Is this forum still of use?

[TerryG]

Hello one and all.
Having been absent for quite a long time i had not noticed that this forum appears to have fallen out of use.
At time of posting (12th March 2023) there has been no activity for a year.
If anyone still finds this site useful please post a response.

[Luxobarge]

Hi Terry, welcome back mate!

Ages ago (I think June 23rd 2022) the forum suddenly became inaccessible, just got an error message. You now appear to have woken it up again, so thanks very much for that.

Personally I still like the forum, although I do recognise that before it went off air it activity on here was pretty low. I suspect it'll be lower still now because the few users we had will have drifted off during the "down" period. Ultimately I guess it's your call, but personally I'd like to see it survive.

Thanks again for sorting it out.

Cheers

[suffolkpete]

Thanks for waking it up again Terry. I've missed it, but I don't think we two surviving admins knew how to resurrect it. Is there any way we can drum up some support, by Facebook for example?

[Luxobarge]

Good shout Pete.

Also, maybe there's a way to send a global e-mail advising folk that we're back on the air? No idea how to do it though....

[suffolkpete]

Somebody knows we're back on air, I've just had to disapprove two spam posts.

[Atodini]

Good to see it back - Welcome

I had been pondering on what had happened as all I ever got was an error 500 message - which I knew wasn't something I could do anything about, as a mere user...

I just kept the link on my taskbar and checked about once a month to see if it had been repaired!!

Wonder how many other "bunnies" will return now!!!

Not much has changed here, except we've had to replace our family modern with an automatic as the wife's osteo-arthritis has got a lot worse. Family car has been her choice for years - the last 3 have all been "Partlingos" (i.e. "57" Peugeot Partner (1400 petrol) / "09" Citroen Berlingo (1600 twin ohc petrol, written off after being heavily rear-ended on the M1) / "60" Peugeot Partner (twin ohc, vvt petrol. (I often wondered what whoever decided it would be good to put a 130bhp ("BMW") engine in these was smoking!!! Seriously overpowered for the chassis, but she loved it).

Now we have a 21 reg Honda jazz Crosstar EX. Hybrid so good on fuel and smaller so easier for her to park. We wanted to buy new as we reasoned that it would probably be our last ever car (both in our '70's and both with health issues) but this was not to be as the lead times were far too long - had we ordered new we still would be waiting for one. Still cost us over 3 times what we paid for our first house (in 1975) though.... Actually quite a nice little car and nearly as good on petrol as my Kitten. I personally find some of the "safety" bits more than a little intrusive though - especially the lane-keeping bit that keeps trying to wrench the steering wheel out of the drivers' hands if it detects you crossing a white line (unless you're signalling at the time)......

John

[TerryG]

Hi all,
Slightly long (and boring) story but suffice to say that an update by the hosting provider borked the site. It has reminded me why i don't normally have automatic updates enabled for any critical systems.
I've been away from cars for a while as excessive rust and losing every weekend for too long rained on my enthusiasm.
Anyway, it doesn't cost me anything to leave it live so if there are a couple of people enjoying it, i'll leave it online.
I may update phpbb as it's quite an old version.
If the admins are agreeable i can grab the registered users email address list and BCC out a message apologising for the outage and telling everyone the site is back online.

[suffolkpete]

I think it would be very useful if you could email the registered users. Do you have the means to send out an email that large? A minor point - I had bookmarked the site but my bookmark didn't work until I had inserted a hyphen between Practically and Classics. Will this affect others or is it just me?

[Luxobarge]

Hi Terry, firstly very grateful for you resurrecting the site, appreciated!

As per above, I think it would be great if you could e-mail the user list, if we don't get some interest back then, perhaps it's time to call it a day but if we start getting people chatting about stuff again then it will be worth it.

However, before you do this suggest you delete all "inactive" users - they are ALL spammers. I regularly do this by "pruning users", if you look at the members list (click on the link at the bottom of the index page) and sort by most recently joined you'll see them. We get about 20-30 per day so worth keeping on top of. Also important to delete them, not just disable or disallow them. They all have e-mail addresses, so we don't want to be e-mailing them to let them know we're up and running eh? Having said that, they are all generated by bots, I doubt if there are any real people involved, the majority seem to originate in Russia.

Many thanks again - top man.

By the way, I know how you feel about the enthusiasm being beaten down by constant battles with rust, I'm getting too old for that malarkey too.

[gazza82]

Glad you are back! Enjoy many of the posts on this forum.

You may need to give users the heads-up it's back as I doubt many like me just tried the URL every few weeks .. just in case!

Having said that, they are all generated by bots, I doubt if there are any real people involved, the majority seem to originate in Russia.

Banning the IP addresses or a range helps!

I've also added the stopforumspam add-on to phpBB to a Classic Car Club forum I administer!