Is it about to get busy on here? Blatchat to close...

[buzzer]

ash73 said:

Supplied in bits, but called "kits"... love the careful wordsmithing

Or... Lotus sold them as kits, Caterham sell them as kits = they are kit cars.

No No NO! They are component cars... definitely NOT kit cars... they come from the factory as a collection of COMPONENTS… Not in a kit of parts. In the eyes of a Caterham owner using the term “kit car” is a derogatory term that should never be used in the context of their cars… that term should only be used for much lesser cars like Westfields, Dax, and numerous others…. But definitely NOT for a Caterham.

Best not to use the words “kit car” around a Caterham owner as this upsets them and they will spend hours debating, playing on words, delving into minutiae and trying to convince you they are a cut above a mere kit car…

[framerateuk]

Eugene7 said:

Or try this site - another of the ones I look after for a mate: http://www.tallyho-barkway.co.uk/

Nice looking site that Steve!

Strange they didn't consider it, but then, if they don't have someone aware of such things, they wouldn't have known to ask for it. We get it with clients all the time who thing they want something, but it's usually because they aren't aware of what they really need. I wouldn't dream of not producing a site that doesn;t work on mobiles/tablets these days.

[BertBert]

wow, had a look at the new site. Been a watcher on the old site for a few years having decided that £45 is too much to post on a forum.

But really, REALLY? The people responsible should be utterly ashamed of themselves. I am feeling Victor Meldrew levels of angst. That is just utter ste. I guarantee that I could give my kids the task and they'd do a better job with with wordpress for pocket money.

Complete and utter tts.

Bert

[IBDAET]

I think the new site is very poor in terms of its contrast from an onlien accesibility perspective, but that pails into insignificance with what I am about to say.

By making tech talk "Members Only" the Lotus Seven Club has taken it upon themselves to take intellectual property it does not own, and charge people to use view it. This is plain and simple IPR theft from the authors of the posts.

I for one will be writing to the Lotus Seven Club and asking them exactly when and where from they got any licence to resell the information in posts I and others made.

[buzzer]

IBDAET said:

I think the new site is very poor in terms of its contrast from an onlien accesibility perspective, but that pails into insignificance with what I am about to say.

By making tech talk "Members Only" the Lotus Seven Club has taken it upon themselves to take intellectual property it does not own, and charge people to use view it. This is plain and simple IPR theft from the authors of the posts.

I for one will be writing to the Lotus Seven Club and asking them exactly when and where from they got any licence to resell the information in posts I and others made.

I didn't realise they had made Tech Talk members only? I cant see it on the site now though...

If they have, what a disgustingly spiteful thing to do... not only from the fact that all that knowledge given free by the members since 1998 is effectively now hidden, but any prospective new purchaser has lost the ability to do any research.

I have to say that I would now NEVER re-join the club under the current management.

[RobGT81]

I guess there is some small print somewhere saying that anything posted on forums becomes property of the forum owner? Or words to that effect.

Having said that, the tech talk section is one of the most valuable and helpful parts of the entire Caterham community. I don't think it does the Caterham community any favours at all to lock it to non-members. The read only permissions seemed a nice compromise and helps potential new owners feel a little more at ease with their new toy.

It's blatchats train set at the end of the day though. Maybe we could get a technical section on here up and running.

[fergus]

buzzer said:

No No NO! They are component cars... definitely NOT kit cars... they come from the factory as a collection of COMPONENTS… Not in a kit of parts. In the eyes of a Caterham owner using the term “kit car” is a derogatory term that should never be used in the context of their cars… that term should only be used for much lesser cars like Westfields, Dax, and numerous others…. But definitely NOT for a Caterham.

Best not to use the words “kit car” around a Caterham owner as this upsets them and they will spend hours debating, playing on words, delving into minutiae and trying to convince you they are a cut above a mere kit car…

Do people actually care what their cars are referred to as?

The fact that most of teh current crop of "kit" cars have more thought put into their design than Caterham would appear to get lost on most (caterham) owners. Yes, I own an SLR....

At some point all cars could be considered kit/component cars, albeit some of these are assembled on multi £ production lines slightly larger than a poorly equipped single garage.

[fergus]

IBDAET said:

I think the new site is very poor in terms of its contrast from an onlien accesibility perspective, but that pails into insignificance with what I am about to say.

By making tech talk "Members Only" the Lotus Seven Club has taken it upon themselves to take intellectual property it does not own, and charge people to use view it. This is plain and simple IPR theft from the authors of the posts.

I for one will be writing to the Lotus Seven Club and asking them exactly when and where from they got any licence to resell the information in posts I and others made.

Arnie, request a cut of royalties earnt, or charge them a licensing fee.

Especially given the pains that went into the disclaimers on the "old site" referring to all views expressed being those of the poster and not "the club".

The whole concept of a "management team" for the L7C and the powers they give themselves is farcical at best. Not the type of guys you'd want to share a beer with?

[fergus]

RobGT81 said:

Having said that, the tech talk section is one of the most valuable and helpful parts of the entire Caterham community. I don't think it does the Caterham community any favours at all to lock it to non-members. The read only permissions seemed a nice compromise and helps potential new owners feel a little more at ease with their new toy.

Don't let common sense, and any sense of community get in the way of the mal informed opinions of a small group of people though.

[Eugene7]

I have to agree that making TechTalk members only is a very stupid decision...
Many new-to-7 owners would look at it for help, and then join the club based on the help provided.
But, very few people will join the club to gain access to TechTalk - that's just human nature.

Once again the 'team' are making themselves and the club appear aloof and uncaring of the members views.
The exact reason a bunch of use quit the club and set about our own totally open and not-for-profit forum - 7-DNA.

And the result of the new appalling 7 Club website (not just the forum - the website really is crap too!) has been a large increase in people signing up for 7-DNA...

As much as I enjoy the banter on 7-DNA it is a real shame for those that still want to support the 7 Club - they have been totally let-down!

[Eugene7]

framerateuk said:

Nice looking site that Steve!

Thanks - appreciate the comment!

I only do it for fun, but it does show how easy it is really...

[PAULJA]

Eugene7 said:

I have to agree that making TechTalk members only is a very stupid decision...
Many new-to-7 owners would look at it for help, and then join the club based on the help provided.
But, very few people will join the club to gain access to TechTalk - that's just human nature.

Why not operate a 2 tier membership i.e forum only membership £10 so you have full access to the forum but non of the club benefits and full membership as you have now @ £xx.xx

[RedCat7]

Making Tech Talk members only is an own goal IMO.
After asking for help in Tech Talk, I've been contacted and helped by non-members with solutions via Blatmail. If they can no longer view then they can no longer help members this way, which I think devalues the membership.
TT was also one one the things that attracted me to the club - one benefit of joining the club (being able to ask for advice on Blatchat) was obvious for non-members to see.

Edited by RedCat7 on Thursday 2nd October 12:58

[Mabbs9]

PAULJA said:

Why not operate a 2 tier membership i.e forum only membership £10 so you have full access to the forum but non of the club benefits and full membership as you have now @ £xx.xx

I like that idea. I've not been a member for nearly 2yrs after selling my 7 but I've enjoyed reading Blatchat since.

[Eugene7]

2 tier membership was discussed while I was still a member...
Like pushing a snowball up-hill in searing heat!

[7heavensoon]

I know it's only a forum, but after making almost 15,000 posts over about 11 years, I am really annoyed with what has happened to Blatchat.

The management team seem to have completely lost touch with a large part of the membership with their recent actions.

The forum is a complete dogs dinner, although a number of members are working hard to fix this which is great. Making Tech talk members only is ridiculous - the content was provided by the posters at no cost for the good of owners and potential owners everywhere . To charge for this with no notice is not on in my view. I hope members who are posting use the open forums for technical issues until the management see sense.

In the past, I've happily paid subs solely for Blatchat, and have never really used the club site at all. Really not sure I'll bother continuing paying when my subscription runs out.

[buzzer]

7heavensoon said:

The management team seem to have completely lost touch with a large part of the membership with their recent actions.

Agreed, its arrogance of the highest order.

All the technical contributions made with goodwill by people including myself have now been lost. poor show.

So many people are saying they wont renew the membership. In a way I hope the club fails and that forces a change of management and the way its run. Time will tell.

[AVES]

You know that the response will be that you can't please all of the people all of the time without any introspection as to how recent incumbents have moved the club and forum from an interesting and informative one with a bit of banter to what amounts to the autistic ramblings of a few billy no mates

[Krismuss]

Banter is definitely frowned upon now, unless of course you want someone to provide numerous links to past threads containing similar banter from years past because that's really helpful

[PurpleMeanie]

Eugene7 said:

If it was 'bespoke' I'd (kind of) agree - but it's not, it's Drupal modules...

Except it isn't really is it. The bespoke stuff will be the integration work for the membership function, which works across the whole site so will need to hook in to each module. The integration of the various tech areas into a single search. The migration of the data. It isn't trivial. It isn't "a website" that you can knock up in 10 minutes.

You are willfully ignoring this for your own purposes (one assume you get told off one to many times about linking to your site from BC). And willfully ignoring when others, with possibly more experience of charging for complex website creation, are saying.

framerateuk said:

Eugene7 said:

The last figure I heard was in excess of £30K - I understand that figure went up...

That sounds about right to me to be honest. There's a lot of functionality on the site including membership, forum, profiles, news and events, member blogs and no doubt other things. Plus the design of the site too. Web sites aren't cheap when they're bespoke builds.

As here. I think £30k is not unreasonable, given the complexity. Now, you can argue that the requirement to have such a complex signup process isn't part of the Minimum Viable Product if you want. And I am not suggesting that the current site is anything like an MVP, but responsive designs, and quoting, and all the other stuff that people seem to think they MUST have...can all be added later. Release the MVP. Have it actually being used - there really is no substitute for "testing in the wild".

Eugene7 said:

And I agree, for any website/forum to not be responsive in this day and age is a major no-no!
All the websites/forums I do are responsive...

Whilst I think the L7C should be responsive, it simply isn't the case that ALL websites should be. And it often isn't as simple as just picking a responsive "theme" from whatever tool you are using. Are you *really* hand crafting the response points in code, and if so why ? Or just doing what everyone else producing a simple site does and select a template that will move the basic elements about for you ?

Eugene7 said:

framerateuk said:

Nice looking site that Steve!

Thanks - appreciate the comment!

I only do it for fun, but it does show how easy it is really...

Yes, it is easy. I could knock up the same site very rapidly. But it is pretty generic, and doesn't include many of the things that I would expect from a site in 2014, no infinite scrolling, no parallax, no animation on mouse over. Ok, the parallax thing is over, so we can leave that out There is no engagement, no blog, no personalisation, no real people just generic copy, no feed from Facebook (cake Friday for example) you have a twitter social icon that probably came with the template but they don't have a twitter account, although the link to Tripadvisor is nice.

http://www.clockjackoven.com/ is a bit more current (not our build but we did some social promotion and marketing for them).

Notice that on a mobile "Find us" is in prime mobile finger press position. And the stuff you want to know (when it is open) on mobile is up the top. Because we know the mobile user journey because we have analytics on the site (which you don't, in 2014 !) we can optimise for it. Yours is on the bottom.

However...the point is not that a poncey London restaurant has a swanky website, but that you almost certainly don't need all those things. But you will never know what people DO need if you aren't working out their behavior. You can't ask people what they want, they almost never know. What they think they want and what they do are rarely the same. So we spend a lot of time analysing eye and mouse movements and testing.

People seem to be able to post quite a lot on the new forum. So it works ! Build from there, not from where you imagine the future to be. Maybe your hunches are right, people are screaming for features, and when you implement them they are used. But don't guess in advance. THAT is a waste of money.

None of this means I think the site is easy on the eye or has anything like the feature set it should have. But to do that all up front, rather that follow what is a pretty well trodden path of web app development, is the wrong thing to do.