Here We Are...

[Bill Murray]

Hi all:

Just a couple of random thoughts.

Geoff may remember that he helped me investigate starting my own vBulletin forum a couple of years ago. It was to be a site devoted strictly to soft skins of the period 1935-1945.

What I learned from Geoff was that in no way was I going to set up my own forum. I can only admire him for having set this one up in the first place and then having to make a major upgrade to a version with a lot of new templates and choices.

For those of you who have never investigated the possibility, the choices go on for page after page and the language is very computer geeky. As I recall, there were few warning signs that if you "did this" it would "affect that".

And, if it goes gunny sack, as MLU sort of did last week, you have two choices. You can open a "ticket" and they will try to fix what may be a problem on their end. You are then left to do all the repairs to your own forum after they fixed the problem or, in this case, did a major upgrade to a new version.

Or, and this was the path I would have had to take, you pay them to do everything from A to Z and that is very expensive.

Geoff deserves one hell of a lot of credit for doing most of it himself.

Second observation.

This is a "photo rich" forum and thank goodness for that. But, photos take bandwidth and slow down the response times.

Personal opinion only, but I think the thumbnail option is probably better for all of us. It is in it's own way, as state of the art as getting all of the photos to show up in their original size, just more efficient.

I also like the feature that allows you to choose to load from your own data base or an img from another location on the first go.

Just some thoughts for today.
Bill