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78TA Forum Suggestions

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Hitman:
First, I would like to thank all of you who have supported this forum and have been here throughout the years. I greatly appreciate your time and effort you all have put into this Community.

But this is where I need your help. This forum is getting kinda old and there are many more different outlets out there for information and people to hang out together. Forums like this one (which is now 15 years old) are really kinda old news and really have become somewhat of extinct like the Dinosaurs. Now, I don't want to get rid of the information that is here because there is a lot of good resources to go back and research here, but I need to make a change.. or a few changes.

The website hosting provider I have been using have raised their prices and and right now it is no cost effective to keep this going. I have a new provider set up for the website, but the problem I have is that they limit their database sizes to only 1GB and this Forum is currently 1.11GB. So I can't move this site to a new provider because this database size is too large, but I need to do something. I am going to start trying to trim down the size of the database.

First step would be to delete the members who have registered, but have never signed in..... ever. But there are 9,260 members and deleting ones who have never signed on is only about 350 members (no big deal to delete them because they have never signed on anyway). But here is a question... I can also delete members who have not signed on in the last 10 years or longer which would get rid of about 3,500 members. I would not delete their posts, just their login. I can possibly also delete members who have Zero (0) posts which may get rid of another 1,500 members (give or take). Is that wrong to do? delete a member just because they have not posted? (we will come back to this last one later)

Second step would be to get rid of old posts that no longer matter. There are about 416,852 posts on this forum and I can start trimming those too. But I would right now only trim the ones that are.t important anymore. Like I have the board for "Ebay Listings" that is about 7,700 posts.... I can probably get rid of most of those because the Ebay listing is now gone. I can probably also delete most of the postings in the "Parts for Sale" board because those people probably have sold those parts or no longer have them. Same thing goes for the "Parts Wanted" board as well. So, I would start trimming the boards that really do not hold any information that would be good to research because they are long gone. Anyway, I would get rid of some of those and others like very the "Vendors and Distributors" boards.

After that, I would really have to see what size the database would be and if that would be enough to get me under the 1GB limit. After that I would have to look at other options for "trimming the fat" to get the database size down.

So what are your thoughts (for anyone who still reads this forum anyway)?

1. Is it ok to delete the members who have never logged on and ones who have not logged on in over 10 years?
2. Is it ok to get rid of those posts I mentioned?

So just looking for a little input into the direction of the Forum and would like to do it within the next month. So please post your thoughts and suggestions here to help me out with this conundrum.

lumarkhood10th:
Both of your suggestions sound good to me.

If you need some donations to keep this site active, please post and let us know.  Thanks for trying to keep this one going.

78w72:
sounds fine to me to delete everything you mentioned, maybe leave some of the current want ads & parts for sale since i do see some recent activity there & it does come in handy still for the members that  come here still. & the other sub categories like vendors hasnt had any activity for 3-4 years so that can go. 

also maybe weed through some of the old or redundant pics since they take up a lot more space than text.

Cecil07:
This place is legendary...I'd say cut who you need too...

Martin:
Hi Brett,

I was just looking at your forum last week seeing if I recognize any of the older members..and was thinking the same thing that the forum could be streamlined.....
I have not logged onto 78TA until today in quite a while myself.

But I still believe that your forum has helped many people in the past and I assume that it will in the future.  That said, maybe you and your admins can keep the technical information on the
forum and do away with some to the topics that have not been posted to in a while.   Just my two cents from an old member who always thought that you kept the site fun and informative.

Martin

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