New Forum Platform Coming Soon!

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SHaines

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Apr 9, 2019
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Greetings!

We want to take a quick moment to thank all of you for being part of our Practical Caravan and Practical Motorhome communities. It’s incredibly important to us that you receive the support and attention you deserve, so we have some exciting news to share with you all today.

While looking over the features available to you in your current forums, we’ve discovered that the experience isn’t all it could be. To bring the forums up to date with new features that will serve you well for years to come, we’re going to migrate the existing forums to the Xenforo platform.

A bit about Xenforo:

  • Security is improved substantially in the new platform.
  • Development in XenForo is more active and is based on a modern framework
  • The learning curve for all of you should be small, as Xenforo is quite intuitive and user friendly. We actually have several forums running on Xenforo already, including Space.com Forums, if you’d like to check those out.
  • Extra built-in features like spam prevention that are stricter and more effective
  • It has a vast library of addons that will help us continue to quickly add new features for years to come, as technologies develop.
  • Responsive design that scales resolution and provides a substantially improved mobile-friendly interface, for when you want to stay in touch with the community while traveling
  • A built in image gallery for posting pictures directly into threads

As we get a set schedule in place for the migration, we’ll continue to keep you all updated with the latest news. Expect this to happen early next year.

Because the Practical Caravan and Practical Motorhome forums are both currently active, it will require making a copy of the forums in Xenforo. What that means to all of you is that there will come a period of time (that we’ll tell you about in advance) where posts made after a specific time will not be migrated over to Xenforo, so they will be lost in the process.

This will also mean some period of the forums being offline completely while data is transferred to Xenforo. We’re going to keep this window of time to an absolutely minimum, but believe that the end result of the vastly improved forums should make the move worthwhile.

Part of the process for improving your experience in the forums is to keep a robust number of users that can all share their experiences in one convenient place. To accomplish that goal we’re also planning to make one forum that will cover both motor homes and caravans. The two separate Editorial sites will remain exactly as they are, but using a shared forum with categories that will serve both communities well.

Please let us know your thoughts, or ask any questions you may have.Once the migration is complete and we can all enjoy faster page loading, improved security, reduced spam, and new social features (like direct messages), you’ll see an incredibly strong foundation on which to build an exciting future.

Thanks so much for being part of the Practical Caravan and Practical Motorhome communities!

- The Community Team
 
Jul 15, 2008
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I get it that the forum is owned by an advertising company and that you are well justified in moving to a new platform that prohibits viewing your forums if an advertisement blocker is in use.

Will the new platform function if add blockers are in use?
I am guessing not.
 

Parksy

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Nov 12, 2009
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Hi Bill
I'm not sure what effect ad blockers wil have when this forum migrates to the new platform, but I registered with the space forum from Allen the Aliens link and I didn't notice any intrusive adverts on that website so there's no reason to suppose that intrusive advertising will greatly impact on us when we make the move.
 
May 7, 2012
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Thanks for the update. I am happy to wait and see what happens before making any judgement but do agree that combining the two forums might help as there is a certain amount of the content that would work for members of both.
 
Mar 24, 2014
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Guzzilazz said:
Ad Blockers inspect the html content, so they are independent of the hosting platform

Ad Blockers can be detected and the site may request that you disable the Ad Blocker to enter the site (there are a number of news web sites which already do this). It is, of course, ultimately the user's decision whether to do so or to go elswhere.
 

SHaines

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Gafferbill said:
I get it that the forum is owned by an advertising company and that you are well justified in moving to a new platform that prohibits viewing your forums if an advertisement blocker is in use.

Will the new platform function if add blockers are in use?
I am guessing not.

Hey there,

Ad blockers won't block access to the new forum, no. In most cases, active, registered users are actually exempt from seeing ads. I'm not positive how it will be setup here since it's still a couple months away, but I suspect it'll be fairly similar.

Ads are a way to help forums pay for upkeep, which is why they do indeed serve an important function, but the most important thing to any forum is a happy community of forum users. What makes users happy is to have a minimal amount of disruption in their viewing experience.

Once it's up and running, just come by and check it out. We're happy to hear all the feedback folks will have.
 
Jun 20, 2005
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After many years of this Forum being in the Wilderness it is encouraging to hear Allen the Alien’s proposed developments for the future.
The proof will be in the pudding, fingers crossed.
I like what I hear so far :cheer:
 
Sep 26, 2018
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Having just gone through a change in software on a Kuga forum, we all need as users to sit on our hands immediately after the change, as it will take some getting used to for navigating the forum in our individual ways. When it occurs it will be a good idea to have a "New Forum Hints and Tips" thread so that "how do I?" questions can be posted and hopefully answered by both Allen the Alien and other users...
 

SHaines

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Apr 9, 2019
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Hey again!

I'm closing up this thread for the original announcement and want to direct folks to post their comments in the new thread that calls out the specific date of the migration:
https://www.practicalcaravan.com/forum/general/58393-forum-downtime-migration-begins-11-december

It has been moved up to this week, so please chime in there with any questions you may have.

Thanks very much!
 
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