The Forum

[Martin]

Cheers guys

2.5yrs actual existence, many trials and troubles, but we're getting there.
As Paul says, it's very time consuming but worth every second of it, You guys make it happen, we just steer it..
We've never pushed the Rib side of the forum because we never set out to be in competition with "The others" and we're happy to be friendly with ribs facebook group and share many members with them. I was dubious about the dark side but i think it's taken off quite well, and to keep you "dark side " members pleased to still be onboard here is awesome!!!
This site is here for us all, myself and Paul love being just members and getting right in the thick of it out on the water with you all just makes us smile more.

It will grow further in time, The search engines are very slow with our forum due to its short existence and poor SEO software, I'll just keep putting in the hours and it'll creep its way up there

All the big sites and forums run expensive monthly paid for software with huge SEO possibilities. To do that they have to have income from adwords, adverts and other generally annoying screen abducting crap that gets right on everyones nerves and ruins a great experience of a website.
We agreed in the begininning, keep it fun, free and friendly.. I think we've done that?
As Paul said at the start, lets get the quality members - not the numbers. It took a while to sink in, but he was very right.

So a big cheer everyone.. THANKYOU for your help, support & participation.
Top google ranking for Fribs & Sibs on its dedicated subject. RESULT

[Admin]

Unfortunately we've had no option but to implement the banning of third party inbound links from photo storage websites due to the mess left behind with spoiled/missing images.
As most of you will know, photo bucket muppets got a little greedy and decided to charge account holders to allow outbound links from their site to a community/forum/facebook etc etc...

By uploading your images directly to this forum, they are backed up daily and should never get lost/deleted. This gives all members a better experience and helps keep the forum productive and alive.
We have no issues regarding storage limits anymore, we increased it some time ago as the forum got a little busier, bandwidth and storage are no longer a problem.

You may or may not have noticed the F&Q (frequently asked questions) button on the menu bar, looking at that page it does explain linking is an option... Re-writing that instruction is totally out of our control unfortunately as that help page is stored on the forum software suppliers website and linked to here.


Should you require any assistance on uploading images, please refer to the "How To" guide on the main index page. There you will get advice on videos, images, subscriptions etc..

YouTube.
We have no issues with you linking/embedding video's via youtube, The video content is considerably less than the image count, so should a situation arise with video linking we can probably fix that easily.
Youtube make a great amount of revenue from account holders input, the likelihood of them charging for outbound links (In our opinion) is pretty much zero.

Thanks for your support and previous input on this guys,
Admin

[Martin]

The help pages are here for anyone requiring assistance, or ask any of the regulars and everyone will be happy to help
http://f-ribsandsibs.com/viewforum.php?f=19

[Martin]

At the start of this - our third year, we had 200 members on the forum, I was hoping we could double that by the end of the year.. (Big ask i know)...
But we've done it ... 452 members at the time i posted this...

Welcome to all the new guys, and a huge thanks to all that keep the forum alive. The forum is nothing without your input...

Well done guys

[Jakeyboy]

Dont know if this should be here but how do i use smilies ect from my galaxy s6 on mobile site ?

[Martin]

Unfortunately the software doesn't support smilies from third party sources as yet, so you have to use the dedicated smilies we've installed.
When you click reply or when you start a post, you will see the smilies on the right hand side, below the smilies you will see the words "View More Smilies" ... Clicking that wording will open up another box with additional smilies on a page.

Martin

[Jakeyboy]

It seems only way is to use full version as smilies not on mobile version any way seems to work now just need to zoom in more

[Martin]

It seems only way is to use full version as smilies not on mobile version any way seems to work now just need to zoom in more

If there are any particular smilies you've seen that you would like installing on the board, find an image, a link and post them on here and we'll do our best to get it on for you

[Martin]

As we progress towards the big switch, we have a few changes to make to the forum.
You’ll slowly see parts of the forum that make it our own disappear..

The portal page, the dark blue & white forum backgrounds, thanks for post, the forum spinning banner and logo, etc etc... will all be going.
We will be left with the basic forum we started with in Dec 2014.

This strip back is required for the software upgrade we’ve been forced into, technology and security issues keep arising and the only way we can keep up to date on everything g is move forward with it.
The support for our software is now non existent.

So what are we getting?
Here’s a quick peek (iphone screenshot) of what’s heading our way.

[Martin]

A Trial Upgrade Run ....

We attempted this last night and it ended up being catastrophic....
We may have lost an odd post or two but they will only be posts made between 12 midnight and 03.30 this morning - that's when i finally gave up and went to bed.

I'll advise as and when we next attempt this,
Should we disappear for any reason.... Pls keep checking to see if we have returned, the phoenix will always rise from the ashes, even if severely battered/bruised and embarrassed

As we've hopefully explained previously... this upgrade is not something we particularly want to do, Security is paramount these days on the web, without this upgrade we will be left very susceptible to attack - The big difference being we'll be left with No Help or Support as the software has moved on.

Martin