Announcement Welcome to the New Motoring Alliance Site

@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)

 

Thanks! Lots more to do... still shaking out the base. Hope I can be working on Garages (Showcase) etc. this weekend. No way it would have happened MCSO2 and Steve.

 

FYI - this evening and tonight you may see layouts change on the articles page while I work on formatting and fixing some of the open items..

 

OK - so, reverted some of the changes I made to articles.. was having some unexpected results. Have to do some research. Now working on "Garages"... that will be a multi-phase process. You will start to see some "Legacy" tags. Once I have the data normalized, it will then be moved into the new tags. After tonight if you go in and update/edit your "garage" you will see new buttons/selections which over time will allow you to quickly refine what garages you can see.

 

1/25/18 update
1) Over the last few days I’ve been MCS02 and I have been working on importing the library. If you go to “articles” and look on the left under categories you will see what’s there so far. There is still a lot of work to do... but it’s moving slowly.
2) The “New Post” button is in progress.
3) The old IMG and AME tags. There is some work there. Essentially that fox will provide a short outage as it will require running a script against the DB. Therefore the safest thing is to take a backup and turn it off for a few minutes while the script runs. I want to do this against the test site first. However the articles need to come over first. Plus if there is other maintenance to do against the DB I will do that at the same time. Having any sort of downtime should be very rare. But in this case it’s part of the ongoing clean up. Once I have a schedule on that I will let you know.
4) Garages - I’m working on that also. Most likely during that down time I will run a script to normalize the fields (Make, Model, year.. etc). Ideally it will also move that information into the new fields that will be sortable etc.

I’m heading out for a few days. MSC02 is going to continue with migrating the articles etc. I’ll be on and off in limited capacity I think.

That’s all for now -

 

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.

 

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