Buy Somersoft?! How much would you pay?

[jingo]

Jan and Ian don't even promote their own books, lectures or website. As I understand, they've done well in residential property, and have used some of that to support this community.

Thank you so much to both of you.

I'd like to echo the above as well. If it wasn't for Jan and Ian's books and this website, I would have given up property investment ages ago!

Regards Jason.

 

[shuggy]

Yes this board is a great resource for property investors (thanks Ian & Jan) but it looks like the front end hasn't changed much for years ... although i'm sure there has been some tweaking behind the scenes and a lot of time & effort put into it.

Sim i look forward to you finding the time to one day redesign it and upgrade it to the latest version and apply more extensions. It can be much more than a basic message board as you've proven with your zoo site.

It would be nice if these items are considered when you have the time to upgrade and redesign:
1) adjust the avatar settings to allow files bigger than 80 x 80 pixels or 9.8kb which i think is too small these days -- 150 x 100 pixels and no larger than 50Kb would be good and not too distracting (keep animated avatars and emoticons off).
2) allow attachments greater than 100Kb for doc, gif, jpeg, xls and zip files. Seems a bit odd it allows mp3 attachments up to 14.3Mb. Increasing the pdf attachments to greater than 244Kb would also be good.

Nope - the owners of the site just want it to continue to be a great resource for property investors. That was their goal when they started it, that still is their goal now.

I disagree. IPB is good - but I don't think there is a need to migrate off vB, it does everything we need it to and is extremely extensible (have a look at what I've been able to make it to on ZooChat for some examples: http://www.zoochat.com/ ). We really aren't using the capabilities of vB to their full extent at this point. I am planning a redesign of the site sometime down the track to take better advantage of what this software has to offer in the latest versions.

Jan and Ian have made it clear that they would prefer to maintain their independence and not rely on sponsorship or advertising. Advertising isn't the only business model available.

Moderators come and go. It is a volunteer position and I think the moderators we have do a great job. We do ask new people to join the team from time to time.

Jan and Ian have made it clear that they want to focus exclusively on real estate. We tolerate discussion of shares and managed funds in the off-topic area (Coffee Lounge), but would prefer people focus on property. There are plenty of other discussion forums out there which cover shares and managed funds.

The coffee lounge already does allow you talk about just about anything except where it goes against the forum rules or covers one of the few taboo topics we have on this site because (from nearly 10 years of experience on this site) they always end up breaking the forum rules.

 

[Sim]

Yes this board is a great resource for property investors (thanks Ian & Jan) but it looks like the front end hasn't changed much for years ... although i'm sure there has been some tweaking behind the scenes and a lot of time & effort put into it.

Quite true unfortunately - most of the effort has gone into maintaining the back-end (and the forums themselves). Almost no effort has gone into updating the UI in quite a few years. That was mostly deliberate (to maintain a well known look-and-feel for our users) - but I agree that it is well and truely time for an update.

The benefit of vB is that it makes it relatively easy to introduce new designs while still maintaining the old design for those people who are reluctant to change what they know.

It would be nice if these items are considered when you have the time to upgrade and redesign:
1) adjust the avatar settings to allow files bigger than 80 x 80 pixels or 9.8kb which i think is too small these days -- 150 x 100 pixels and no larger than 50Kb would be good and not too distracting (keep animated avatars and emoticons off).

I don't really think it's necessary to go beyond 80x80 for avatars - that's still the standard and I think anything bigger and we may as well have banner adverts I don't really think it gains us much by allowing bigger avatars.

2) allow attachments greater than 100Kb for doc, gif, jpeg, xls and zip files. Seems a bit odd it allows mp3 attachments up to 14.3Mb. Increasing the pdf attachments to greater than 244Kb would also be good.

Attachment restrictions were largely put in place to limit the amount of disk storage and bandwidth used by the site. While prices have decreased quite a bit, traffic on the site has grown significantly as well - so there's still quite a bit of demand on resources put on the site. That being said, I do think there is scope for revisiting those size limits - I'll put it on the to-do list.

As for the oddities - the mp3 size was increased specifically to allow for audio recordings from some of the Somersoft meetings to be uploaded, and doc and xls were deliberately kept small to discourage the use of proprietary file formats. But as I said, I do think there is justification to revisit these.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[Rolf Latham]

Hi Sim

I like it the way it is......................but then I like XP pro on all my biz PCs n notebooks coz my IT guys wont get upset with me

ta
rolf

 

[Sim]

I like it the way it is......................but then I like XP pro on all my biz PCs n notebooks coz my IT guys wont get upset with me

The site is going to see some UI changes at some point anyway - vB v4.0 is coming out soon with some fairly significant changes to the design (although I won't be upgrading as soon as it is released).

I'm not talking about anything completely radical - just updating the design to take current best-practices into consideration.

 

[shuggy]

Thanks for the reply Sim.
Yes i think 80 x 80 avatars is sufficient but a bit bigger than 10Kb would be nice if possible

 

[shuggy]

I like it the way it is......................

Upgrading a board's UI always rocks the boat a bit for those who don't like change but users generally adapt to it quickly.

Security issues (hackability) also need to be taken into consideration when distributors make these upgrades and sometimes they also change the design in the process.