Announcement Most liked posts in thread: Welcome to the New Motoring Alliance Site

Quick update regarding some of the work that has been going on in the background.

1) Photobucket issue - I've now gone through over 5,000 threads manually working on capturing the images that were lost via photobucket. I was able to re-capture about 80% of the images. The others are lost in the internet. I still have about 1000 post left to go through but we are getting "close". For the ones where we could not recover the images, the dead links are still there, but will be cleaned up over next few weeks so they do not show up in the thread. That said we were able to recover some great threads. For example, "The Phoenix - The GP Roadster Project". Here is the link: https://www.motoringalliance.com/threads/the-phoenix-the-gp-roadster-project.22081/

2) Classifieds - I continue to work on getting the classifieds updated to the new format. Right now, the "Cars for Sale" template is up. Again, would love your feedback. That said, this weekend I will be working on this some more. If you are not familiar with the updated look and funcationality you can see it here: https://www.motoringalliance.com/showcase/category/classifieds.13/

3) Site organization - Over the next few days you will see me working on the site organization. I find that some forums are 2 or 3 levels deep. I feel this is making it hard to find some information. MCS02 and I have been working on some updated layouts. It will continue with the same look and feel, but will also bring back some of the traditional top level sub forums. It will be a work in progress and your feedback is always appreciated. Please note, I will be doing this live so we do not have to take extensive downtime. Most of this effort will be done starting Friday night through Sunday. So if you see something change even while you are on the site, don't be surprised.

4) Site maintenance - I'm working on scheduling some downtime for site maintenance and some additional post migration data clean up. During this time I will be updating the site platform and running some scripts to clean up some of the crazy characters etc. The site will be offline during that time as we need the database to be stagnant so we don't hit corruption issues. I will schedule this and let everyone know the time. Most likely it will be late next week.

Again - I appreciate everyones feedback. Let me know if you see any issues or have any suggestions.

Thanks,

Josh

 

@old81 Thanks for the patience - I tend to start with... oh that won’t be that hard. Then somewhere along the way I go.. hmmm this is more than I thought.

 

@Nathan - thanks!

Oh and I forgot - Smilies. Yes, I will be adding smilies soon. I’m currently letting the platform “bake” a little before I add on smilies etc. Plus I’m trying to find a “thumbs up” one.

 

Quick Update (1/18/2018)

So, my wife says I always have rose colored glasses... and I kind of do. I have not been working on the garages and market, instead its more fixing some of the issues and trying to resolve some of the request and feedback you have provided (THANK YOU). Ultimately this is your site and the forum is an extremely important aspect. There is still some work to do on the forum and that is where I will be spending my nights until this weekend. Then I'm planning on working on the garage and market.

As always, the feedback is very welcome. As you find issues, please let me know!

Thanks,

Josh
(Below is the previous update)

 

Quick Update on Garages -
If you go to "Garages" you will see I'm working on some changes which ultimately will make it so you can refine it quickly (if you want to) and has mapping options. However at this point it does require some manual effort on your part. I'm working on doing some "normalization" of the old data, but if you go and "edit" your garage, you will see this start to populate quicker.

Lets start with "Mapping." This to me is a really cool feature. If you go and edit your garage, you will see a field for "Map Location" located near the bottom of the edit screen. It states you must use a "VALID" address to generate a map... you actually do not. Instead just put in a ZIP code or something near by. Once you do that, your garage will show up in the map. I think it will be very cool when this gets fully populated as you can then click on the "pin" and see the car. So far we have a few members who have already done this:


While you are there you will be asked to fill out some additional check boxes etc. What this will do is allow you and other members in the future the ability to "refine" your search. Do you only want to see a specific model in a specific color? You can do that. You have to be in the "Category" then you can refine to your hearts desires. Note, very few people have updated their garages so this will get better over time... or until I get everything ported into the new fields. Note if the field has "Legacy" by it, it will not show up in the "refine by" list..


I'm still working on the organization of this. For example you will see my new "ride" under Project cars. I think ultimately, I will end up moving that back into Garages.. still thinking through this.

 

Correct - you also have "Alerts" which you will see in the upper right hand corner next to the "flag" or next to the "Envelope"

 

Understood - there was a lot of change. I’m going to try and pull together a quick video which walks everyone through it. Steve, MCS02 and I didn’t initially plan on this much. But as we used prefix more and more it kind of happened over time. Essentially we tried to pull together general discussions etc (I.e. non technical) and technical into a seperate. By using the little colored “prefix” things/menu’s at the top you can quickly filter. This will get better over time. For the initial cutover they had to be kind of Generic.. as we move forward we can refine. That said, if you want to see anything on the forum that is has a prefix you can do that.

Let me know if you have any questions -