Thanks for the hard work on the new forum

[Spen]

Let me know best place to make a PayPal donation if possible. I'm sure it wasn't free.

[uzayas]

Request PayPal for donations

Thank you for keeping all this knowledge and experience alive

[tig]

Thanks for the offer. We're covered for now but will be setting up an easy way for folks to donate soon.

[DavidE9]

Thank you very much for the update to the forum !

Not to beat a dead horse, but I would happily help pay for adding the ability to directly load and serve images on the forum rather than use 3rd parties. There is a tremendous amount of value in those images that disappears with time. I wrote a script to do that with my posts on e9coupe.com and would be happy to do the same here.

Thanks again.

[tig]

Thank you very much for the update to the forum !

Not to beat a dead horse, but I would happily help pay for adding the ability to directly load and serve images on the forum rather than use 3rd parties. There is a tremendous amount of value in those images that disappears with time. I wrote a script to do that with my posts on e9coupe.com and would be happy to do the same here.

Thanks again.

Hear you loud and clear.

The new infrastructure should enable this. I've already experimented with it and I think we can make it work inexpensively.

Let's wait a few weeks until the new infrastructure is deemed stable though...

[jimoreno]

Thanks for the new server. Things are flowing so much better and faster now.
Great work!

[4DSC]

Ditto, really glad to see investment in keeping this community alive, thanks for the hard work! I have a computer science background with a specialty in security so if there's anything I can help with to give back for the wealth of knowledge I've gained here, up to and including building an image hosting system from scratch, let me know.

[az533]

Ditto, thanks!

[tig]

Ditto, thanks!

Thanks all.

Email notifications should now be working...

[5280 JB]

Thank you Tig and team! We are very gruntled to have this board back online and healthy for the future!

Jim

[Bonsaibacker]

Thank you for your commitment and effort to this community. This forum has been an invaluable resource for me and MANY others (members and lurkers).

Please let us know how we can assist in making this a reality:

Thank you very much for the update to the forum !

Not to beat a dead horse, but I would happily help pay for adding the ability to directly load and serve images on the forum rather than use 3rd parties. There is a tremendous amount of value in those images that disappears with time. I wrote a script to do that with my posts on e9coupe.com and would be happy to do the same here.

Thanks again.

[muleskinner]

New! Improved!

Thanks to the artist formerly known as Charlie @Tig and the rest of the team who refreshed the forum. Funny enough, my 12 year old cat's name is Tigger.

Those of us who have been on this forum for a long time have seen the e28 community as well as this forum change and evolve. The early days when you could buy a decent e28 for $3K to $7K, and then document how you improved it here are long gone in the age of Bringatrailer.

The reality is that the e28 itself is now more than 40 years old, which means those of us who started out as e12 and e28 enthusiasts in our 20s are now in our 60s or older. So, activity on forums and boards like this naturally starts to diminish by attrition of cars and/or members.

That said, I still check in here often, lots of great memories, wild comments, and e28 stories here, and it will always be a tremendous resource for anyone who owns an e28.

[DavidE9]

A little experiment on the night before Christmas:

Here is a thread on short shifters from 2010:

viewtopic.php?t=72458&sid=c71456133758a ... 823372cae6

You can see the first 3 images in the thread look fine, but there are another 7 broken image links. With a little work, I can find them programmatically:

http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/ratio.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftkd.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftg3.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftg4.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftg1.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftg.jpg

So while the image links are broken for whatever reason, we might be able to find the source image and re-host it on another server to preserve that info in the thread. It would be a little work, but it might be possible.

Just a thought.

[tig]

A little experiment on the night before Christmas:

Here is a thread on short shifters from 2010:

viewtopic.php?t=72458&sid=c71456133758a ... 823372cae6

You can see the first 3 images in the thread look fine, but there are another 7 broken image links. With a little work, I can find them programmatically:

http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/ratio.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftkd.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftg3.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftg4.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftg1.jpg
http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftg.jpg

So while the image links are broken for whatever reason, we might be able to find the source image and re-host it on another server to preserve that info in the thread. It would be a little work, but it might be possible.

Just a thought.

FIxed!

Any link to any image off of mye28.com that was created before ~2021 now redirects to a LOCALLY STORED COPY OF THE IMAGE!

There are ~64GB of said images now saved.

Sadly, some of these images are either this fucking image



Or, some other lame placeholder.

But for the vast majority, the images that provide so much of the value of this site will never be lost.

Soon, I'll have figured out an easy to use, robust, and inexpensive (for mye28.com, not you) way of uploading photos to mye28.com and linking to them.

Until that happens, I'll be running the script that did the magic above regularly. Within a few days the past few years will be saved (right now the script is somewhere mid 2021).

[tig]

to illustrate, this image



while still linked to within the img tag in that post:

http://www.unofficialbmw.com/images/shiftkd.jpg

is now served by mye28.com from:

https://www.mye28.com/images/ext/263064 ... a30c4d.jpg

Verify this by right clicking on any image in any post on the forum and doing Open Image in New Tab (or equivalent) and noting the URL.