Morning all,

Chris, if you see this, please respond!

I can't help but notice that we seem to be getting more & more site outages, I doubt it's for maintenance as you wouldn't normally do that in peak hours unless essential

Is anyone in direct contact with Chris? If so, is it a server problem, or individual "breakages" on the website or what?


I, for one, & I'm sure many more of you, really don't want to lose this site, it's such a useful resource for all things car related & many more things besides, I've had info on house electrics, plumbing & all sorts of DIY stuff & have given advice on all sorts of topics where I have knowledge

If there's anything any of us can do to assist with the site being kept going I'd be happy to get involved - I can't imagine the site generates a fortune, but would have thought, properly run, it would make a small income & provide that much needed resource?

Assuming no response from Chris, does anyone know anything?

Server Luke may be able to throw some light on it but he's not been on here for a month or so but may be kicking the backend into life?

http://www.locostbuilders.co.uk/members/_luke/

I've noticed the site out of action quite a bit recently. Like "russbost" I find it a fantastic resource not only for car related stuff, but many other subjects beside. The variety of memebers and therefore experience and knowledge is excellent.

I'd also be happy to get involved if I can in helping to keep it going (I'm not an IT or website expert by any means, but will do what I can).

ChrisW - if you see this and can tell us more ten please do.

Yes noticed quite a few outages over the last week or so.

As the guys have said, it's a really useful site, so I'd hate to loose it.

I retired from IT Servers 8 years ago, so I may be out of date, but any help I can give I am happy to.

I've contacted Chris via email each time this happens but had no response.

I've mentioned in the past that I'd consider taking on the hosting/operation of the site if he's got too much on, I have the back end set up for other sites and car forums I run, but I suspect Luke was brought in to do this in the background and they're just enjoying the hellish process that is porting over 2011 forum software and databases to 2021 kit. I took a brief look into it and it looked like it would need at least passing through an intermediate conversion stage, and that's assuming he's not made any major back end code mods to the forum software (which I suspect he has too, for improvements).

The last forum I took on like this was for my favourite tin-top, it took the best part of a week of evenings to do all the dry runs and conversions to ensure it didn't fall over and lose the old data.

This site is simply the best forum on all topics, not just our kit cars. It would be a real shame if it dies, from other responses there are obviously a few folk who have the capacity to keep it going, so I'd ask Chris, coyoteboy, and Mash etc to keep it alive somehow.

Keep us informed and let the rest of us know if there is anything we can do to help.

Godspeed gentlemen

Hi Guys,

As I posted in the last thread, I speak to Chris frequently, he is just a very busy man these days and when the site goes down he gets to it when he can. Rest assured that I look on here almost daily and let him know if there are any major issues.

Cheers

It actually makes me sad that this site is no longer as frequented as it was 10 years ago. I am a member of several facebook kit car groups and they are just horrid. Topics are none existent, searching for answers is impossible. It makes me mad when I see them busy.

This site got me into cars, helped me decide to buy a kit car and build it. The people on here helped me IVA it. I would hate to see it gone.

That's unfortunately the problem with Facebook. It destroys communities while pretending to help them.

The data is lost instantly.
No-one scrolls more than a page before asking the same question.
People want answers instantly with no effort.
Groups get spammed to death.
People get snarky and nasty.
There's no context for advice.

We started one for my other forum and the forum traffic went from thousands of hits per day to tens a week, and the facebook group is just a shell of thing with random folk selling spares. Same thing happened to pug306.net, it's dead and the facebook group is garbage.

@computid - I know you said that last time, and it's great that he keeps it up as best he can while busy, but I can't help thinking it's doing it a disservice to not keep it up to date, maintained and publicised.

This is an irrelevant post, but the traffic on this site, (and a site i have been on since pretty well the start,) is now minimal
There was 11 users signed on earlier, and this is a world wide site ? 11 ? thats pathetic

We used to get 50 min, and more like 200 signed in every day, and then theres the lurkers the forum page used to be like the football teleprinter!

Now take this further, another site i frequent, is a second class football club in South London, and im a life long supporter
in one day its had 23,000 hits, and in one day on one forum post had 360 replies

Maybe this site has seen its day, shame as its one of my go to pages every day

Also, to put the above in perspective

Since 2015 tonight, on my other site we had 65 Reponses to the Mars landing tonight, and thats from a football club !!

this site who are supposed to be mechanically minded ZERO

Most of the outages I have experienced seem to be from too many people trying to access the site at the same time - as I write this it says - There are currently 164 Guests and 7 Members browsing LocostBuilders - which says there are probably too many who seek to view the site who are not logged in as members and when the outages happen probably a greater number . hmmm - probably Covid boredom is really the problem

That's a relatively tiny number, and likely a lot of bots crawling it to index the pages.

I think the problems are more fundamental, but it's really not possible to be sure unless you're at the far end of the connection looking at the back end.

It's really not easy running a forum like this and keeping it running smoothly for everyone, but it's worth it when your users enjoy it and contribute so much as folk on here do.

As well as site outages I'd like to re-highlight the issues of being able to add images to the site.

Most of us like to illustrate what we've been up to or answer peoples questions with images showing what to do. If we can't upload images to this site and then show them in posts it makes the above very difficult. I know there are paid for hosting services, but that was always a real benefit of LCB to be able to add images for free.

I appreciate this may also be down out of date "forum software" and "server capacity". If so is a small forum membership charge appropriate to help fund updating the forum?

Don't shoot me down - I'm just putting an idea out there!

Fair comments from Nick, and i tried to add a photo only a few days ago, and gave up !
and the search facility is dreadful, but i presume this Forum is running on very old software, hence its clunky format,

My other site, that i mentioned, which has an incredible amount of traffic daily, is a Crystal Palace site, and yes i do support the Eagles, sorry !!

I was on there earlier, and you HAVE to sign in to view the forum, so that would discount any bots or spurious figures, it also has a counter for how many are viewing each segment, and just a rough count was 170 people at one time (0905)

This has been mentioned many times before, but perhaps there should be a limit of what can be viewed, on here, as a free site, and not signed in
but once joined, and paid a min of £5.00 you then have access to all of the site

If we can raise the money, perhaps this funding will bring the site more up to date

It would be a real shame if we lose it, as its one of many sites i frequent daily, and although my locost went nearly 18months ago, i still find some interesting stuff that can be discussed

steve

The thing is we're all problem solving without any point, if Chris doesn't have time to do this and doesn't have someone else on the team to help, sinking cash into it won't help, and this thread is likely to just frustrate and upset him more - I'm sure he doesn't want the site to fall over.

From experience, charging for site access cripples a sites membership (even when that includes other benefits like discounts on events) and that's probably why Chris has logically made it donation based and has adverts up. A decent site can self-support it's back end costs (minus staff) by small adverts (not google ads) no problem at all. It's the time and effort required by the owner that is expensive in terms of personal life and balance against paying work. In any case, you also need to ensure the back catalogue of posts and images are maintained, and the further you get from current software, the more of a gulf that becomes.

It's all a bit of a pickle, I hope it gets resolved soon before it's too late.

Just as a comparison, and i cant see how many are viewing the site right now, but on my other site (CP) its varying fro 440 -540 ish a miniute

Guys is the search down also

quote:

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Originally posted by Johneturbo
Guys is the search down also

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quote:

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Originally posted by coyoteboy
That's unfortunately the problem with Facebook. It destroys communities while pretending to help them.

The data is lost instantly.
No-one scrolls more than a page before asking the same question.
People want answers instantly with no effort.
Groups get spammed to death.
People get snarky and nasty.
There's no context for advice.

We started one for my other forum and the forum traffic went from thousands of hits per day to tens a week, and the facebook group is just a shell of thing with random folk selling spares. Same thing happened to pug306.net, it's dead and the facebook group is garbage.

@computid - I know you said that last time, and it's great that he keeps it up as best he can while busy, but I can't help thinking it's doing it a disservice to not keep it up to date, maintained and publicised.

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