Dave Ambrose

We use advertising income to pay the bills on the servers and for software maintenance. We've been seeing declining ad revenue, and I'm wondering if it's because more of our users have ad blockers on their browsers.

There is still very much a market for print. I wandered (read was dragged) into a Barnes and Noble yesterday. It had a surprising number of print magazines. Realistically, I suspect that's how they get noticed by potential readers. I don't see the need for print going away soon. Eventually, yes, but not soon. This site is primarily supported by advertising. If you have an ad blocker, please whitelist us. That has been covering the bills for a long time, but we're now seeing income from that dropping. We don't know why yet. Overall traffic is still good. We're working on that problem, and will hopefully find some answers. I suppose if it came down to it, we'd ask for donations, but we haven't even thought about those discussions yet. This site has a big footprint, and we have limited hosting options. We've been on Liquid Web for a while, and I have to say that I like them a LOT. I appreciate all the support we've been getting lately. If this forum is great, it's because we have a wonderful community of builders and affectionados. That by itself makes this forum worth continuing.

Welcome. I think paint is the one thing that gives us all problems. To the best of my knowledge, the only way to get better is practice. Fortunately, I have a couple of British cars that keep me in brake fluid so I can get a do-over.

Been listening to these two lately:

I'm not, but my father-in-law was. He was born in Big Bend, and lived in Redding for at least a while. My wife worked out of the Redding Forest Service office before we got married. Your story is a familiar one to a lot of us. I managed to maintain a low level of building when my kids were young. I even put my daughter to work detail painting for me. She did a great job too. Welcome back, and have fun in our virtual clubhouse.

I meant to say that the upgrade put us into a sufficiently current version that I can get this type of support question answered. They actually came out with another update a few days ago.

I can now that we're on the current version. Thanks!

It's going to be a week or two before I get this theme thing fixed. Please let me know if you encounter any problems. I have one report of notifications getting turned off. Please check the settings in your user profile. I'm especially interested in the dreaded 404 error.

My two dream cars MG MGA and an MG TF. Never should have sold my MGA.

There are lots of ways to do this hobby. All of them are good. When I was a kid, my first couple of models were unpainted. They were fun to build. Did they look good? Not really, but still, they were fun to build. I've progressed a bit since then. One of the things I like about model cars versus armor and aircraft is the freedom to freelance the kind of car I might build for myself. That creative element is a lot of fun for me. Super detailing is interesting. It's hard for me to do, but I'm getting better at it. Done well, it adds a lot to a model. But, sometimes, I'm more interested in the design concept, so the detailing isn't so important. I've gotten much better at discerning these situations and building accordingly. That's a lot more fun. My skills are also evolving so something that used to be hard is now fun. I have to be conscious of not adding too many hard things to a build at once. This has gotten me frustrated and stalled on more than one occasion. I boxed up the model, only to come back to it later when my skills were a better match for my ambitions and have fun with it.

That's a great reason to be stoked. Thanks for sharing it.

I'm still working on it. I'm in the unfortunate situation where the forum vendor is pointing their finger at the theme vendor who points their finger at the forum vendor. And, I don't have a clue by 4 long enough to reach either one. ? I'll be taking the site offline in a week or two for some other maintenance, but no plans for any multi-hour down times yet.

Double check the notification settings in your member profile. I know some of the behind the scenes settings got munched in the upgrade. PM me if you need help.

The usual way is to open Windows Explorer (or the Mac equivalent). Then, drag and drop the files to the paperclip at the bottom of your reply. They will get uploaded to our server. After they upload, you put the cursor where you want the photo, and click on the lower left corner of the photo you want to insert. That will include it in the posting. Do that for all the photos and you're done. You can also copy photos from your browser, and paste them directly into your posts.

I want to say this is unreal. Except that the exact opposite is true. This looks so real, you'd have a very hard time telling the difference between the model and the real one. Truly a magnum opus.

Please post them straight to the site. Sooner or later, these photo sharing companies that are losing money will have to do something to increase their revenues, and they won't much care how their users feel about it.

No. A linked image has no limit. The limit is on uploaded files. It seems to be working fine for me as of just now. There are times when the system will slow down. People get home from work and, guess what they want to read? Yup. Us. It can get slow late at night. It's busily making backups, and it takes a surprising amount of computing horsepower to do that. Also, sometimes these photo hosting services have problems of their own, or the companies providing their Internet connectivity have problems. Or our hosting company has to go to battle stations. Sometimes a little box in a dark room decides it doesn't want to be a little box any more and it decides to be a fireball instead. Google sysadmin war stories for more examples.

The problem with external sites is that they can change their minds about what they'll let you link to. Photobucket rather famously disallowed free linking unless you gave them a few hundred per year. We lost all of Harry's pictures that way. It's now much better for us to host them ourselves. That way, we can't get treated that way again. If you do run into a size limitation, we can increase it again. Disk space is cheap, and we have rather a lot of it right now.

We had some database problems that needed immediate attention. After that, I triggered the forum upgrade. The opportunity was there, and we needed to do it. It didn't go well. Some folks at Invision stayed up late putting things right, and we seem to be functioning again. We're still not quite where we need to be. I have a theme that controls the forum's appearance that isn't loading. I'll have to address that tomorrow. Right now, you can read and post, but possibly some things aren't working, or work differently. Please hold on to any problems until I get the new theme installed. While this was inconvenient, and still is, we'd have to go through this sooner or later. I think sooner is better. There was no way to anticipate these problems. We were going to have to work through them regardless, and better to do that while the support personnel are available. Thank you for your continued patience and support. I'll have things running well as soon as I can. With any luck, I'll have the theme problem figured out by tomorrow. I'll post any updates below.

PM me your new email address and I'll change it. You can't do it yourself.

Sorry about that, Chief. Should be better now.

I saw one at Scranton too. You have to see it in person. It will be visiting SoCal in early October. I think a railfan expedition is in order.

I hope surgery and rehab go well. I've recently been through a major illness, and it takes longer than we want to heal.

I've been using Windows 10 since it came out. It definitely works better than 7 in some ways. I haven't had any crashes on 10, which is saying something. I'm not thrilled with the start menu, but you can find software to put that back to the Windows 7 style. There's no way I would connect an unsupported system to the Internet, even with a firewall. Things are bad enough already, and there's no point in asking for trouble. Just ask Experian. Definitely make sure you have enough RAM and disk space. If you have to upgrade your disk, I heartily recommend an SSD. I have a 10 year old laptop that runs like a champ on an SSD.

I didn't get a picture, but I saw a lovely Franklin. I think it was a Torpedo Phaeton, but it went by too fast for a picture. I have a feeling there are a lot of super interesting cars around here. Oddly enough, this isn't the only Franklin I've encountered around here.