We are 400!

A great welcome to "irama pelangi", our 400th member! I haven't checked, but the rise from 350-400 has been one of the fastest increases the forum has had with the exception of the first 50

Thanks to everyone here for making it such a great forum. Without everyone's participation it would be worth nothing so it's all down to everyone here. Cheers! :beer:

Michael.

 

:beer:

Nice Job Micheal

 

yeah, top job!!:MILD:

 

There is something going on out there, pfm is also growing at its most rapid rate since being created. Its great to see both forums doing so well.

Are you planning to upgrade to vBulletin 2.3.3? I think I'll take the plunge with it this time (pfm is still on 2.3.0).

Tony.

 

Tony - I think the increased signup rate for ZG is largely due to the fact that all the threads are now indexed in Google. I know you were using the same "hack" to make the PFM threads googleable but it doesn't seem to be working terribly well:

Compare the results of the Google queries:

allinurl:www.zerogain.com
(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...=allinurl:www.zerogain.com&btnG=Google+Search)

allinurl:www.pinkfishmedia.net
(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...nurl:www.pinkfishmedia.net&btnG=Google+Search)

(in both cases expand the "More results from..." link).

In the case of PFM I get 28 results, in the case of ZG I get 3240

In addition, I think that ZG is picking up HFC deserters and has maybe reached a sort of "critical mass" where word of mouth and recommendations from existing members starts to have a noticable effect.

I'm not going to bother with the upgrade to 2.3.3 as the changes seem to be pretty trivial. Unless some major new functionality or bug fix appears in 2.3.x I'll leave it as it is now intil vB 3.0 is release which will be a major upgrade headache :cry:

Michael.

 

Yes, I obviously buggered up installing the vBspiderfriend thing. I think the problem is that I can't get the .htaccess file to show up once I upload it – I ftp the three files up, and only two show up. Is this some inherent crapness to do with Linux / Unix or whatever my web hosting uses? Do files without a name before the period vanish? Same thing happens if I rename it and upload it as x.htaccess and then rename again it to .htaccess – copies up fine then vanishes as soon as its renamed!

The rest of the vBspiderfriend seems to be working and can be seen at http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/archive/

Any ideas?

I suspect this is a large part of it, pfm picks up a good few Naim / Mana etc deserters. Both our forums share a large number of posters which is excellent. I expect pfm to crack the 1k user barrier sometime next week! Yikes... Still got a way to catch Naim up though, they have 5630 :O

I'm not even convinced I'll be going to v3 – it looks 'fussy' and seems to provide a wealth of distracting and seemingly useless features… It all depends on just how much you can turn off!

Tony.

 

If the .htaccess file wasn't there then the thing wouldn't work at all, even if you click on a link to it directly and it clearly does work so your .htaccess file must be there. What it does is to cause any requests for a page that doesn't exist (HTTP status code 404) to show a specific URL instead of the boggo "Page not found" one. In this case the URL is the vbSpiderFriend script that interprets the requested URL and shows the right page.

eg: http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/archive/5/2003/11/1
..is a non existent URL on your site yet you get a result (the thread listing of the first week in November).

What your problem is likely to be is that there appear to be no links to the archive "home" page anywhere so Google never gets to traverse the archive. If you look at the bottom of a ZG page you will see they all have the link to the archive next to the "Contact Us" and "ZeroGain" links.

I did that by editing the "footer" vB template so the middle bit reads:

PHP:

<p align="center">
  <normalfont><b>&lt; <a href="$contactuslink">Contact Us</a> - <a href="$homeurl">$hometitle</a> - <a href="http://www.zerogain.com/forum/archive/">Archive</a>
  <!-- - <a href="$privacyurl">Privacy Statement</a> --> &gt;</b></normalfont>
</p>


instead of:

PHP:

<p align="center">
  <normalfont><b>&lt; <a href="$contactuslink">Contact Us</a> - <a href="$homeurl">$hometitle</a>
  <!-- - <a href="$privacyurl">Privacy Statement</a> --> &gt;</b></normalfont>
</p>


I also added a link to the archive on the http://www.zerogain.com/ home page and then submitted the link to the forum and to the archive to the Google submit URL page (http://www.google.com/addurl.html).

Funny - I thought you might say that about v3

Michael.

 

Excellent, thanks very much for that info – I've just implemented it.

I am nothing but predictable I do plan to look very closely at V3 once there is a full and stable release product. A lot depends on its actual performance, i.e. can it be made to run smaller, faster and more efficiently than 2.3.x. If so I'd deploy a very minimal configuration. I don't know whether its just my connection but the V3 forums at vbulletin.com and vbulletin.org seem to run like a real dog compared to either pfm or ZeroGain on V2.3.x... not a good sign.

Tony.

 

See http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=88013

"The most obvious change with this version is the new style. The new templates were designed with the goals of streamlining the user interface, making for cleaner layout and easier navigation"

Certainly looks better than previous vB3 incarnations. I agree that it seems to be slow on sites that use it but they also have a much heavier load than either ZG or PFM and it is still pre-release software so there may still be some optimization. It would seem to me that the bottleneck for forum speed is database accesses. If these can be kept to a minimum then it can be really fast and this may not yet be fully optimized on vB3.

Michael.

 

Its better than previous V3 incarnations I've seen, but it still looks incredibly clumsy and cluttered to my eyes. For instance I hate having the username and avatar over the post rather than at the side – I find it really distracting. I also feel that the user is confronted with far more options than they are ever likely to need. IMHO vBulletin is in danger of going down the route of Microsoft Word, i.e. most users will only ever use about 10% of the functionality, the remaining 90% just keeps the programmers busy and ensures you need a much more powerful computer to run it on…

I get quite a few mails from pfm users who are baffled by the options available in vBulletin v2.3.0 (and that's just the ones I've left available!) – its easy to forget that members of a audio forum may not be computer experts or even have any interest in computing at all. I intend to make pfm as user friendly as I possibly can, and to be honest I don't think V3 is the way to go based on what I've seen so far. If it looks confusing to me with 15 years plus professional IT experience what the hell is it going to look like to someone who has just unpacked their first PC and just wants to know about phono stages or whatever?

Do you like what you have seen of V3 at all?

Tony.

 

TBH I haven't really looked at that much yet. One feature that strikes me as useful is the "Similar Threads" listing you get at the bottom of a thread. I haven't paid that much attention to the other new features.

I'll check it out more closely when it's released.

Michael.

 

Michael, maybe you should also consider giving away prizes to every additional 50th & 100th member thereon. Some other prize should be given to the most behaved, most postings, most controversial, etc.

This should spice up the forum more


regards