This is just a couple of things that have been bugging me for a bit now.
1. We happen to have spammers and bots now.
2. Email notifications are spotty. I get some messages for some threads, and others I don't.
3. Search function is still terrible, and, while doing a search last night, I noticed a sizeable chunk of forum threads have gone AWOL...

 

We are not the only forum or website that has this issue. It's also nothing new. Unfortunately, it's also part of the Internet. I hope you do not believe this is 100% within our control, or our fault?

Like most forums, we require valid email address (which they have), as well as passing the "Image Verification" (image with characters that require you to type what you see - which some members have trouble with) - which the "spam bots" also pass.

If we did any more "verification" on new members signing up, I'm afraid we would make it simply more difficult for members to use the website, while likely not gaining much ground on the spam bot issue, and thus simply lead to complaints from legitimate members. The "spam bots" and people spamming are not dumb.

I see no clear resolution to an issue that is found on the Internet.

Best thing you can do is to use the Report post feature which is found in every post. A moderator, or myself, will then take care of it. Based on records, I think the overall majority are taken care of rather quickly.

This could be due to a Thread Subscription issue that a 2 or 3 people have reported, or this could simply be an email issue. Email is not considered "mission critical" on the Internet, and therefore, is usually considered "best effort" by providers. You will find just about any email provider that provides the service for free, or packaged with your ISP, stating as such. It is never recommended to use email for anything "important" due to this reason.

One big issue is that we have a lot of other automotive enthusiast based forums that also generate a email notifications. This means we process a lot of email. Some email providers flag our mail as spam and either reject the email or filter the email.

I see your email address is Yahoo, which has been one of the most common email addresses that I've seen reported from our members with intermittent email notifications. I'm not suggesting it's confined to Yahoo, but Yahoo has been one of the more common email addresses that is usually associated with member complaints about email notifications.

Outside of adding the email address of our email notifications to your contact list or whitelist, which in some cases will let the email provider know that we're not trying to spam you, I'm told by the people in charge of the mail server that there isn't a lot that they can do that is within their control.

In that case, please use the correct thread:
https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/prob...on-thread.html

The thread above is actually dedicated to the Search issues.

However, I should inform you that simply stating the Search is "Terrible", without providing any additional information or constructive criticism will likely not help and/or will be moderated as it's not descriptive enough to give anyone any leads on how to improve whatever is apparently "terrible" about the search engine.

As far as thread gone AWOL, can you provide some examples? Sometimes the search needs to be manually reindexed, and thus, some threads may not be included in the search result until this reindex is performed. Therefore, some examples will help in order to know where the problem is.

Thanks.

 

Well, as for the Search thing and the AWOL posts. I'm sure that someone, somewhere, had asked a question about 'alternator rebuilding' between late 2006 and late 2007... I know that I in particular asked a question about this and got an answer from someone and THAT thread is gone. I indexed the search by Date and only got maybe six or so threads between that time period mentioned before.

Oh, and thanks for the heads-up about Yahoo, although I didn't have any problems with it before the servers crashed, and I have had that email address longer than I have been on this site.

 

As far as the missing thread, providing more information, the better.

1) It's possible that the thread is in a forum that needs reindexed (but if it's an older thread, I don't think that is likely thee case - but I'm not the developer of the search engine)
2) The thread may have been moderated (soft-deleted). However, this doesn't look to be the case as I cannot find such. However, we get some reports from members suggesting that search isn't working, when I later find out that it's because a thread they were trying to find was moderated/deleted due to content.
3) The thread may have actually gotten physically deleted by accident. That is rare, but it has happened as people make mistakes.
4) Or perhaps you are not hitting on the keywords.

The search may be different, but it really does work from my daily usage. I'm not saying that due to any personal interest. In fact, I did not develop or maintain the search engine. However, I find with minimal keyword(s), the threads are found. We are now able to search based on keywords that was never possible several years ago. There's pros and cons to everything. The search engine is still "beta", and I'm sure if there is valid and constructive criticism, it will be reviewed.

If you can provide more specifics (search criticism or in regard to the missing thread), perhaps we can help.

Would this happen to be the thread?:
https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/elec...ging-some.html

It has the same link you referred to in the recent thread where you mentioned the search issue ( http://www.alternatorparts.com ).

By the way, what do you mean by "servers crashed"? I seen you stated that same response before (when I was checking your account), and I'm curious as to what you're referring to. I'm not recalling any recent server crashes, but it's possible I may be forgetting something. Most of the issues we've had in the past several months have simply been load balancing equipment issues and a few network issues. The last, real, server crash was 2-3 years ago due to a failed hard drive when we was owned by our original owner and founder. To my knowledge, we have not lost any data, especially with the crash that happened 2-3 years ago as that wasn't a database hard drive (to my knowledge - that was something I wasn't a part of).

 

That may have been the thread I was looking for. However, I do believe I had started a post about this... could be wrong, since that thread seems to be around the right time period. Either way, when I put into the search engine "alternator rebuilding", I noticed that there seemed to be a shortage of topics in 2007, certainly nowhere near the number there has been for this year or 2006 or any year before that.

Eh, either way, just thought I would bring up some questions and get some answers. May not have been what I was expecting, but I got them.

:edit: And yes, I was referring to the big server crash last year when TGO was down for a good few WEEKS. It was somewhere in the beginning of the year, IIRC...

 

Oh, and I forgot to ask one thing. When I finish writing it, how would I go about submitting a Tech Article for Bird Headlight Motor rebuilding, including pics?

 

You can send it to me via email (jt@thirdgen.org) and I'll post the article in our Tech Articles section. I don't really have a preference on the format, since it gets converted.

Thanks.