17 replies to this topic

[Nu2mini]

I'm sure I'm not the only one out there that spends hours trawling the forum for the answer to a problem. The most time consuming job is sorting the wheat from the chaff. It would be great if you know what you want just to be able to go straight to the answer. So I would like to propose an online workshop manual made up from really high quality posts. The idea here is to post the links to the relevant articles onto this post and use it as an index. What does everyone think ??.

To start the ball rolling I'll post (As an example of the quality I would like)

Hi-Lo Fitting guide (Also useful for replacing Rubber Cones and Knuckle Joints)....... Click Here

[evansisgreat]

Guide to adjusting tappets.

Clicky

[Ouster]

Most articles like this are (or should be) in the FAQ section.

[evansisgreat]

Most articles like this are (or should be) in the FAQ section.

In my experiance the FAQ's section is always missing photos and is not mantained.

[Guess-Works.com]

Most articles like this are (or should be) in the FAQ section.

In my experiance the FAQ's section is always missing photos and is not mantained.

Have you offered to maintain it ?

[Dan]

There is nothing we can do about missing photos in posts written by members. People link to their Photobucket or similar account when they write guides and then they forget all about that post when they need more space in their account. Members who offer to write guides should consider it their responsibility to maintain their photos ideally but it takes a lot to do that. It's not lack of maintenance on our part that causes these photos to vanish, but on the part of the people who own them. The posts you have linked to will sooner or later suffer the same fate. Better indexing of the FAQ section is already part of the long term plan.

[The-Womble]

I suggested something similar quite a while back, never got any responses though. Admittedly it'd take a bit of work to get it going, but with the amount of members on here I'm sure it wouldnt take too long and would be pretty useful, especially to novices.

Might stop some of the very frequently asked questions too.

[Nu2mini]

I agree that the FAQ section is the best place to keep this information and as a picture speaks a thousand words photo's are the key. It's a shame if someone has gone to the trouble of compliing a really good post when we loose it. Is it not possible for us to setup a photo repository for forum photo's. That will keep them seperate from members collections. So before posting the article you would load the photos into the repository and then link to them there from the article.

[Dan]

Believe me, I've made that point to the other admins several times but it's technically difficult to arrange apparrently and would use up a lot of space. Members can upload photos to their own account here and they will then remain in place forever. Since we don't delete accounts of former members they will always be available. The problem is that members don't get much storage capacity.

[lrostoke]

Is there not some sort of gallery feature available ??
I know on my website I've got the ability to start gallerys where members can post there images, start a gallery called technical or FAQ.. People who want to write a perminant guide upload to that gallery then link to those images in the guide ???
Possibly before somebody wrote a guide they checked the gallery to see if any pictures could be used rather than uploading new ones ??
Images need not be massive if people edit and resize before uploading.

[Dan]

We had a gallery before, that was where I kept a lot of my technical images. It was destroyed when we had a server failure. There is a reason we can't bring it back but I can't remember what that is. It costs enough to keep this place running as it is.

[lrostoke]

Tell me about it my servers $49 a month

[Ethel]

You can find what images are already on TMF by using google images and a site: search.

There's also a link to an online manual, of sorts, in the very first pinned topic of this section.

Hosting lots of images on the server would slow the forum down. I suppose you could help yourself, and others, by saving useful faqs to your own pc as a back up. The only problem being the possibility of disputes over copyright, which might lead to a tedious addition to our rules and regs.

[Shifty]

To control the images couldn't we use "Sock puppet" accounts that are controlled by admin?

Ie

I write a guide on fitting a front end, this is submitted and approved by the tech team.

I then PM the details to the sock puppet account who posts up the thread. As this account is controlled by the TMF team and the pictures will use that accounts photo allowance the images will remain on TMF.

As 1 accounts photo limit is reached then another can be set up?

[Ethel]

That's a good idea as long as the server has the bandwidth. Jammy or one of the other "inner circle" would have to say. We we're also discussing improving the front site with stuff like this - but who has the spare time to do it?