The Register Discussion Forum

[Ian Grace]

The following is an extract from Register Ramblings in the latest Register Magazine, just delivered to the printers, and relates to this Forum.

"Being eight hours behind England here at VMR HQ in Seattle, I wake up to several interesting e-mails from members every morning that have been sent during the day from England and Europe. I try to answer as many as I can before heading for the office, and at any time, I am usually engaged in a number of very interesting exchanges – technical questions, historical information requests, restoration reports, news of outings and rallies and so on. A small subset of these end up in either the Magazine or these Newsletters, but there is not the space to relay a fraction of the incoming to the wider membership, even though they would benefit greatly from the news and information contained in these exchanges. Can I therefore invite you all to consider posting your correspondence on our Discussion Forum if appropriate, for the benefit of everyone. Even if it is just you and me posting to the Forum thread, with nobody else contributing, many dozens of members will be able to see it and benefit from it rather than just the two of us, and it will be available for viewing permanently. I receive several interesting e-mails a day, but the rest of the membership are completely blind to all these interesting exchanges, and I can only put a sample in the Magazine or the Newsletter. The Register feels very ‘hub and spoke’ sometimes, but the Forum provides the means by which we can multiply the dissemination of information which we would all benefit from seeing. It is just one more service that the Register can provide and help all members feel more involved in the club.

In particular, I’d like to invite every member to start a thread in ‘Our Cars’, if you have not already done so, where you can record the story of your car - its history, restoration, trips out, rallies, etc. We’d all love to see all this, and the thread will build into an illustrated diary that can, for example, be very useful for future reference, or should you decide to part with your car at some point in the future, because potential buyers can view the history of your car. (On the other hand, if you would like me to delete individual posts or entire threads, I can do that too. I did exactly that for one member last month.)

Of the posts that are made, the vast majority receive no responses whatsoever, although they are read hundreds of times. For example, John Cooper posted Christmas wishes to everyone just before Christmas. While his post was viewed 296 times, not a single reader (other than yours truly) responded. I wonder whether John will bother next year.

I suspect that there are many members who have registered for the Forum in the past but don’t post, simply because they have forgotten their individual Forum username/password combination. If that is you, let me know and I can help. If you know your username but have forgotten your password, I can reset your password. If you have forgotten both, I can reset both for you. If you haven’t registered yet, you can do so by following the easy instructions after following the Discussion Forum link on the website. (Can I encourage everyone to use their name, e.g. John Smith, as their username. It makes is so much easier to administer your registration if I can simply type in your name in the Administrator Control Panel when searching for your details – for example, if you need me to reset your password.)

If anyone has any difficulty uploading photos to the Forum, I can help here too. I can re-size large images so that they can be better viewed (I set the width of the images to 1,000 pixels) and I can upload images for you if that would help. Just e-mail them to me. I know that many people host their images in the cloud and link them to the Forum, but then remove some of these images from the cloud years later, so when viewing past posts, the pictures are often found to have disappeared. When I post photos, I upload them to the same server that hosts the Forum (and the website), so as long as the Forum exists, so the photos remain viewable."

Comments and feedback, posted here, most welcome.