trying to accomplish, and you guys are doing a kick-ass job. Hopefully, I at least gave the site-rejuvenation project a little shot in the arm with this thread at least. Can't wait to see how it changes.
NEED and WANT are TWO different things folks. yea it would be noce to "update" but dont knock it. thats just my 2cents.
I personally like the way the forum is set up, and it serves it's purpose. On some of the other forums I've visited they encourage people to post their MSN/AIM either in their profile or under their avatar to enable chatting if that's what's wanted.
t3hw00t has an IRC channel you can use, the information is in the OffTopic forum of MNSubaru. Alot of people idle in there during the day.
Again, refer to my post regarding server CPU time. We have an IRC chat room and a web interface if you don't have your own client.
