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Hi Guest !
Welcome to the 500Eboard forum.
Since its founding in late 2008, 500Eboard has become the leading resource on the Internet for all things related to the Mercedes-Benz 500E and E500. In recent years, we have also expanded to include the 400E and E420 models, which are directly related to the 500E/E500.
We invite you to browse and take advantage of the information and resources here on the site. If you find helpful information, please register for full membership, and you'll find even more resources available. Feel free to ask questions, and make liberal use of the "Search" function to find answers.
We hope you will become an active contributor to the community!
Sincerely,
500Eboard Management
Thanks so much for keeping this site going, Gerry!
- Thread starter Mark S
- Start date
Thanks for your note. It's a pleasure to keep and maintain this site for everyone as a cost-free resource. Although my wife is NOT very happy with me at the moment, because I spent about 18 hours (finally went to sleep at 5AM Central time this morning as JelmerBass and I were corresponding together, and got up at 7:20 AM for work) yesterday on this migration and neglected the family on a weekend
Cheers,
Gerry
Jepp also, definitely Thank you Gerry 
Thank you Gerry 
+1 with that option.
It won't get old at all by us thanking you profusely for the Herculean effort you've singlehandedly undertaken to improve everything in the site. Although I may not post often, I do visit the (old) site regularly and with my crazy hairy schedule, I just now - this past weekend- finally took photos of my mistress which I owe a long standing introduction! Thanks again, bud!
Thanks and I'm also glad that you were able to update your avatar. it tells me that the function is working OK because I had carried over everyone's avatars and signature photos from the old site (did this manually). Thanks again !
Cheers,
Gerry
Oooh, that's why you replied so slowly! (j/k)Thanks for your note. It's a pleasure to keep and maintain this site for everyone as a cost-free resource. Although my wife is NOT very happy with me at the moment, because I spent about 18 hours (finally went to sleep at 5AM Central time this morning as JelmerBass and I were corresponding together, and got up at 7:20 AM for work) yesterday on this migration and neglected the family on a weekend
Cheers,
Gerry
Also, thanks. I'm sure I'll stick around for quite a while. Who knows, I might even make a useful contribution in a while
Let me know if you have trouble hosting the site or you have bandwidth issues, I can help with that (for free).
I am using a new hoster with this new (migrated) site -- a company called 1&1 which is quite reputable. The old hoster (I still have the 500Espot.com site running so that I can pull photos/attachments off of it) was not as reliable as I would have liked so I am only going to keep my personal domains/accounts/e-mail system there and keep everything that is 500E-related here.
Thanks for your offer !!
Cheers,
Gerry
Let's let GSXR explain that, since he seemed to have the same problem and I think has figured it all out. Right Dave ?!?
Just read the Vbulletin Documentation, actually everything is explained there. Hehe
On a side note: Personally, i don't like Vbulltin from a server-side perspective - its to over-loaded and resource-hungry. In the past my own Forums that i hosted/administrated all used SMF - Simple machines Forum. Together with their countless of free addons and a nice self-made Template its as good (or better) than Vbulletin and its free
However Vbulletin is way better than the old Burning Board or whatever that was... Hehe.
If you ever would need help with administration, let me know... I'm an ex Web-Designer/Linux Server-Admin with keypoint of administrating websites hosted on servers.
On a side note: Personally, i don't like Vbulltin from a server-side perspective - its to over-loaded and resource-hungry. In the past my own Forums that i hosted/administrated all used SMF - Simple machines Forum. Together with their countless of free addons and a nice self-made Template its as good (or better) than Vbulletin and its free
However Vbulletin is way better than the old Burning Board or whatever that was... Hehe.
If you ever would need help with administration, let me know... I'm an ex Web-Designer/Linux Server-Admin with keypoint of administrating websites hosted on servers.
I thought long and hard about moving from phpBB to vBulletin. And I did it for both tactical and strategic reasons.
Tactical: There are hundreds of forums out there, many of them (like phpBB) free or low-cost. However, they are not updated all that often with bug-fixes and security patches. vBulletin is definitely very well-supported and new features and functionality are added regularly. With phpBB and other forums, you have to add "mods" which often can "break" the board during installation, or have to be re-modded after a new software revision of the board is released. And even then, often with new releases, mods for older versions don't work. With vBulletin, there is a ton of features/functionality included (so not as much modding is required).
Strategic: vBulletin is not only a forum but really a fully functional content management system (CMS) if you want to license/add those modules. There is definitely a ton of headroom to grow and/or add functionality if this site grows. Also, the 500Ecstasy site used vBulletin, and one key reason I changed over to vBulletin was because if there was ever a decision to merge the old 500Ecstasy site with this one, it would be MUCH easier technically to merge forums that are based on the same platform. I have had some discussions (earlier this year) with Scott and Benny about this, and although there are no plans nor active discussions underway to do so, if we ever decided to do it, having this site on vBulletin would pave the way for a much more seamless integration. It would be my goal someday to have the sites combined as that site's resources are really fantastic (although this site is growing nicely and is accelerating, with much of the key content already here).
Hope this helps explain things a bit.
Cheers,
Gerry
Tactical: There are hundreds of forums out there, many of them (like phpBB) free or low-cost. However, they are not updated all that often with bug-fixes and security patches. vBulletin is definitely very well-supported and new features and functionality are added regularly. With phpBB and other forums, you have to add "mods" which often can "break" the board during installation, or have to be re-modded after a new software revision of the board is released. And even then, often with new releases, mods for older versions don't work. With vBulletin, there is a ton of features/functionality included (so not as much modding is required).
Strategic: vBulletin is not only a forum but really a fully functional content management system (CMS) if you want to license/add those modules. There is definitely a ton of headroom to grow and/or add functionality if this site grows. Also, the 500Ecstasy site used vBulletin, and one key reason I changed over to vBulletin was because if there was ever a decision to merge the old 500Ecstasy site with this one, it would be MUCH easier technically to merge forums that are based on the same platform. I have had some discussions (earlier this year) with Scott and Benny about this, and although there are no plans nor active discussions underway to do so, if we ever decided to do it, having this site on vBulletin would pave the way for a much more seamless integration. It would be my goal someday to have the sites combined as that site's resources are really fantastic (although this site is growing nicely and is accelerating, with much of the key content already here).
Hope this helps explain things a bit.
Cheers,
Gerry
Thanks gerry for that explanation and with the planned merging this makes of course much more sens
Well, but as a "hint", please never compare SMF to all those "other" (free) Forums Softwares out there... Vbulletin is also *not* the holy grail, definitely not.... I have had a larger RPG Forums based on SMF for around 4 years, at the same time i was team-member of another game-forums aswell as a FXP-Board, both based on Vbulletin (Version 2.x.x up to 3.7.x). I was able to directly compare both and my conclusion was that SMF, although it was free, was much easier to administrate even though the functionality in detail was way way higher.
SMF also has with Addons/Modules full CMS capability and way way way way way way more. Its fully from the base customizable. The Source-Code of every PHP-File is fully open, as opposed to Vbulletin. You get the same amount of first-hand support from the programmers themselves or a dedicated support-staff on their forums. The community with "millions" of registered users is breathtaking, extremely polite and friendly. There is also a company behind it, which earns money primarily from Ads and paid support-memberships for commercial users, who will then get a support which goes so far, that they set you the things up you don't know/able to/whatever - they even install it for you.
So now enough advertised for SMF.... xD Feel free to ignore it, or take a look at SMF on some famous "PHP-Board rating websites".
Well,
but as a "hint", please never compare SMF to all those "other" (free) Forums Softwares out there... Vbulletin is also *not* the holy grail, definitely not.... I have had a larger RPG Forums based on SMF for around 4 years, at the same time i was team-member of another game-forums aswell as a FXP-Board, both based on Vbulletin (Version 2.x.x up to 3.7.x). I was able to directly compare both and my conclusion was that SMF, although it was free, was much easier to administrate even though the functionality in detail was way way higher.SMF also has with Addons/Modules full CMS capability and way way way way way way more. Its fully from the base customizable. The Source-Code of every PHP-File is fully open, as opposed to Vbulletin. You get the same amount of first-hand support from the programmers themselves or a dedicated support-staff on their forums. The community with "millions" of registered users is breathtaking, extremely polite and friendly. There is also a company behind it, which earns money primarily from Ads and paid support-memberships for commercial users, who will then get a support which goes so far, that they set you the things up you don't know/able to/whatever - they even install it for you.
So now enough advertised for SMF.... xD Feel free to ignore it, or take a look at SMF on some famous "PHP-Board rating websites".
Since I just made the transition to vBulletin (which was more than a year in the planning, prototyping and then execution) I'm going to standardize on it. I have given Glen and GSXR full administrative privileges (and they will also shortly be getting all database passwords and domain information) so that if/when I die or otherwise become incapacitated, that this site can continue on with no problems.
I know there are some other really great php-based forum packages (I really never had any complaints with phpBB and actually had some last-minute thoughts about moving to vBulletin about a week ago) that are moddable, well supported, and very extensible. And I won't knock them (except the Drupal Forums implementation as done by the Mercedes-Benz Club of America (www.mbca.org), which was a horrible transition FROM vBulletin which was working just fine). And yes the phpBB was very easy to administer -- vBulletin is probably 3x as complex to manage just because of all the options and considerations that have to be made to tune the forum (which I'm still actively doing, turning on and off features to see how they are, tweaking settings, etc.). But I did a lot of research and having been in the high-tech industry for the past 20 years, there's (like with anything in a capitalist system) no free lunch. In general you get what you pay for, and vBulletin is a paid system and you can see it in how it is supported and maintained. It is very active as compared to the "free" forums that are run by smaller companies and as open-source projects (phpBB) where operators have to be much more technical to get the most out of them.
vBulletin isn't the be-all end-all of forums but as I said for the reasons above -- particularly if 500Ecstasy were ever to come back into being -- which many of us put our blood sweat and tears into ..... then I think being on vBulletin would be the best solution from a technical standpoint. And I am actually liking this new software. It's been working well so far as I continue to tweak it.
Cheers,
Gerry
I know there are some other really great php-based forum packages (I really never had any complaints with phpBB and actually had some last-minute thoughts about moving to vBulletin about a week ago) that are moddable, well supported, and very extensible. And I won't knock them (except the Drupal Forums implementation as done by the Mercedes-Benz Club of America (www.mbca.org), which was a horrible transition FROM vBulletin which was working just fine). And yes the phpBB was very easy to administer -- vBulletin is probably 3x as complex to manage just because of all the options and considerations that have to be made to tune the forum (which I'm still actively doing, turning on and off features to see how they are, tweaking settings, etc.). But I did a lot of research and having been in the high-tech industry for the past 20 years, there's (like with anything in a capitalist system) no free lunch. In general you get what you pay for, and vBulletin is a paid system and you can see it in how it is supported and maintained. It is very active as compared to the "free" forums that are run by smaller companies and as open-source projects (phpBB) where operators have to be much more technical to get the most out of them.
vBulletin isn't the be-all end-all of forums but as I said for the reasons above -- particularly if 500Ecstasy were ever to come back into being -- which many of us put our blood sweat and tears into ..... then I think being on vBulletin would be the best solution from a technical standpoint. And I am actually liking this new software. It's been working well so far as I continue to tweak it.
Cheers,
Gerry