JohnCh

I don't know, we might target that as the first post after the migration completes to give people a reason to keep checking back :jester: -John

Unfortunately, you can't embed Vimeo here. Good news is that the new forum coming in a couple of weeks allows you to easily embed video from all the popular platforms. -John

We have a new plan and timeline. We are moving the current vBulletin forum to the new hoster this Sunday around 10am ET/7am PT. We did work earlier this week to prep the DNS servers to point to the new location. In theory, this work means the forum could be offline for as little as 1-2 hours, but despite those efforts, it could take up to 24 hours for the changes to fully replicate throughout the Internet. Bottom line, even if everything goes smoothly with the actual migration, we still could be offline until Monday morning, so don't start panicking until mid day Monday and check the Twitter account for an update. -John

Embedding the videos from the above post since the hyperlinks aren't working correctly. -John

We’re not selfless, we’re doing this for us too. I want a better, modern forum, integration with social media, and to grow a vibrant community of likeminded individuals who think a se7en is an eminently sensible vehicle. This site should be the locus in North America for those who own or who are considering owning a se7en. Whether new or used. Whether a Westfield, Birkin, Stalker, WCM, Caterham, or any other car true to the Lotus 7 ethos. I want see track days, tours, local get togethers, and for us to collectively corrupt those who have been hesitant to take the plunge. But first I want the better forum and functional spammer control John

We ran into some issues this week when attempting to move a test copy of the current forum to the new hoster. Good news is that they’re sorted and so far the test copy is working correctly. This gives confidence that when we do the first migration hop, things should continue to work as they do now until we make the move from vBulletin to Invision. So functional, but a little buggy 😉. However, we will want to push out the dates again by a few days to finish testing. There is also a chance that the temporary outages described in post #1 may happen during the day rather than overnight. We have a great support person who is incredibly responsive and on top of things. I’d prefer to perform both migrations during his working hours in case there is a problem. I’ll update this thread tomorrow with the new dates and times. -John

Where in Eastern WA are you located? Thanks, John

Greg, 425 Motorsports in Kirkland is a good place to shop for helmets on the Eastside. They tend to have a lot in stock to try on, and they do sell Arai. -John

I's amazing how far behind you can get after 4 days with no power and poor cell coverage. Fingers are still crossed for this Thursday. I've set up a Twitter account (@usa7sclub) to communicate status should issues arise during either migration that take the forum offline longer than expected. Croc, you really shouldn't wear black when you visit. It encourages them to shed more. [ATTACH=CONFIG]18099[/ATTACH] -John

We've made the DNS changes and are giving them time to propagate, In the interim, we'll move a copy of the forum later this week to perform a test. Provided this step goes well, we'll move the existing vbulletin forum to the new hoster on Thursday, 1/28, and switch to the new forum on Thursday, 2/16. These dates are 1 week later than originally planned. I've updated the initial post accordingly. -John

Here's a photo of Alaskossie's luggage rack sans luggage. Edited to add a second photo taken from the other side with a little more detail. -John

Although the process has begun, we've had some delays due to travel and work schedules. I will provide an update to the dates above today or tomorrow, but I suspect that each migration phase noted above will slip by 1 week. -John

I've been a bit surprised by (critical of?) prices paid for some Caterhams on BaT, but I agree with Kitcat on this car. Given the work done, it was a bargain. Hopefully the new owner will join the forum. -John

E55, it might be worth looking at this thread on Elan.net that was started yesterday The person has the Mangoletsi on his Twin Cam and didn't want to remove material from the intake manifold, so came up with solution. Might work for you as well, or give you some inspiration for a different workaround. -John

Thanks Bruce, I'm familiar with your efforts with the manual. That doc is precisely the type of resource we are adding to the Downloads section. I'll send you a PM with my email address and you can send it to when you have time. Thanks, John

Thanks Graham, I’ll watch that when I can. I’m dealing with some connectivity issues at the moment that complicate making it through the video. Thanks, John

According to whotoo's profile page, he last visited the forum in 2014, so I wouldn't count on a response. Hopefully someone else with experience in this area will chime in. -John

I didn't realize this was fixed in a Caterham. Westfield welds pinch fittings to the rear of the frame for each leg of the tire carrier. Simply loosen the pinch bolt to slide the carrier out completely or to adjust for a specific tire width. As to Vlad's point, when I rebuilt my car, I didn't drill the holes in the rear tub for the carrier and don't carry a spare. There are a lot of good tire patch kits out there that include very small and light compressors or that use CO2 cartridges. Granted, there are some situations where this won't be enough, but it's served me well for many years and many tours. -John

We have galleries here, but vBulletin essentially hides them. The issue with promoting their use has been storage costs. However, this is less of an issue with the new hoster. The number of albums and total images will vary between registered users and Paid Club Members, but they will be enabled, and Invision doesn't make them hard to find, placing the link on the same navigation level as Downloads and Articles. I'm between martinis (hey, it's Friday) so thought I'd watch the video I mentioned above and throw together a quick home page that is essentially a portal for the community. It's far from perfect (did I mention the martinis?) but gives an idea of the kind of things we can do. -John

That's included in the platform. I haven't played with it yet, but it's supposed to be easy using area blocks. Each block can show different things: featured downloads, featured articles, featured photos, and latest threads. There is a video showing them putting one together in less than 5 minutes. -John

Thanks. The screenshot below shows an activity stream where the three most recent posts are: Text plus photo Photo only Gallery update As you can see the post with text and photo does preview the text but not the photo. Given thumbnails show up in the Gallery update, there is probably a way to achieve what you're requesting, but it might require custom dev. I have an email out to Invision asking about this. BTW there is an option to show an expanded view which previews the post (view below) or a condensed version that eliminates the post preview and shows smaller thumbnails for gallery updates. Again, this is user choice, so everyone will have flexibility to create the activity stream view they prefer. -John

I just realized I forgot to address your comment about content being available to visitors. Guests can view the content (although we may keep Downloads behind the registration wall). They can also reply to a post. However, when they click submit, they are asked to register, which they can quickly do with their Facebook credentials. -John

Thanks for the information. Addressing in order: Driving new content is a separate topic. By improving many facets of the forum and integration with social media (coming) we hope to grow the community and the daily content. I'm a member of many forums on various platforms and haven't seen the pictures included in the activity feed. I'll ask, but an example would help. The feed will show thumbnails of images added to a gallery, so it may be possible. The feed is also highly customizable by the individual user, so you can set it up to show what you want and ignore the rest. Landing Page - TBD for reasons you state @mentioning (tagging) is included Giphy is included. We can also set options by MPAA ratings. With this group, that may be a good idea. Pictures are now easy to add. You can simply copy & paste or drag and drop from device, or paste in URL from hosted image. Images resize and compress, so we will only have a limit on the total size in a single post. We can adjust this over time, but original thinking is 10-15MB per post. There are performance considerations here so we'll look for best practices. You didn't mention videos, but those auto embed when pasting in the url. Many platforms are supported including YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook. Platform works very well on a phone through a browser. Everything resizes properly and it's easy to add photos and post. There is also a mobile app, but that isn't available in the demo environment, so I can't comment on that. Thanks, John

I didn't see that there is a native Giphy plug in that is turned off by default in the Demo site. It's now on and works. Took about 60 seconds. What else do you want? -John

Invision allows you to paste the link to a gif in the editor and it will automatically embed it in the post -- no need to click a button and go through an upload menu, or manually type in HTML or BB tags. So if you find a gif you like when doing a search on Bing or Google, it's very easy to add it to your reply. We can consider adding a plug in that gives people pre-canned choices searchable within the native environment, but there a number of other things we are working on that will take priority. Once the new forum is live and people have a chance to use it, we'll create a dedicated thread for upgrades/improvements to capture the various ideas. -John