Boat Buzz, largest online forum for antique and classic talk

[Don Ayers]

A big milestone has been reached as Boat Buzz hits 4,000+ subscribers!!

IMHO this says a lot about the antique and classic boat community and how/where information is exchanged.

A fantastic benefit of this organization for sure!

Here's to hitting 5,000 in record time.

Regards to all

[Hopatcong Buddy]

Thank you to all involved for all your efforts. There are 4,000+ and growing because the CCABC has designed an easy site to use for all to use and has become a fun, informative place to visit and learn.

[Matt Smith]

Congrats. Today 4,000 tomorrow the World..No.. wait, we are already all over the world...mmm wait.. let me see here.. I know, tomorrow a movie about how we stole this idea from some classmates.. ya.. here is to success!

[Al Benton]

Boat Buzz has been growing very consistently at about 60 new members per month, give or take, over the past 5 plus years. The first and second thousand members took about 17 months each. The third thousand took only 15 months. This last thousand members was back to 17 months to accomplish.

As Don says, Boat Buzz is becoming the go-to place for exchange of information. As it grows in numbers it also grows in function as a resource for hard to find information.

What's great about Boat Buzz is that new issues regarding our old boats surfaces regularly here. Not only that, but there's generally always a number of responses to them from people in the know. It's amazing.

Al

[jfrprops]

Boat Buzz is an important part of my day, thanks to all my brother and sister posters for all their comments, and to the club leaders for thier hard work.
See you at Taveres/Dora.

John in Va.

[Bill Basler]

This is a great milestone. Al Benton is our unofficial statistician on this one. I can tell you that we have grown. Al can map it all out on a Gantt chart.

It does not seem that long ago to me that we started this forum, so to see it take off has been a lot of fun. However...the fun iust beginning.

I have been working hard on a replacement for this forum. In fact the entire chris-craft.org web site will be changing fairly soon. We have a long ways to go, but there is a lot of work that has been done.

The new Boat Buzz? Boat Buzz II, Boat Buzz the Sequel, whatever...how about just Boat Buzz.

It will have a wider page format to take advantage of the progression to larger computer monitors.

We will introduce an entirely different photo upload engine. All of this will be handled within the chris-craft domain on servers that we manage, so no more Post Image.

The new Buzz will also have an extensive photo gallery function, allowing you to post hundreds of photos in one place and then link to certain photos or entire galleries within your posts.

The new system will also allow you to save a draft of your post. This means, you can sit down...start writing....go away for a couple of days and finish your post up. No longer will you lose your unposted text. It will even auto save your progress.

Next, the search function will be entirely new and customized.

Oh...and how about a custom forum reader app that you will be able to download for iPhone, Droid and Blackberry. This app will allow you to read and make posts, search etc...all from a custom designed mobile app that is optimized for your mobile device.

Now...the trick is to implement all of this without losing what people love. I am biased on this, but I really think that the way we have Boat Buzz set up is very simple and intuitive. I understand this further when I visit other forums, some of which are very noisy and confusing.

We will not change what you love about Boat Buzz. We know some of you (Rothert ) don't like change, and we're going to be sensitive to that.

[Al Benton]

Bill,

That's exciting news. Especially the app for using mobile devices with Boat Buzz posts.

Along with progress comes questions of how the present Boat Buzz posts will work after the change over to the new system. For example, will the old PostImage photos still be accessible from them on old posts? Will they be transferred to the new system and saved in in-house servers and become part of the new galleries?

I'm sure there are other questions but the images came to my mind as I read your post. I know that digital storage has become a real bargain these days. Who would have ever thought that a 500 GB external hard drive would have been practical (or needed) for a home computer?

Al

[Bill Basler]

Al, good points. The old Post Image Photos will continue to appear as they do now. In a perfect world, I would have a developer script something that would chase the Post Image photos down via the URL they are currently stored, then move them to our Boat Buzz server and then relink.

I am not a developer so that would be one that I would have to ask of someone much smarter than I!

As for storage...yes...it is a lot more affordable than ever before. We now back up hard drives what we used to back up on a 20 tape magazines, with bar coded tapes. That is great. I am glad to see tapes go away within our environment. But to backup to disks doubles the money, and to do this all at RAID level 5 or RAID level 6 is even more. To keep the data protected it still takes a lot of money and time.

By the way, we do have the lost posts identified and isolated. We are waiting to deploy the new forum before we bring these back online.

[jahearne]

Thanks for all your hard work Bill and to all who make this a great resourse for our boats.

Take care,
John

[Al Benton]

All of this new hi-tech stuff has far surpassed my ability to comprehend. This club has always managed to stay on the leading edge of the latest technology. The coming upgrades for the web site and Boat Buzz, with even more great features, are examples of this.

I would like to join John in thanking Bill Basler for this. "Thanks, Bill"

Al

Oh, forgot to mention: It's great that the missing posts from November through January are safe and will be included in the new version. I was most concerned with Ali's "Uh-Oh!" topic that was becoming one of the longest and most viewed threads of all time. There's a lot of good resource information included in the posts that were misplaced for a while. I and others will look forward to seeing them again.

[jfrprops]

Dear Bill:

Thanks for all you do.

And many thanks for pointing out that I (John Rothert) am the top ten poster most averse to CHANGE.
HOW TRUE!!!!!

All I know about an App is that you are APT to lose me when discussing such.

Your detailed post on the web upgrades we can expect was very comprehensive but why did you not use ENGLISH? And then Al and the subsequent posters jumped to cyberspeak too????? Oh well....I would rather pull apart a Paragon than a Dell anyhow.
P.S., I "opened" my last computer with a hatchet just to see what was inside....liked the paragon better.
Not enough grease in a Gateway....
John in Va.

[Bill Basler]

Ha! Classic John Rothert. Very good. Even though I'm a geek, I have so many friends who can way out geek me. Everything is relative you know.

[Al Benton]

Hey John, We have an APP for that!!!

See ya in just over 3 weeks!!!

Al