Folks,

This website is designed, and chartered to be a community service for this community of riders. With that in mind, we are constantly looking for ways to upgrade the clinic and make it a better place to be for everyone.

We are contemplating making the following changes, and would really like to get just as much feedback as we can on each topic. Please reply in this thread with your approval/disapproval/comments.

Advertising: In an effort to get the clinic inline financially, we have added some small advertising to the bottom of the clinic. It is too early to know if this will truly benefit the clinic, but we have high hopes that it will. It removes the burden of financially supporting the clinic from the current staff, to advertisers who want your business. We are also looking at adding some advertising to other locations, with an eye toward not interrupting the normal reading flow of our articles and content.

Picture Gallery: Our current Picture Gallery is pretty basic, and we really want to have something where folks can put up pictures of their bikes, as well as some technically oriented galleries. We think this could be a very usefull feature for the clinic that would allow readers to peruse through pictures of what other folks have done.

New Forum: This forum has been adequate so far, but we are starting to outgrow its usefullnes and feature capabilities. We are looking at adding either V-Bulletin, or Simple Machines Forum. With either, we will pick up a great personal messaging system and both have better methods for finding recent posts. We are currently leaning towards Simple Machines due to the fact that it is free for us to use.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all of these subjects. Speak now, or forever hold your peace

GRAM

Hi Gram,
I'll try to do this in order.
Advertising: I figure you need to do this. Why should the continued upkeep and hosting cost come out of your pocket. Maybe even some adsense would work.
Picture Gallery: There are some very good open source photo galleries out there that allow members to create accounts and upload photos to them. I think you would want to get some revenue in from advertising first to cover any additional bandwidth costs that may come up, or charge a small fee to cover the costs. I use yappa-ng myself and have been happy with it so far http://www.thommeyer.net/gallery/ is the link to my gallery. I have it set so I am the only one who can upload photos and create accounts but I believe it can be set so users can create their own accounts. Another good one is coppermine http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/
New Forum: I have used both v-bulletin and simple machine in the past and they are both good forum scripts, the question I have as I don't remember off hand is are they compatable with mambo or are you planning to scrape mambo and go with something different.
I think you have done a good job with this website so far and am sure you will continue to do so. If you decide to make your changes and would like some volenteer help give me a yell, I know your computer skills probably out wieght mine but I would be happy to give any type of asistance you need.

Thanks for the feedback Thom. We already have a copy of coppermine running, just need to finish the integration. We wrote our own set of authentication and management scripts for the clinic, just need to finish integrating it with them. We have been using the auth scripts for some time now. They allow us to integrate different scripts without forcing any to conform to another. A good example is the integration with our classified section.

The coppermine is at http://roadstarclinic.com/galleries/.

Our scripts manage the mambo too, although I suspect that will soon be Joomla as it is time for an upgrade and Joomla seems to be leading the pack between those two.

As to V-bulletin and SMF compatibility, there are integration scripts available, but they always require some form of hack we would rather not use, so again, we will end up integrating with our own management scripts. SMF is a little faster, but does not track who a post is made to. Every post is added the previous for any particular thread, although it does support "quoting" from a previous post.

Joomla has really put SMF through the test, and they seem to be holding up really well.

We can ALWAYS use more help Thom, in particular technical help. Do you have PHP coding experience, or much experience configuring Apache or MySQL? We also have a tremendous need for help cleaning up article submissions to be properly displayed on the clinic. This usually involves removing any WP formatting and inclusion of our particular CSS properties. Right now I am sitting on articles that need cleaning simply because I cannot get to them.

We also have an old copy of adsense that I would like to update. All I did was install it, it was never used or properly configured.

Our goal this next year will be creating enough revenue to get off of this shared hosting plan and on to a dedicated server.

If you would be interested in assisting us, send me a PM and lets discuss it furthur.

GRAM<br><br>Post edited by: GRAM, at: 2005/11/27 17:55

boy you guys quickly out distanced me on your web site / message board knowledge but I can weigh in on the advertisement thing.... I think in today’s day and age having banners is a necessary evil... no one here expects you to have to pay to keep this web site up... you give us your time which we are super grateful for... I will honestly say that I won't join a site that charges me money, but I am willing to fish through advertisements... heck, look at what delphi makes you go through, at least the advertisements here are bike related... you could double the banners and it would not make a difference to me... and I do try to use your links when I purchase from a web retailer... perhaps you could add the scripting to the links in the links section so that you can get the referral credit... (or you may have and I didn't know it).. thanks ~D

What davehrn said.

Thanks for the feedback Dave.

We are real sensitive about the advertising. I'm with you on getting ads for computers, software, or whatever non-bike related when I am on a bike site. Just doesn't make a lot of sense.

GRAM

Thanks ekonkjack

GRAM

Steve . . .

I have no problem with advertising. Like others have stated, you shouldn't be footing the bill.

As far as upgrading the forum and gallery is concerned, you should make sure you have the (advertising) revenue first and then migrate to what makes financial sense.

. . . Greg

I am the Senior Admin on one of the largest and most successful watch forums on the internet. We average near 900 posts per day and 382,000 hits per month. About a year and a half ago we started using advertising as the costs of maintain the venture were clearly over and above what the owner had envisioned. We do not allow pop ups or other junk type ads and the content is limited to watches and watch accesories like bracelets, straps, tools, etc.

You can check HERE to see what I mean. If you click on a post you will see the advertising at the top of the page. The ads on the Main page cost FAR more as they are far more prominent.

As far as software goes, I have used it all...I prefer webbbs but that is old school It allows for more of a chat room atmosphere but is not feature intense! WOWbbs and ProBoards seem okay too...

Good luck...we did a server and software migration about 2.5 years ago now and after the bugs got worked out we really took off

Regards, Ted

You REALLY don't want to see me dance

But then, I don't either

Good to see you Greg. Sounds like your going to have a challenge with that speedo cluster. Let me know if I can help. Got my ohm Meter and ready to go.

GRAM