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posted on May 16th, 2003 at 10:41 AM
VW Spectacular Nambucca Magazine Articles Wanted
I've just been talking with Donna Pell who is organising the VW Spectacular in Valla in August.
She is preparing the Show Magazine and is on the look out for some interesting articles to insert into the mag. If anyone has any, and I'm aware
that an on-line mag was being setup on this forum, and would like to get them in print, then please email a copy of your article (and pictures) to donna@vwparts.com.au
Donna is looking for articles that have not been published in a magazine before, and that do not have copywright. Donna reserves editoral rights over
any of the content, and please limit your content to less than a page. Donna would also like to publish your articles on their website http://www.vwparts.com.au after the show.
Roll em in!
Steve
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posted on May 16th, 2003 at 01:17 PM
....on the Forum??
What about an article on the forum itself, from it's history of how it started, to where it is today? It's bringing alot of people together,
across multiple clubs and countries, all with one interest. Plus no doubt, will conjure up more business for the site, and more members too.
Squiz......
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posted on May 16th, 2003 at 01:27 PM
Forum article
Brad, Jim, Wes, vanderaj
Care to do an article on the forum?
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posted on May 16th, 2003 at 02:03 PM
I volunteer JIM
I reckon as the founding father Jim should do up an article for the good old forum.
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posted on May 16th, 2003 at 11:24 PM
Hi
I did one for the 2001 issue about various forums including this one, boy have we grown since then.
1302Steve
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posted on May 17th, 2003 at 07:58 AM
Didnt it start out with an E mail listing...
then progressed to the Web page that Jim ran
then what we have today from Brad ??
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posted on May 19th, 2003 at 05:08 PM
Yes fellas, write a detailed history of how things came to be with the site and how it has grown to where it is now.
I would like to do a chapter on it for the new edition of Knowing Australian VWs, which I'm working on at the moment...
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posted on May 19th, 2003 at 06:41 PM
Jeez.. Where do I begin. This is lengthy but I hope it is well worth a read, as it is the full history on the forum, and how it started.
In May 2001, I was surfing around the web and discovered a number of forums around the web. I ended up joining one of them in the UK, and was
instantly addicted, racking up 1000 posts in 5 or 6 weeks.
It struck me one night that they had something that we didn't have. They had clubs, VW's of course, the VW togetherness and commonality, but
something they had and we didn't was a way of talking to each other without waiting for shows or festivals. This was a fantastic idea, and whilst
there was heaps of forums, the idea was still in it's infancy. There had to be a way to fix this problem. I was in Uni at the time, so $$ was a
huge issue, so if it was going to cost something, there was no chance to start anything at all.. it was that bad.
In Mid June 2001, I looked into a forum at Ezyboard, simply by clicking on a link on my existing forum.. 10 minutes later, it was made! It was that
easy. Now I had one member.. me. So not much there.. I started emailing people.. But how would I get people's email addresses? I looked on sites
that had classifieds, such as the Indian Automotive site, the Club VeeDub Sydney site and so on.. After a few emails, members started coming.. slowly.
Brad, Wes, Spook and Dave Birchall were in the first 20 from memory.. You can imagine the hardest part was keeping the conversations going.
Essentially at times it felt like you were replying to yourself!
A few months later, and a few hundred emails(no exaggeration) we were into the triple figures, but the fee from the free forum space was starting to
take it's toll in the form of pop-up ads. Members were even to the stage of leaving, due to the ads driving them nuts.. understandably.
I had to raise funds to pay off the ads. I had to seek sponsorship, and out of the 30 or so businesses I sent an email to, I had ONE response.. Even
if it was just a query on price. And that was Mick Motors, so they have been a crucial part of this forum, and the way we can repay them is by
responding with at least giving them a go for your business.
So with a few hundred dollars in my pocket(cheap) I paid for the ads to go. I also had enough to get the ball rolling with stickers, and although the
price was more than reasonable and the profit margin small, the money started to be recuperated. Membership was gaining momentum, income coming in,
conversations getting longer and posts growing. The forum had nearly reached its primary objective; being a constructive communication tool. People in
Sydney could talk to people in Perth; People in Melbourne could talk to people in Brisbane, and all on a daily basis.
The fact that Ezyboard's fee ran on a 'hit ratio', that is, the more visitors per day/week/month, then the more we pay next time to
keep it afloat. When renewal came around, it was going to cost $300US odd to keep it going!! Brad, (who had brought in so many members, and organised
most of the sposorship deal, and was therefore made a fellow administrator) decided he could use the current system at a fraction of the cost, so the
'new' system was introduced. The old board/forum had near on 1000 members when it was shifted, but about 30% of those members weren't
active, simply because they had used the forum as an advertising tool to accompany their advertising on alternative VW sites aforemantioned. That was
fine by us, and the price we had to pay to at least get people onto the forum, after that it was up to them whether they stay or go.
When the change was made, Andrew was also made administrator because of his involvement with the changeover and simply because of his techincal and
computer nouse.. it's incredible. Many people have also been made moderators and so on because the three of us can't patrol everything and
this thing needs more than just our six eyes watching over it. These people have been delegates these duties for a reason. They are usually very good
at that particular interest or section they are caring for, so show some respect to these people as they worked hard to get where they are as far as
this forum goes.
That pretty much sums up where we are today, which takes care of the Secondary Objective of the forum as well, and that is that the forum, to a
certain degree, should be able to run itself and be a low maintenance operation.
Thanks you for your time and your contributions on this forum, and keep it up because if everyone reads, and no one writes, then there soon runs out
of things to read.. And as I have said from the day dot... POST ON!!
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posted on May 19th, 2003 at 08:36 PM
Jim
Before that most of us here in Sydney at least i know Col and Jay as well
from memory were on a E mail listing that i think Steve Moran MATRA started out not sure there but
it was called the au beetle list Jay was on it just ask her
and aussiebug as well
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posted on May 19th, 2003 at 10:53 PM
I didn't know a lot of that early history - thanks Jim! I think the
body count on ezboard was closer to 700 than a thousand, but that detail doesn't really matter - we had lots of members!
Anyway, the ezboard pop up ads were killing the post rate. People were leaving. I knew it aggravated me... a lot. I offered to help in the move, not
really thinking that I would end up being the administrator of the new board, as I have an insanely busy life. But we had to move and in the end,
there aren't too many people around with the sort of IT skills we needed at the time. Brad's pretty good, but I think I occasionally scare
him I think we now have a few geeky members who can help with the
technical side if push came to shove. So by default, I ended up being an administrator. Not a biggie - how hard could it be?
After a bit of a search, XMB was selected as it had an important ingredient - it's free.
Sometimes, free is not really free as it costs to look after a busy forum. I think we've exercised every single bug XMB ever has had.
The transition was a bit traumatic - no posts, no users, and no history were able to be exported. We needed to never lose all the posts and stuff
again - and with XMB, all our posts are in our own database, and if we needed to we could migrate to another compatible software, like phpBB or
vBulletin if we absolutely must do.
I spent a few days helping resetting people's post counts and getting their avatars just right. However, I made a mistake one night just after we
moved in, and I accidentallly reset the post counts. This forced me to go over 250 members in one sitting resetting the counts to be an accurate
reflection of the old and new accounts added together. This is harder than you think - ezboard was still pop-up nightmare, and members didn't
always retain their old names. Spook used to be Elspooko, for example. You sometimes had to be imaginative to find people
The post count stuff still causes grief - this forum software can't cope with so many members being post count adjusted. Some of you will notice
that it counts backwards sometimes
When we first moved, we moved to a hoster where it was cost a fair bit of money to do the sort of traffic we were doing back then. We cracked 3 GB /
month regularly, running out of bandwidth, and eventually Brad's wallet.
There was another "branding" problem as well - we used mickmotors.com.au as the forum's main URL, but we really needed to separate
AussieVeedubbers and Mick's site.
So basically, we had to move. Luckily, the transition gave us the ability to move to a cheaper place, and 'cos we owned all our posts, we were
able to move reasonably transparently. There were cookie problems for a few days after that. It was a tough week or two.
I packed everything up in a tarball, took a dump of the database, and ftp'd it to the new hoster and reloaded. Brad had found a Brisbane outpost
of a cheap hosting company. We moved and didn't lose a single post or a single status or a single avatar, and everything was cool to go again
after the cookies had been sorted out. Excellent result that one.
Right now, it on average takes me about 20-30 minutes a day helping people, resetting avatars, resetting passwords, fixing bugs (thankfully, most of
these have gone away), etc. I would imagine that's there a similar load on all of the moderators and Brad n Jim.
Since then, we've grown and grown and grown! We're now over a thousand members and cracking 8 GB a month in traffic. The XMB database is
over 140 MB in size alone. That's a lot of posts for a piece of software that's only been going for less than a year!
We're entering a new phase now with expanding the sponsorships. I let Brad and Jim do all the busines stuff as I lead a very busy life. I'm
glad we have the sponsors, and particularly Mick's seed capital as we simply wouldn't be here without them.
The ad management software is a bit raw, but it's the best free one out there. It allows us complete and utter freedom to do what we need to do,
and allows sponsors to see how their campaigns are going, which is excellent.
Sometime in the next thousand members or so, we may need to move to a dedicated server, and this will require a lot more money than we're giving
to the hoster now. Hopefully, we can make XMB more efficient so it doesn't get us noticed for a bit longer!
We've had a few battle royale's on both the old and new forum, but I think that's pretty much settled down now, thank goodness! It does
provide the spice of life, and I'm particularly proud of the sheer life that's on this board. So many active posters - we're far more
active per member than NewBeetle.org. They have 7000 members, but we have nearly half their daily post count with only 1000 odd members.
Keep posting people!
Andrew
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posted on May 20th, 2003 at 09:20 AM
....next....
So there is a lot of good information there. Who is going to pull it all together into the "official" piece on the forum? Perhaps someone
can pull it all together, and email it to all of those who have been involved in the setup and growth of the forum, get approval, and then pass onto
Donna as an official and approved piece. The last thing we'd want is someone doing their view, and getting other people's noises out of
joint because it wasn't quite correct.
Squiz.....
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posted on May 20th, 2003 at 11:52 AM
Its true what Dave said I kicked off the aubeetle email list on listbot.com back in March 1999. It was primarily an email list only for the Australian
VW community. We moved to yahoo groups and grew to about 70 in number. When Jim kicked off aussieveedubbers I promoted it and most members moved over
to the web forum. The traffic tailed off on aubeetle towards the end of 2001 as most people including myself perferred the web forum rather than
email.
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posted on May 21st, 2003 at 08:19 PM
I thought I did?
I could expand if ya want, but I was sending myself to sleep letalone the readers!
Matara, you're right. You were first, and had set up a nice database, but personally I prefered the forum version of internet communication,
hence setting it up how I did. I appreciate your promotion though Steve, and you too were in the first 20-30 members to frequent the original site.
For your efforts I thank you.
I think many would argue that this is the first of this sort of site in Australian VW circles, but there was many other smaller steps to get to this
version of forum. I know Indian Automotive tried running a forum as well, a few different message boards including Steve's Yahoo groups version,
and so fourth, but without being biast, I think this one has worked. Do you agree or.... ?
matara
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posted on May 21st, 2003 at 11:31 PM
OK I will merge Jims comments and Andrews follow up and merge them and simplify them a bit.
I had a thought, why dont we just ask the members to post their thoughts on the forum and limit it to 1 line. That way we can put 30 or so of them in
the mag!
We've got to get this to Donna by June 6th
What do you think?
Steve
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posted on May 22nd, 2003 at 06:43 PM
Sounds good to me.. Make it a sticky post and leave it up the top.
posted on May 16th, 2003 at 10:41 AM
I think the
body count on ezboard was closer to 700 than a thousand, but that detail doesn't really matter - we had lots of members! 
posted on May 20th, 2003 at 02:03 PM