Well, there is a straighforward and simple post to reply to
To start at the end, you are one of the owners of the forum Tom, so how do you think it is going so far?
As another one of the 70 owners of the forum, I can't believe how successful (I think) it has been so far. Most of the old characters are back and giving off that very distinct and pungent EuroKClub odour.
We have managed to acquire lots of new 'owners' who are doubtless wondering what they have joined and apart from the vast knowledge base and technical store that was stolen by Nadeem, at times I find it hard to believe that anything went wrong in the first place. I love it!
By the way, a lot of folks very kindly say 'thank you' to me for setting this place up, but I want to say an even bigger 'thank you' to everyone who came and joined me in here, it would have been a very lonely place without every single one of you. So thank you one and all!
I bought the new domain name for £20 a year and that is all that I own. I am most definitely not the owner of the site nor the forum. We have a management team consisting of the six admins and mods and we are responsible for the day to day, month to month and year to year maintenance of the site, but I am determined that this version of EuroKClub will never be the property of any one person.
So, on to your outrageously demanding requests
Embedded videos vs linked videos! This all comes down to disk space and disk space costs money. When we were all adrift and Paul and I were trying to see how to move forward, he found a very cheap and quick way of getting back up and running with extremely low hosting costs to boot. Without that one single step we would all still be in the Faceache lifeboat. Bearing in mind that we were taking a risk that we would end up with costs for a site that no-one joined, it seemed a reasonable way to go.
The downside is that we have limited storage space, or rather not unlimited.
We can increase our allocated disk space at a cost, but whatever the allocation we will eventually fill it if we all have our holiday videos uploaded to the site. There is also a security issue with having vids embedded.
I concur with you about the members map and if Rae lives long enough to make it to Lowestoft for the start of the 'Chasing the Sun' ride, then he will get many beers for his effort. Or G&T's in his case.
I beat you to having a whinge about the smilies; I can't even use the ones off my iPad as it loses all text following the smilie when I Post, although it is there when I Preview. This is as a result of changing the text from US to English.
So, for both of the above suggestions we have one major problem; none of the admins are HTML skilled coders. And if we have any in here, they are keeping very quiet about it.
The day to day admin of the forum is fairly straightforward as it is all encapsulated within the free software SMF from Simple Machines on which our forum and lots of others are based. There is lots of support on the SMF forum on how to do stuff and we are looking at this but we have linitations.
If we want to make radical changes beyond that available within SMF, (and I think maybe the member's map is that sort of change) we need to have access to a geek with HTML and various other software skills. If anyone knows of someone who can help with this stuff, please get in touch.
We have had almost no technical problems to speak of with the new site; a few issues with the Captcha device, the spool-chucker and the language being set to default US English. Touch wood quickly!
These issues were fixed by the admins or by Martin who built the site, as part of the initial set-up. Beyond that, we pay for his time if we need him to do support or other changes but we need to bear in mind that Martin is not a forum expert, his skill is building and maintaining websites, not forums on websites.
To summarise, I think that we eventually need to make some decisions about the ongoing direction of the site in terms of support and hosting but it was always my intention to let the site 'bed-in' for a couple of months before we make any drastic changes and then sort out the costs associated with it at the same time.
Brian (who says 'keep em comimg, none of em are being ignored'
)
PS I did manage to find the fingering Adolf on the net, but have no idea what to do with it.