We've now completed the migration to our new home. During the coming days and weeks, we'll be addressing those inevitable, niggling issues that occur with the move to a new residence. In the case of the community, that means getting URL redirects in place, fixing broken links within discussions, learning new moderation tools, figuring out user profiles, new features and other functionality. It'll take time for all of us to get used to this new home.
For those of you who were wondering, "Why the change?" The simple answer is, our former discussion forums were being discontinued and were no longer supported after today. We reviewed all your many comments, and did our best to find the right discussion application to meet our Car Talk Community needs.
Feel free to share your comments here. All we ask is that you give the few of us light-starved lackeys your patience. As always, there are just a few of us here -- and we have the full Car Talk site to manage, update, and generally keep alive and thriving. As time, our abilities and the functionality of the new forums allow, we'll do our very best to address any outstanding issues.
Our Czarina for all things Car Talk Community, Carolyn, will be updating this discussion thread from time to time.
I do not see a link to a site for TSB’s, I was expecting this to happen. I also see we have lost our contributor ratings (or perhaps I just do not know where to look). Are the contributor ratings gone?
Thanks for your feedback, and thanks again for your bearing with us during the move. It was a big undertaking – we moved almost 500,000 posts and over 80,000 users from one system to another in a relatively short time. We’re also getting used to the new digs, and we’re trying to create a prioritized list of items we’ve got to fix. The first order of business is to fix what’s broken, and to ensure that what is in place works properly, and then we will move on to incorporating more enhancements.
I just wanted to respond directly to some of your comments.
Search function: We’re in touch with the developers to investigate our options for a search, and we hope to have it in place soon.
Top 20/Top 250 Rankings: We’re also going to find out what are options are under Vanilla to restore recognition of our top posters.
Sticky Posts: This option does exist, and it’s helpful for us admins. (I know I’m excited!)
Again, thank you for your patience, and I will stay in touch. Please keep your comments coming.
"Search function: We’re in touch with the developers to investigate our options for a search, and we hope to have it in place soon.
Top 20/Top 250 Rankings: We’re also going to find out what are options are under Vanilla to restore recognition of our top posters."
I would be fired or at least given a stern talking-to if I did a migration without knowing the answers to those questions beforehand. Sure wish I could see what I’m typing.
Voting 1.0.4.1b is a vanilla approved plugin for voting comments up/down. You can set it to remove comments voted down “X” number of times, set in the config.
While not exactly the same as top 250, top 20, etc, Post Count 1.0.2 is approved, and will give you a number of posts line by each name. Better than nothing, I imagine.
What I still don’t see is where anyone who wants to ask a question about their vehicle has put in information about the vehicle so those of us on this board knows what type of vehicle is being refered to. Without this information most questions go unanswered because we don’t know what the type of vehicle is being refered to.
This should set up as required fields that need to be answered before a question can even be asked.
After going through several of these software changes, I’ll get used to it I 'spose. I did notice that the response window did not expand as text filled it nor did the text scroll. So you just guess what you are typing after filling the window. Maybe a setting someplace or a need to restrict the size of posts.
Bing, after your text disappears off the bottom of the window you can use the down arrow to get to your current line. Its very annoying as you have to do this at the end of every line. Apparently it does it in IE and Firefox (at least), but I know it doesn’t happen in Chrome (and I think someone also mentioned Safari). So its partly browser related & I assume it will get fixed at some point.
I notice a feature that is not sitting well with me, the inital post looks just like the follow up answers or comments, this is highly irregular (first time I have seen a Forum using such a technique. Can we come up with a way to designate the inital question (except it simply being at the top?)
The ‘compose’ window is too small, and doesn’t automatically expand, or even show scroll bars. What’s up with that? Also I had to create a new password, as the site didn’t remember mine.