Update about WRT - Website Images & Other stuff

[Mark]

You may have noticed a few changes - I have removed the Gallery section and the CMS pages app from the site as it costs too much to 'rent' those modules with comparatively very little use by members - it just did not make sense to keep them going. I apologise if this inconveniences or annoys anybody but I think it is better to keep the core of this website to be a discussion forum.

The WRT website is costing me a lot of money per month to run and I am making a few changes to help with that - there is a little income from eBay affiliate ads but not enough to cover the cost of hosting and some help from Patrons and for this we are very grateful. The site has over 30GB in uploaded media now!!! And the notification emails generated is quite high too - I have to use a separate company to handle this so that the site doesn't get email black-listed. One of these services suddenly and without notice stopped our service a few months ago and it was a few days before anybody even noticed (password reset emails were no longer working). I did manage to find a new email provider and things have been running smoothly ever since.

Getting back to the uploaded media, as mentioned it's over 30GB and this covers images in topics going back several years. I do back this up every night and I backup the site database every hour in order to protect the content should we ever have a disaster I have a Synology NAS here in the office which has a full backup on and I also keep a backup offsite on a cloud service. 

I have also decided to use Amazon Cloudfront to host all the uploaded media. I am in the process of migrating this content over and you may notice broken images for a very short period during the migration. But ultimately this will maintain and even improve performance of the site.

Anyway, all being said, this is a fantastic community and I am fully committed to continuing with it's administration, keeping our little corner of the net alive

- Just a little update to let you know what's happening - 

[dadistic]

Appreciate all your hard work, WRT is the best watch related forum that I know of. 

Cheers!

[Mark]

many images now broken. Please know that it will take several hours to complete, but it's going well so far.

[dadistic]

I noticed :-)

[Lenj]

Thanks Mark, we ALL appreciate all your hard work that you do to keep this "GREAT" site up and running..

Len

 

[oldhippy]

Thank you Mark. I love this site and helping out. It keeps me sane. 

[Watcher]

Another tribute to your work keeping all of the previous valuable posts alive and of course your Invaluable You Tube series that has actually created many watch enthusiasts. One tentative suggestion is that you incorporate an automatic welcome message to new members signed by yourself. This would avoid the clutter of individual messages from members, some of which may, in part, be to increase their 'Popular Contribtors' score. It might even be advantageous to remove this section.

[jdm]

1 hour ago, Watcher said:

One tentative suggestion is that you incorporate an automatic welcome message to new members signed by yourself. This would avoid the clutter of individual messages from members, some of which may, in part, be to increase their 'Popular Contribtors' score. It might even be advantageous to remove this section.

Sorry, which clutter? If you are not interested in that section or any other just look for new postings in the sections that you like to read.

I think that it's just polite to introduce oneself before asking questions as this is a friendly forum unlike Quora and other fast-paced, solution-oriented ones. As well polite to extend a personal welcome, perhaps with some appropriate line, that said from somebody that doesn't do that much often.

[TheFixer]

Thank you Mark.

[Mark]

Another tribute to your work keeping all of the previous valuable posts alive and of course your Invaluable You Tube series that has actually created many watch enthusiasts. One tentative suggestion is that you incorporate an automatic welcome message to new members signed by yourself. This would avoid the clutter of individual messages from members, some of which may, in part, be to increase their 'Popular Contribtors' score. It might even be advantageous to remove this section.

Yes we already have an auto-welcome for each new user and we actually encourage people to introduce themselves in that welcome message. So it's by design


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[Mark]

All images should be transferred to Amazon cloud now. Let me know if you spot any broken images.

[clockboy]

Thanks Mark, this site is by far the most comprehensive and useful on the internet for all levels who are interested in horology. Have you ever considered allowing advertising on the site from companies such as Horotec etc. to help with the costs. 

[Mark]

1 hour ago, clockboy said:

Thanks Mark, this site is by far the most comprehensive and useful on the internet for all levels who are interested in horology. Have you ever considered allowing advertising on the site from companies such as Horotec etc. to help with the costs. 

Happy to entertain queries of course

[vinn3]

On ‎11‎/‎19‎/‎2019 at 2:15 AM, Mark said:

Happy to entertain queries of course

   Mark;  could you remove my post (miss spelld)  from september?  thanks vinn

[Mark]

   Mark;  could you remove my post (miss spelld)  from september?  thanks vinn

Not sure what you mean???

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[vinn3]

2 minutes ago, Mark said:

Not sure what you mean???

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   remove, sept.  4 post  requesting "Manule"  thanks.

[Mark]

   remove, sept.  4 post  requesting "Manule"  thanks.

Please go to the post and report the post. Enter that you want to delete the post in the reason.

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[vinn3]

On ‎11‎/‎18‎/‎2019 at 4:42 AM, Mark said:

many images now broken. Please know that it will take several hours to complete, but it's going well so far.

      where will the images go?

[Mark]

All images for this website are now hosted on my Amazon S3 cloud account. This speeds up the site considerably as Amazon detects where you are geographically located and serves you the media from the nearest data-center to you. There is nothing you need to do your end, it's all automatic. This is doubly convenient as 30GB is a lot of data to move should we want to change hosting providers. I hope this explains things.

I will close this thread now as the announcement has served it's purpose