I'll think of more later I'm sure, but for the moment - Color, text & layout choices that would increase contrast and readability. Stuff like light-gray on the white background for links in forum posts; they're visible, but just barely. All this small-ish thin-line white-font-on-light-blue is also difficult to read due to the thin lines and lack of contrast. 20 & 30-something site developers with, for instance, 20/10 vision, may not be sympathetic to or even aware of what might work better for those who require reading glasses, etc. The site design should give a nod to the considerations of users across all age ranges. Things nested several layers deep make access & navigation needlessly complicated. I'd rather have more on a page, than to have to keep clicking, digging, and looking. Seems easier to do a little scrolling than deciphering more page loads. There is a balance to strike there, obviously everything can't be on one page either. What happened to our history video? Or is it just not showing for me? The site has improved since it was introduced, but, a number of things could be better. I hope it has solved some of the problems the national office & staff were having, whatever they were. I certainly hope a site re-do doesn't mean, yet again, another re-nuking of the forums & starting from scratch, again. Nothing has been more destructive to the building & continuation of a 'CCA online community & message forum participation than the repeated wholesale wipeouts of the message forums. I wonder if there's any chance of the restoration of the first two message boards, even if only archival, we had prior to this, & the last one that took so much effort to preserve. Will it be the same forum/board software, or something different again?
The forum will remain and eventually be updated giving the forum some additional features. The first two message boards were all imported into the current version. The CMS will remain the same. It's the menu and look that will change.
Yes? My memory gets fuzzy on details 6 years ago - The earliest post I have showing on these boards is Mar. 2, 2008 - my recollection is at that time, the club was on it's second iteration of message forums. I _think_ I recall that the first message forums (which appeared what... not quite 10 years ago?) weren't around all that long before a website re-design nuked 'em? That re-design being around the mid-2000's? I remember Bill Howard was involved with a website re-design (or 2?), and at one point, if I remember correctly, the _2nd_ message forums were saved and archived, and made access-only. In early 2008, the old forum posts from that 2nd iteration of forums (if I'm recalling correctly) were still accessible, I had posts here linking to posts there, the site was something like http://old.bmwcca.org/node/11070. Examples, the old forum links I was referencing are in these posts - https://www.bmwcca.org/forum/index.php?threads/valentine-one-radar-detector.1401/#post-8494 https://www.bmwcca.org/forum/index.php?threads/1995-e34-radio-wiring-diagram.552/#post-2830 I could certainly see a difficulty of continuity issues, etc. there, but as I recall understanding it, once that "old.bmwwcca.org" site &/or those pre-'08 message boards were taken offline, they were gone, or, at least, certainly no longer to be found via the internet, even if they're still extant someplace. Are you saying you went back to very beginning and imported those first two forums? They would have had posts prior to Mar. 2008, yes? I thought you had preserved the forum prior to this one, which was from I'm guessing early '08 to this site's introduction a couple years ago, but not anything earlier.
The initial forum was vBulletin. Then we used the Drupal forum/comment blog. I copied every drupal post and manually added it to the old vBulletin forum coping the timestamps as best as I could so there would be some kind of continuity. Then imported it all into this current forum. Were there posts prior to 2008? Using archive.org I don't see any mention of a forum in 2007. In 2008 I see a log in page. I don't see the video displayed either. May have something to do when the server was moved. I'll let someone know.
I poked around archive.org too - yes, we had forums for, I think, at least a couple of years before early '08. Found this on archive, it's Bill Howard's announcement of the at-that-time new website, and new/expanded forums, which I referenced via link in some posts in '08. "BMWCCA.ORG 2.0 LAUNCHES Bill Howard, BMW CCA Feb. 21, 2008 BMWCCA.org 2.0 is live. The revamped BMW Car Club of America website adds more content, more forums, and a gallery for photos. Other than the News section created by BMWCCA.org writers and photographs, responsibility for the vibrancy and popularity of the site belongs to BMW CCA’s 75,000 members who contribute material. Here’s a quick guide to the site." https://web.archive.org/web/20080621050510/http://old.bmwcca.org/ Looks like there's a outline of the old forums in early '08, looks like it had something more than 4k posts - at the time, I was hoping/expecting the archive of the forums on that "old.bmwcca.org" would have been kept online, but, nope. I could be wrong, but I thought there was a relatively short-lived message forum prior to that one. Having participated in all the 'CCA website forums since they first came to be & watching them come and then disappear, you can see why I always make a point asking about the preservation of the forums. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20080308210843/http://old.bmwcca.org/forum Archive apparently goes to the last page of threads/topics, I looked at tech talk, as it had a lot of posts - it doesn't have the content of the posts, but the creation date on one post here says two years & two weeks earlier prior to apparently April '08, which would mean forums were online at least by April of '06. https://web.archive.org/web/20080411232027/http://old.bmwcca.org/forum/13?from=675
Hard to tell if those forum posts where vBulletin. Most likely it was since so called v2 was nothing more than vBulletin and vBadvanced. Maybe the previous version was phpBB? It is possible that some posts didn't get imported or got deleted in the cleanup of the import. I made every attempt to import everything that was available. I don't think anything was deleted from the vBulletin forum. It is also possible that something was corrupt and didn't make it. Whatever is gone, is gone.
I think Bill Howard might be the only one who might have insight. Best I can tell, you did salvage all the content that was available, and there was a lot in the forums this current version replaced. One would think the earlier forums would be archived in a file someplace, but maybe not. We need to find that guy who's like "Look Honey! I printed out the entire internet!"
