What do you think about these forums?

[Andy R]

Hello everyone! I just wanted to find out what you all think about these forums? I developed them because I wanted a "best-of-breed" solution for the Airstream community. I am a newbie to Airstream having just aquired my 1961 Bambi.

The other forums I found lacked some key features like the ability to upload and link to images. If a picture is worth 1,000 words sure does save a lot of typing!

So what do you think? The more feedback the better!

Cheers,

Andy

[PeterH-350LE]

Andy,
Ok, I got it with the avatar, but I have to have 5 posts to be able to change it. Also I could not reply to the avatar thread, it said its closed.

[Andy R]

Sorry about the broken link! I moved your Avatar question to it's own thread. I have a feeling that in the future, more members will have questions about them and they would not be able to find them that easily under this thread because the title is What do you think about these forums?

A new thread for Avatars is now located here.

I have fixed the setting to allow custom Avatars with 0 posts! Enjoy!

Let me know if you have any other questions

[83Excella]

Andy,
My hats off to you, looks great and it looks like you covered all the Airstream bases, very thoughtfully done and laidout. Looking forward to participating.

John

[nvestysly]

I am new to this forum and relatively new to forums in general. It certainly looks like all the bases are covered here. I will check it out for a while and make some posts and see how it works out.

Thanks, Lucius

[Andy R]

Lucius,

Welcome to the forum. I don't know if you are familiar with List Servers, but they are very popular in the Airstream community online. There are advantages and disavantages to both. If a user is accessing the internet via a cell phone they would perfer to download all the messages and respond while offline.

The problem I found was that I would submit a post and then have to sift through every message's subject to see if mine had been answered. You never know when you decide to skip on reading a single message and murphy's law states that was the one that had your answer. With this forum, you can sit back and relax and if you choose, it will notify you via email when your post has been responded to!

There is a forum dedicated to teaching new members how to use features of this forum. "How-To... Forum"

If you have any other questions, feel free to post them!

[66TradeWind]

Hi Andy & all !

Like the format and ability to zero in on what you are looking for. I expect you will see a lot of participation in coming weeks. Thanks for your efforts.

[PeterH-350LE]

Andy,
the tremendous amount of work you put into this forum is starting to show. Good Job!
Combined with the vast knowledge and experience of the members, you are about to create an Airstream Library of new proportions.
Do you have secure back-up in place to guard this data?

[Andy R]

I have a cron job setup to dump the Database to a backup everynight. Each week the backups are burned to CD-ROM for off site (in case of fire at the datacenter) purposes.

I get security audits performed on our servers quarterly.

If disaster strikes (if the datacenter burns down), we can be back up in 2-4 hours. Worst case scenario we would lose 1 weeks worth of information.

There it is plain and simple. If the forums gain such critical mass, I can always mirror the database for up-to-the-second backups.

Cheers,

Andy
Resources for this site have been donated by Organic Hosting!

[Grunt1210]

Hey Andy,
Glad to see this new format for all of us Airstream buffs. We belong to the VAC and Airstream lists and receive the digests. How goes the work on your '61 Bambi? We have a '61 Bambi also, which is a work in progress. Actually the work stopped as we decided to prep the '64 Overlander for the first VAC caravan to Belize. All available time (and money) went towards that effort. But, I stray from the main thread. Congrats!
Gary and Sandi

[Charcigar]

I'm new to the whole Airstream scene and am delighted to have this type of format available.

I look forward to dropping by often!

Charlotte

[nvestysly]

Wow! How fast time flies! I just looked back and realized I (my wife and I actually) joined this forum back in 2002. I did not realize it at the time but this forum was relatively new at the time. The user interface was already well developed in those early days - now it's even better. Keep up the good work. This is definitely the place to find very useful information about any Airstream - any age, any model, any issue - it's all here!