Surreyscoobies

[SeanMcKnetic]

Should be back now.

http://www.surreyscoobies.co.uk.

[Steve_PPP]

Originally Posted by SeanMcKnetic

Should be back now.

http://www.surreyscoobies.co.uk.

Nice one. Sorry I didn't get a chance to take a look yesterday and reply to your PM! Was at the meet then shopping during the day (scoob in a retail park car park ) then had to sort some other stuff in the evening....

[SeanMcKnetic]

No problem, we got to a point last night where we thought "Right, it's now or never, lets flick the switch".

Actually, AP and I managed to completely break it WHILE flicking the switch, but that's another story for another day haha.

[riiidaa]

nice one sean

Will tapatalk integration be back on the cards at some point?

[SeanMcKnetic]

After a difficult 18 months behind the scenes at Surrey Scoobies, we're finally accepting that new forum we bought was a turkey, and are abandoning it in favour of a full Facebook group. You guys might see a few new members as people who balk at the idea of using Facebook may migrate to SES as I've encouraged them to do.

Here's the post I made about it today on the SS forum and FB group:

===================

**SURREY SCOOBIES ANNOUNCEMENT**

We are going "full Facebook" with immediate effect, and therefore discontinuing the vBulletin forum in a phased manner.

Sept 2016 marked the 1st birthday of the new forum, meaning we had to fork out £400 for the annual renewal. And for what? It's dead. So we will NOT be renewing it again. I've fought long and hard to try and get back the momentum we had before we were hacked in Summer 2015, but things were never right again. None of us has the appetite to incur further hosting costs, or do a lift-and-shift of our database to get another PHP host, and we're pretty much out of funds now anyway as we haven't taken a single £10 member subscription in over 12 months. It's become a money suck-hole and for absolutely no good reason when Facebook offers a much more centralised and modern online platform from which to operate.

If you're allergic to Facebook and will be orphaned by this move, then I apologise wholeheartedly. If you're particularly enthusiastic about PHP based forums as your platform to talk about Subarus, then I highly recommend signing up to South East Scoobies if you're not on there already. It's a great, friendly, busy Subaru forum with a natural geographical overlap with us since it covers all the counties in the South East.
The Surrey Scoobies forum will stay online until Feb 2017. If you are particulaly keen not to lose any posts (build threads, how to guides, car photos etc), then maybe find them NOW and re-create that content as new threads over on SES.

I never wanted this outcome, and if it wasn't for the overhead costs I'd find away to struggle on with the forum. But that £400 bill was a wake-up call and made the answers to a few questions seem very clear and obvious all of a sudden.

Regards,

Sean on behalf of the Surrey Scoobies team (AP, Sean, Guy, Steve TBTSTT, Banstead Stig, Riiidaa, Anger).

[555_Si]

Its a shame, but i wish you all the best for the Facebook future, of course anyone joining us from Surrey site will be most welcome on here.

[Steve_PPP]

Thanks for posting up Sean. I saw your post on Facebook earlier and hope it works for you guys.

Big credit owed to you for the time spent in the last year or so rebuilding it from the original failure too.

[tbtstt]

It's a terrible shame that the forum will be no more (doubly so after all the effort Sean put into resurrecting it) but, sadly, this has seemed inevitable for a while now.

Hopefully all the existing members will find their way to the Facebook page and SES!

[stonejedi]

It's very sad about Surrey Scoobies site,but its seems that MR ROBOT'S hack was a beginning of the end,plus the lack of users and a very finicky interface made it a matter of time before the plug was pulled.Big up yourself Sean,Guy and the rest of the SSCrew,I know that you all tried your best.SJ.

[Banstead Stig]

The club will live on, just in a different way.

Hopefully this forum will benefit from some of the users coming this way as there are some great contributors signed up over there.

It's a lesson in how fickle the internet is, as the downtime was the real killer in my opinion. Once people got out of the habit of visiting it was hard to entice them back. The cloud based vBulletin is not great, but to be honest neither is it that bad. I'm not a technical whizz, but if I can navigate it successfully I can't see the problem.

[stonejedi]

Originally Posted by Banstead Stig

The club will live on, just in a different way.

Hopefully this forum will benefit from some of the users coming this way as there are some great contributors signed up over there.

It's a lesson in how fickle the internet is, as the downtime was the real killer in my opinion. Once people got out of the habit of visiting it was hard to entice them back. The cloud based vBulletin is not great, but to be honest neither is it that bad. I'm not a technical whizz, but if I can navigate it successfully I can't see the problem.

Yeah I hear yah, but as I said before a site is only as good as its users and quite frankly I use to log on to surreyscoobies and not see any new posts for at least a week or so which in my opinion never helped.SJ.

[Banstead Stig]

Originally Posted by stonejedi

Yeah I hear yah, but as I said before a site is only as good as its users and quite frankly I use to log on to surreyscoobies and not see any new posts for at least a week or so which in my opinion never helped.SJ.

I think we're saying the same thing. People didn't come back after the hack. That ****ed it.