A warm welcome to the VBD forum

[Idris]

Just to let everyone know that I'm here too and, as soon as I find my photograph (it's on one of the four computers I use!), my blue eyes and whiskers will be back.

[Cam]

This is an excellent forum format, I am a member of a number of different forums and have found this one to be the most friendly. I couldn't sign up with the old Lefora one even with Nick's able assistance. I am so looking forward to the information to be found here.

Cam

[misterpop]

Look at that.I go away for my holidays in The France and when I get back everything had gone tits up[Sorry Numi]


But your not getting rid of me that easily.............Blah blah rubarb rubarb.......

[gpwcollector]

Hi all, hope to see ever one here soon. This format is a lot more friendly, good luck Nick

[Moyboy]

Well done Nick - sense at last. At least on this site your content is your own and not pissed about by anyone else. Not sure how you can transfer your previous Lefora contents but maybe copy and paste or ask Brad as he is very familiar with this format.
The admin panel is fairly easy to understand and there is a helpful description on all the things here on the phpbb site.

Good luck and hopefully no more changes.

[Martin Avis]

Nick,

I think you have made the right decision, however hard that must have been. Lefora have simply screwed up.

Having said that there are a couple of things you should know. This phpBB platform is very good - I have used it for several forums in the past and still have two very small ones running. The only negative is that it can be prone to being hacked and/or spammed unless you take some preventative actions. There is a database of useful hacks and mods on the phpbb.com site that you may want to peruse.

On the problem of the new site not having access to the old one's data, I may have a partial solution.

When it was announced that Lefora was doing a major overhaul I took the liberty of writing a program that scraped every thread into csv files. I wasn't able to do all the forums, but did manage to do the following: 1-75 series, Boxes, Ebay, Large Scale, Majors and Accessories and Superfast. The Lounge was too big to copy.

So I have a record of every post in every thread up to 23rd June.

The drawback is that any pictures that had been posted using the upload method were not able to be copied because Lefora had turned them into an odd, uncopyable format. Where pictures were posted as links to other sites, the links should have been preserved.

I'm not sure how these files (there are thousands of them) can be restored to the new forum, but a decent programmer should be able to make it work. Right now I'm snowed under with work so can't offer to do it, but if you want to find a programmer I am very happy to make the files available.

At least 4 years of history MAY have been preserved in a way that we can all get to use again.

You have my phone number, so if you'd like to talk it all over, feel free to get in touch.

Martin

[nickjones]

Wow thats brill Martin, I'm sure we can do something with them, I'll be in touch........

[SMS88]

Thats wonderful news Martin, you have saved all the useful knowledge,the threads from the lounge were more fun than knowledge so are no loss but having back all the effort we put into the specialist forums makes its all worthwhile.I have seen this style of forum before,it seems to work as well as the platform MCCH used for most of its existence,one still used by Key for their forums yet madly dumped by lardy boy! Its unbelievable how dumb lefora are unless of course they are on the edge of bankruptcy and had no choice but to dumb everything down rather than vanish overnight as fotopic did. http://forum.keypublishing.com/forumdis ... c-Aviation

[mrmoko]

This one feels a lot better Nick .

[kerbside]

Welcome back Garry, ( mrmoko) I did get your PM, thank you.

George T.