I can see why Steve needs to cut down on posts - this forum alone must take a lot of space or bandwidth or whatever a forum takes in order to maintain it.
Let's get back on track here & hopefully Steve can create a non-post count Forum for us so we can still have our O/T posts & continue to use this for genuine truck/Ford/F150 questions that don't fit well in other Forums. I'm worried that if we start posting things in the regular forums that don't necessarily fit it will choke them up like this 1 is & we'll really mess things up for Steve.
There's no reason why we can't be trusted to post O/T posts in a specific forum & still be able to ask questions or offer advice here that is truck related. Anyone else want to help Steve & the site out? Please?

 

I'm in, I admit I have gotten out of hand lately, and I am sorry with the posting. We do need to tone it down a bit so the server can get right again.

 

Here is what Steve said:
"Hopefully, this action will result in a decrease in the number of overall posts in this forum, potentially freeing up the search engine in the future."

Here is my feeling on this. Nothing is more important than getting 'Search' back. Whatever we have to do.

Set my post count to zero
and/or

Make me a thumb sucking baby Junior member for life
and/or

Remove all post counting features from the entire site
and/or

Clean Out General Discussion/Testing123 and any other Forum not directly related to pertinent info about the Ford Truck
and/or

Delete any USERID and threads they started who have not posted in two years
and/or

Delete USERIDs that orginate from a single IP address keeping only the one that last posted

Trying to think of these on the fly
Here's the last one. I've helped on a few truck issues and I remember what they are, the rest of my posts are nonsense.
Delete all of my posts. The board won't suffer for it.

Other truck sites have Search functioning. There is a wealth of knowledge buried here but, we can't get to it. I want this site to be the best Ford truck site.

 

It wasn't just you - all of us were getting post happy - including me. I think we just didn't realize the extra work this created for Steve - at least I didn't because I have NO clue as to what it takes to run a site, especially 1 of this size & with this much content. It has to be difficult!
Hopefully if Steve sees we really are willing to help out & comply by posting things in an O/T forum we can once again get credit here for truck related posts that don't have a better forum to post in. We can think of them as "orphan" topics maybe & then, everyone will be happy!

 

Sounds great to me Steve. So ALL queries or things
posted in the general dis. forum should be truck-
related, right? Do I understand correctly?

 

I just re-read your post. Are you simply not going to
count posts in this forum? Sorry for the confusion!

 

if i'm not mistaken, he is saying this IS the place for o/t discussions. but they won't count on your post count due to post padding lately.
this way if posts here don't count, padding won't occur. that way everything posted at this forum should have some value to it, not necesarily truck related. just my opinion of course. seems a wise move to me.

 

Unless of course the padding doesn't just move to one or more other Forums, which would be much worse.

If we can't get rid of Post Counts altogether, how about changing the incrementor from 1 to a random number generator from (+1 to -5)? That would defeat padding.

Even better, allow whoever wants it to have 10,000 no, 100,000 no, a damn gadzillion post count listed under their name.

 

i agree with raoul, i would rather have the search back than post count. with out the serch i know i have posted a couple threads that were asking questions that i could have found if there was a search.

 

I want search back even if it says Cheby fool under my name.

 

To what value is a "post count" anyway?

I have other possible solutions; Eliminate "signatures" from,

a, duplicate posts within a thread, and/or

b, posts in the "general discussion" part.

The signatures must surely use a lot of bandwidth and I know that it takes a lot of time loading up threads that are 'top heavy' with signatures! ennis

 

fourhour,

Actually signatures do not require a great deal of bandwidth on this particular forum software, as signatures are stored in a different table from the posts. Theoretically, if an image appears more than one time in a post (ie - in a sig), it should be cached by the browser, so no increased bandwidth.

It seems that more and more people are using the F150online Photo Galleries to store their pics and thumbnails, so page download time has eased somewhat. (calls do not have to be made to other sites) There are still examples where this is not the case, of course.

By default, I have setup the forums so the include signature is not checked (which is the opposite of the default for this software). We don't have the ability to limit one sig per person per thread (though it is a great idea and has been suggested numerous times to the developers), so common courtesy for fellow members should prevail.

If you are aware of obvious abuses of sigs or links to outside images that are slowing pageload times down, please let me know and I will see what I can do.

Steve

 

I don't think eliminating signatures would help 'Search'. I think that was proposed before.

I'm willing to try anything that will lighten the load and help the 'cause'.

How about posting in the nude?
I would be willing to participate.
(OK, actually I already do but, you didn't know that unless you've seen me get my newspaper in the morning.)

 

I agree search must come back I will not however post in the nude, I dont want Raoul thinking Im comming on to him and having flash backs of Sing Sing and the shower.

 

It was starting to look like a chat room in here. I guess we all can get out of hand now and again.

I think some people were just waiting for me to say "You behave or you'll get a spanking"