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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
500Eboard Status & Philosophy (w/regard to 500Ecstasy)
- Thread starter 400Eric
- Start date
My 500E and C126 ownership would not have been possible without this board. It has enhanced my ownership experience knowing this forum is here to help me out out. In return I love to create content when I get to tasks that have not been documented on the forum. The organization, moderation, and HOW-TOs are top notch. I haven't noticed any dip in quality as the numbers continue to grow.
Last edited:
Ricardo,
We are fortunate that things have been very stable, with really no drama whatsoever, for the past 18-24 months. It has not always been so. But even at its worst point, the drama here has never been anything like is seen at other MB-related forums.
The best way to combat problems is strong, consistent moderation of the forum. Sort of like strong, consistent parenting of children
Cheers,
Gerry
We are fortunate that things have been very stable, with really no drama whatsoever, for the past 18-24 months. It has not always been so. But even at its worst point, the drama here has never been anything like is seen at other MB-related forums.
The best way to combat problems is strong, consistent moderation of the forum. Sort of like strong, consistent parenting of children
Cheers,
Gerry
Winding up the July 4 weekend here in the USA, 6:59 AM Eastern Daylight Time, and I haven't done it yet, so it's about time for the annual "State of the 500Eboard" address....
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum currently sits at 7,750+ members ... a number that would likely be above 8,000, but I have been judiciously "pruning" members whose e-mail addresses have bounced and who have not been active/logged in for at least the last 4 years. This comes down to about 1-2 "old" accounts per day that have been abandoned.
This month marks our seventh (and last) full year of being on the vBulletin platform.
Fortunately, as with 2017, on a subjective and cultural basis we had pretty much ZERO drama on the forum this past year. We, fortunately, had no significant site outages -- in contrast with 2017, when problems with the hosting company led the forum to be "down" for several days. I was very careful this year in proactively monitoring things and working behind the scenes to head off any potential issues at the pass.
The forum did seem to survive my cross-country move from the Houston, TX area to Annapolis, MD back in mid-October. Sincere thanks to GSXR, Glen and Klink for their efforts behind the scenes to keep things in line and running smoothly.
We didn't have any attacks this year from spammers, which was nice.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a steady 12-15% increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
One item of note -- the reason for the major (33%) year-over-year increase in the size of the photo/attachment database was because of the script that I implemented during the year. This script "copies" all linked photos in previous and all new posts and pulls them into the forum's permanent photo database, and embeds them into their original post as attachments (as if the original poster would have attached, rather thank linked externally to, them). This is important because it preserves all photos for future reference, which is particularly important for various "FOR SALE" posts where cars are put up for sale, as well as HOW-TO articles.
Key Statistics:
We are just over one year into the existing three-year contract with the hosting company, and the 500Eboard.com domain. When I implemented the contract in mid-2017, it cost $323.64, or $107.88 annually, and comes out to about USD $9.00 per month. Coupled with software licensing fees and other miscellania, I'd say that the forum continues to cost around $15 per month to operate.
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
[TABLE="class: grid, width: 800, align: center"] [TR] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]Total Members[/TD] [TD]Threads[/TD] [TD]Posts[/TD] [TD]Sessions/Day[/TD] [TD]Avg Users/Day[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2012[/TD] [TD]1312[/TD] [TD]2810[/TD] [TD]26000+[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]180+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2013[/TD] [TD]2460[/TD] [TD]4250[/TD] [TD]46800+[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]250+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2014[/TD] [TD]3580[/TD] [TD]5770[/TD] [TD]73200[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]400+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
May 2015
[/TD] [TD]4600[/TD] [TD]7400[/TD] [TD]99250[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]520+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2016[/TD] [TD]6,060
[/TD] [TD]9,210
[/TD] [TD]125,530
[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]1,190+
[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2017[/TD] [TD]6,938[/TD] [TD]10,540[/TD] [TD]143,063[/TD] [TD]1,600+[/TD] [TD]1,350+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2018[/TD] [TD]7,758[/TD] [TD]11,961[/TD] [TD]164,778[/TD] [TD]1,900+[/TD] [TD]1,500+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]% Increase
2017->2018
[/TD] [TD]~12%
[/TD] [TD]~12.5%
[/TD] [TD]~15%
[/TD] [TD]~20%[/TD] [TD]~12%
[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Ecstasy
December 2008[/TD] [TD]3,284[/TD] [TD]5,985[/TD] [TD]49,575+[/TD] [TD]Unknown[/TD] [TD]Unknown[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Comparo
500Ex v. 500Eboard
[/TD] [TD]500Eboard +4,474
[/TD] [TD]500Ebrd
+5,976
[/TD] [TD]500Ebrd
+115,203[/TD] [TD]Unknown[/TD] [TD]Unknown[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum currently sits at 7,750+ members ... a number that would likely be above 8,000, but I have been judiciously "pruning" members whose e-mail addresses have bounced and who have not been active/logged in for at least the last 4 years. This comes down to about 1-2 "old" accounts per day that have been abandoned.
This month marks our seventh (and last) full year of being on the vBulletin platform.
Fortunately, as with 2017, on a subjective and cultural basis we had pretty much ZERO drama on the forum this past year. We, fortunately, had no significant site outages -- in contrast with 2017, when problems with the hosting company led the forum to be "down" for several days. I was very careful this year in proactively monitoring things and working behind the scenes to head off any potential issues at the pass.
The forum did seem to survive my cross-country move from the Houston, TX area to Annapolis, MD back in mid-October. Sincere thanks to GSXR, Glen and Klink for their efforts behind the scenes to keep things in line and running smoothly.
We didn't have any attacks this year from spammers, which was nice.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a steady 12-15% increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
One item of note -- the reason for the major (33%) year-over-year increase in the size of the photo/attachment database was because of the script that I implemented during the year. This script "copies" all linked photos in previous and all new posts and pulls them into the forum's permanent photo database, and embeds them into their original post as attachments (as if the original poster would have attached, rather thank linked externally to, them). This is important because it preserves all photos for future reference, which is particularly important for various "FOR SALE" posts where cars are put up for sale, as well as HOW-TO articles.
Key Statistics:
- 7,758 members -- up 12% from 2017
- 11,961 threads -- up 12.5% from 2017
- 164,778 posts -- up 15% from 2017
- 30.53GB document/photo database -- up from 23GB (33%) in 2017
- 420.5MB post/thread database -- up from 302.4MB (39%) in 2017
- 114.9MB database backup -- up from 97.4MB (18%) in 2017
- 4.72MB member avatar database -- up from 4.01MB (17%) in 2017
We are just over one year into the existing three-year contract with the hosting company, and the 500Eboard.com domain. When I implemented the contract in mid-2017, it cost $323.64, or $107.88 annually, and comes out to about USD $9.00 per month. Coupled with software licensing fees and other miscellania, I'd say that the forum continues to cost around $15 per month to operate.
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
[TABLE="class: grid, width: 800, align: center"] [TR] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]Total Members[/TD] [TD]Threads[/TD] [TD]Posts[/TD] [TD]Sessions/Day[/TD] [TD]Avg Users/Day[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2012[/TD] [TD]1312[/TD] [TD]2810[/TD] [TD]26000+[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]180+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2013[/TD] [TD]2460[/TD] [TD]4250[/TD] [TD]46800+[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]250+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2014[/TD] [TD]3580[/TD] [TD]5770[/TD] [TD]73200[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]400+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
May 2015
[/TD] [TD]4600[/TD] [TD]7400[/TD] [TD]99250[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]520+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2016[/TD] [TD]6,060
[/TD] [TD]9,210
[/TD] [TD]125,530
[/TD] [TD]
[/TD] [TD]1,190+
[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2017[/TD] [TD]6,938[/TD] [TD]10,540[/TD] [TD]143,063[/TD] [TD]1,600+[/TD] [TD]1,350+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Eboard
July 2018[/TD] [TD]7,758[/TD] [TD]11,961[/TD] [TD]164,778[/TD] [TD]1,900+[/TD] [TD]1,500+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]% Increase
2017->2018
[/TD] [TD]~12%
[/TD] [TD]~12.5%
[/TD] [TD]~15%
[/TD] [TD]~20%[/TD] [TD]~12%
[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]500Ecstasy
December 2008[/TD] [TD]3,284[/TD] [TD]5,985[/TD] [TD]49,575+[/TD] [TD]Unknown[/TD] [TD]Unknown[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Comparo
500Ex v. 500Eboard
[/TD] [TD]500Eboard +4,474
[/TD] [TD]500Ebrd
+5,976
[/TD] [TD]500Ebrd
+115,203[/TD] [TD]Unknown[/TD] [TD]Unknown[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]
Well, it's the US "Fourth of July" holiday, so it's about time for the annual "State of the 500Eboard" address....
Note that I didn't do a "State of the 500Eboard" post last year, because one year ago today we were just a few months out from the migration from the vBulletin software to the XenForo software, and I wanted to allow time for things to normalize, for the Google search engines to catch up, and for people to get used to the new scheme of things.
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum currently sits at almost 9,050 members ... a number that is actually 9,260 actual registrations, but the difference is that I have deleted spam registrations and a few folks whose emails have bounced and who have not logged in for many years.
This month marks 16 months of being on the XenForo platform.
Fortunately, as with past years, on a subjective and cultural basis we had pretty much ZERO drama on the forum this past year. I am also happy to report that we had no significant site outages -- except one, for around 6-8 hours, when I attempted an operating system upgrade, found some database incompatibilities, and abandoned the upgrade in favor of a "restore" to the way things were. I have not yet re-attempted the upgrade, but I will plan to probably this summer. Various software updates and upgrades were done behinds the scenes literally on a daily basis, as they became available, and pretty much were invisible to everyone.
I have been very happy with the overall reliability of the company (Linode.com) who hosts the server that this site runs on. That server is physically located in Newark, NJ.
We didn't have any major attacks this year from spammers, which was nice. The new forum software offered the ability to add state-of-the-art spam-fighting countermeasures, which is really nice. We literally had ONE spam post on the forum over the past year, which was 100% done by a human. The countermeasures are 100% effective in stopping the automated spam-bots.
One of the newer countermeasures I put into place, called the "Spaminator," has stopped nearly 23,000 automated spammer registrations dead in their tracks since last October -- this is how aggressive these spammers are.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a significant increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
Key Statistics:
Since debuting the new XenForo software on March 10, 2019, we have updated the forum software a total of 11 times. We are getting ready for a significant upgrade of the XenForo software from version 2.1 to version 2.2, later this year. I expect probably in the September or October time frame. This new forum software will offer a number of new capabilities, which I will detail fully when we perform the site upgrade.
Since March 2019, we have done a total of THREE Ubuntu operating system upgrades; 18 upgrades of the php language; five MySQL database software upgrades; three Apache web server software upgrades; 12 upgrades to the search engine software; and 18 Wiki software upgrades. That is A LOT of software upgrading ... and this does not count the numerous add-on software modules (of which there are around 20) and minor daily Ubuntu software patches and updates.
The forum costs around $37.50 per month to operate as is (this includes both the 500Eboard and the soon-to-be-released 126board forums), plus an average of around $30 per month for various software licenses, Google Domains, and the Google e-mail engine to send forum emails to members. So, total costs for the forum operation are averaging around $65-70 per month.
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
Note that I didn't do a "State of the 500Eboard" post last year, because one year ago today we were just a few months out from the migration from the vBulletin software to the XenForo software, and I wanted to allow time for things to normalize, for the Google search engines to catch up, and for people to get used to the new scheme of things.
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum currently sits at almost 9,050 members ... a number that is actually 9,260 actual registrations, but the difference is that I have deleted spam registrations and a few folks whose emails have bounced and who have not logged in for many years.
This month marks 16 months of being on the XenForo platform.
Fortunately, as with past years, on a subjective and cultural basis we had pretty much ZERO drama on the forum this past year. I am also happy to report that we had no significant site outages -- except one, for around 6-8 hours, when I attempted an operating system upgrade, found some database incompatibilities, and abandoned the upgrade in favor of a "restore" to the way things were. I have not yet re-attempted the upgrade, but I will plan to probably this summer. Various software updates and upgrades were done behinds the scenes literally on a daily basis, as they became available, and pretty much were invisible to everyone.
I have been very happy with the overall reliability of the company (Linode.com) who hosts the server that this site runs on. That server is physically located in Newark, NJ.
We didn't have any major attacks this year from spammers, which was nice. The new forum software offered the ability to add state-of-the-art spam-fighting countermeasures, which is really nice. We literally had ONE spam post on the forum over the past year, which was 100% done by a human. The countermeasures are 100% effective in stopping the automated spam-bots.
One of the newer countermeasures I put into place, called the "Spaminator," has stopped nearly 23,000 automated spammer registrations dead in their tracks since last October -- this is how aggressive these spammers are.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a significant increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
Key Statistics:
- 9,042 members -- up 16.5% from 2018
- 14,563 threads -- up 22% from 2018
- 208,226 posts -- up 26.5% from 2018
- 58.3GB document/photo database -- up from 30.5GB (91%) in 2018
- 483MB post/thread database -- up from 420.5MB (16%) in 2018***
- 121.3MB database backup -- up from 114.9MB (16%) in 2018***
Since debuting the new XenForo software on March 10, 2019, we have updated the forum software a total of 11 times. We are getting ready for a significant upgrade of the XenForo software from version 2.1 to version 2.2, later this year. I expect probably in the September or October time frame. This new forum software will offer a number of new capabilities, which I will detail fully when we perform the site upgrade.
Since March 2019, we have done a total of THREE Ubuntu operating system upgrades; 18 upgrades of the php language; five MySQL database software upgrades; three Apache web server software upgrades; 12 upgrades to the search engine software; and 18 Wiki software upgrades. That is A LOT of software upgrading ... and this does not count the numerous add-on software modules (of which there are around 20) and minor daily Ubuntu software patches and updates.
The forum costs around $37.50 per month to operate as is (this includes both the 500Eboard and the soon-to-be-released 126board forums), plus an average of around $30 per month for various software licenses, Google Domains, and the Google e-mail engine to send forum emails to members. So, total costs for the forum operation are averaging around $65-70 per month.
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
| Total Members | Threads | Posts | Sessions/Day | Avg Users/Day | |
| 500Eboard July 2012 | 1312 | 2810 | 26000+ | 180+ | |
| 500Eboard July 2013 | 2460 | 4250 | 46800+ | 250+ | |
| 500Eboard July 2014 | 3580 | 5770 | 73200 | 400+ | |
| 500Eboard May 2015 | 4600 | 7400 | 99250 | 520+ | |
| 500Eboard July 2016 | 6,060 | 9,210 | 125,530 | 1,190+ | |
| 500Eboard July 2017 | 6,938 | 10,540 | 143,063 | 1,600+ | 1,350+ |
| 500Eboard July 2018 | 7,758 | 11,961 | 164,778 | 1,900+ | 1,500+ |
| 500Eboard July 2020 | 9,042 | 14,563 | 208,226 | 1,000+ (per Google Analytics) | 575+ (per Google Analytics) |
| % Increase 2018->2020 | ~16.5% | ~22% | ~26.5% | N/A (per new measurement schema) | N/A (per new measurement schema) |
| 500Ecstasy December 2008 | 3,284 | 5,985 | 49,575+ | Unknown | Unknown |
| Comparo 500Ex v. 500Eboard | 500Eboard +5,758 | 500Ebrd +8,578 | 500Ebrd +158,651 | Unknown | Unknown |
Well, it's a bit after the Fourth of July weekend, so I'm a bit late with this, but it is time for the annual "State of the 500Eboard" address.
We are now almost 2.5 years after the conversion of the vBulletin-based forum to the XenForo system, and I've been very happy with how things have progressed with the software. New updates and bug-fixes are issued about every six weeks; significant new releases have been about once per year with new functionality and so forth.
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum currently sits at just over 10,000 members -- up from just over 9,000 this time last year. So, roughly a 10% year over year growth in overall registrations.
This month marks 28 months of being on the XenForo platform.
Fortunately, as with past years, on a subjective and cultural basis we had pretty much ZERO drama on the forum this past year. I am also happy to report that we had no significant site outages -- I don't think the forum was down for more than 1 hour at any single time during the past year. Maybe one outage of around two hours. Various software updates and upgrades were done behinds the scenes literally on a daily basis (with a significant one as recently as yesterday morning), as they became available, and for the most part have been invisible to everyone.
The forum has gained stability over the past year, and especially (after a period of instability earlier this year) the Elasticsearch search engine. Although the search engine does require a reboot approximately every 10-14 days, a full system reboot is not required for this. We have begun delaying the application of system software updates and patches to a 2-4 week basis, rather than a couple or several times per week. Although a full system reboot only takes about a minute, it's disruptive, and many if not most system patches can wait a week or three before they need to be applied. Easiest just to do as much as possible in one sitting.
I continue to be very happy with the overall reliability of the company (Linode.com) who hosts the server that this site runs on. That server is physically located in Newark, NJ.
We didn't have any major attacks this year from spammers, which was nice. The new forum software offered the ability to add state-of-the-art spam-fighting countermeasures, which is really nice. We may have had 1-2 spam posts (although I don't personally recall seeing one; @Glen or @gsxr may have seen/deleted one or two?) during the year, but this has NOT been a problem. The countermeasures are 100% effective in stopping the automated spam-bots that try to register for the forum, and manual forum registrations by humans that get through are quickly deleted.
One of the newer countermeasures I put into place, called the "Spaminator," has stopped more than 43,000 automated spammer registrations dead in their tracks since October 2019 -- this is how aggressive these spammers are. A year ago at this time, this number was at 23,000 attempts.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a significant increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
Key Statistics:
Since July 2020, we have done a total of TWO Ubuntu operating system upgrades; 16 upgrades of the php language; six MySQL database software upgrades (including a MAJOR upgrade from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0 in March 2021); three Apache web server software upgrades; 15 upgrades to the search engine software; and 8 Wiki software upgrades. That is A LOT of software upgrading ... and this does not count the numerous add-on software modules (of which there are around 20) and minor daily Ubuntu software patches and updates.
The forum costs exactly $40.00 (up from $37.50 last year) per month to operate as is (this includes both the 500Eboard and the soon-to-be-released 126board forums), plus an average of around $30 per month for various software licenses, Google Domains, and the Google e-mail engine to send forum emails to members. We will be upgrading the storage soon, so it is likely this will go from $40 per month to $50 per month for basic hosting. A significant increase in monetary outlay. So, total costs for the forum operation will average around $75-80 per month. Multiply that times 12 months, and you see that it is pushing $1,000 per year just to keep the forum running well.
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
NOTE: 500Ecstasy figures removed from this year's table, as they are now way past being relevant.
We are now almost 2.5 years after the conversion of the vBulletin-based forum to the XenForo system, and I've been very happy with how things have progressed with the software. New updates and bug-fixes are issued about every six weeks; significant new releases have been about once per year with new functionality and so forth.
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum currently sits at just over 10,000 members -- up from just over 9,000 this time last year. So, roughly a 10% year over year growth in overall registrations.
This month marks 28 months of being on the XenForo platform.
Fortunately, as with past years, on a subjective and cultural basis we had pretty much ZERO drama on the forum this past year. I am also happy to report that we had no significant site outages -- I don't think the forum was down for more than 1 hour at any single time during the past year. Maybe one outage of around two hours. Various software updates and upgrades were done behinds the scenes literally on a daily basis (with a significant one as recently as yesterday morning), as they became available, and for the most part have been invisible to everyone.
The forum has gained stability over the past year, and especially (after a period of instability earlier this year) the Elasticsearch search engine. Although the search engine does require a reboot approximately every 10-14 days, a full system reboot is not required for this. We have begun delaying the application of system software updates and patches to a 2-4 week basis, rather than a couple or several times per week. Although a full system reboot only takes about a minute, it's disruptive, and many if not most system patches can wait a week or three before they need to be applied. Easiest just to do as much as possible in one sitting.
I continue to be very happy with the overall reliability of the company (Linode.com) who hosts the server that this site runs on. That server is physically located in Newark, NJ.
We didn't have any major attacks this year from spammers, which was nice. The new forum software offered the ability to add state-of-the-art spam-fighting countermeasures, which is really nice. We may have had 1-2 spam posts (although I don't personally recall seeing one; @Glen or @gsxr may have seen/deleted one or two?) during the year, but this has NOT been a problem. The countermeasures are 100% effective in stopping the automated spam-bots that try to register for the forum, and manual forum registrations by humans that get through are quickly deleted.
One of the newer countermeasures I put into place, called the "Spaminator," has stopped more than 43,000 automated spammer registrations dead in their tracks since October 2019 -- this is how aggressive these spammers are. A year ago at this time, this number was at 23,000 attempts.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a significant increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
Key Statistics:
- 10,009 members -- up ~11% from 2020
- 14,563 threads -- up ~10% from 2020
- 236,942 posts -- up ~13.5% from 2020
- 78.1GB document/photo database -- up 25% from 58.3GB in 2020
- 620.5MB post/thread database -- up 25% from 483MB in 2020
- 152.3MB database backup -- up 25% from 121.3MB in 2020
Since July 2020, we have done a total of TWO Ubuntu operating system upgrades; 16 upgrades of the php language; six MySQL database software upgrades (including a MAJOR upgrade from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0 in March 2021); three Apache web server software upgrades; 15 upgrades to the search engine software; and 8 Wiki software upgrades. That is A LOT of software upgrading ... and this does not count the numerous add-on software modules (of which there are around 20) and minor daily Ubuntu software patches and updates.
The forum costs exactly $40.00 (up from $37.50 last year) per month to operate as is (this includes both the 500Eboard and the soon-to-be-released 126board forums), plus an average of around $30 per month for various software licenses, Google Domains, and the Google e-mail engine to send forum emails to members. We will be upgrading the storage soon, so it is likely this will go from $40 per month to $50 per month for basic hosting. A significant increase in monetary outlay. So, total costs for the forum operation will average around $75-80 per month. Multiply that times 12 months, and you see that it is pushing $1,000 per year just to keep the forum running well.
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
NOTE: 500Ecstasy figures removed from this year's table, as they are now way past being relevant.
| Total Members | Threads | Posts | Sessions/Day | Avg Users/Day | |
| 500Eboard July 2012 | 1312 | 2810 | 26000+ | 180+ | |
| 500Eboard July 2013 | 2460 | 4250 | 46800+ | 250+ | |
| 500Eboard July 2014 | 3580 | 5770 | 73200 | 400+ | |
| 500Eboard May 2015 | 4600 | 7400 | 99250 | 520+ | |
| 500Eboard July 2016 | 6,060 | 9,210 | 125,530 | 1,190+ | |
| 500Eboard July 2017 | 6,938 | 10,540 | 143,063 | 1,600+ | 1,350+ |
| 500Eboard July 2018 | 7,758 | 11,961 | 164,778 | 1,900+ | 1,500+ |
| 500Eboard July 2020 | 9,042 | 14,563 | 208,226 | 1,000+ | 575+ |
| 500Eboard July 2021 | 10,009 | 16,166 | 236,944 | 1,100+/day | 750+/day |
| % Increase 2020->2021 | + 11% | + 10% | + 13.5% | + 10%/day | + 28%/day |
Halleluiah! It has been highly anticipated for a long time.
Last edited:
I just realized that I had not done the annual "State of the Forum" post earlier in July, so I guess better late than never.
3.5 years after the conversion to XenForo from vBulletin now. Forum is extremely stable, and all technical issues with the search engine capability have been fixed. The forum's server is only rebooted on a monthly basis now, and this is only because of firmware and major security software updates that have to be included to keep things safe and secure.
Forum updates are issued by Xenforo about once per quarter, and the most recent one was issued (and implemented) last week - the week of July 11th. This is version 2.2.10. The last update was in April, version 2.2.9. I am expecting version 2.3 to go into beta testing soon, and will probably be implemented before the end of 2022.
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum currently sits at just over 10,850 members -- up from just over 10,000 this time last year. So, roughly an 8% year over year growth in overall registrations -- generaly in keeping with the ~10% annual growth.
As far as I know, we had no significant site outages over the past year, longer than 30 minutes or so. Various software updates and upgrades were done behinds the scenes literally on a daily basis, as they became available, and for the most part have been invisible to everyone. The forum's Ubuntu operating system was updated to version 20.04 from its original 18.04, and will soon be updated again to version 22.04. The forum's PHP language was also very recently updated to version 8.1, which is the current version. The MySQL database was also modernized from version 5.6 to 8.0. All of these moves keep the forum's infrastructure on a very current and modern foundation that will be good for many years to come.
Notably, we also SUCCESSFULLY launched the 126board.com forum since last year's update. This forum remains small, but is also built on an extremely efficient infrastructure and is even more modern than this one in its underpinnings -- it uses the Litespeed web server (this forum uses the old standard Apache web server), and the MariaDB database. And it runs on a very small server, and quite well.
The hosting company, Linode, was fairly recently acquired earlier this year by Akamai, which is a content distribution network (CDN) that many of you may have heard of before. I was surprised to see this, but nothing materially has changed with Linode since the acquisition, fortunately. Performance continues to be excellent, and both forums' servers are hosted out of their Newark, NJ data center.
We had some modest attacks this year from spammers, one lasting for some days, but we were able to mitigate it after watching it carefully. The security precautions we have in place have protected well against attacks and spammers, and as with last year the new forum software offered the ability to add state-of-the-art spam-fighting countermeasures, which is really nice. The countermeasures are 100% effective in stopping the automated spam-bots that try to register for the forum, and manual forum registrations by humans that get through are quickly deleted.
One of the newer countermeasures I put into place, called the "Spaminator," has stopped nearly 61,000 automated spammer registrations dead in their tracks since October 2019 -- this is how aggressive these spammers are. A year ago at this time, this number was at 43,000 attempts.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a significant increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
Key Statistics:
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
3.5 years after the conversion to XenForo from vBulletin now. Forum is extremely stable, and all technical issues with the search engine capability have been fixed. The forum's server is only rebooted on a monthly basis now, and this is only because of firmware and major security software updates that have to be included to keep things safe and secure.
Forum updates are issued by Xenforo about once per quarter, and the most recent one was issued (and implemented) last week - the week of July 11th. This is version 2.2.10. The last update was in April, version 2.2.9. I am expecting version 2.3 to go into beta testing soon, and will probably be implemented before the end of 2022.
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum currently sits at just over 10,850 members -- up from just over 10,000 this time last year. So, roughly an 8% year over year growth in overall registrations -- generaly in keeping with the ~10% annual growth.
As far as I know, we had no significant site outages over the past year, longer than 30 minutes or so. Various software updates and upgrades were done behinds the scenes literally on a daily basis, as they became available, and for the most part have been invisible to everyone. The forum's Ubuntu operating system was updated to version 20.04 from its original 18.04, and will soon be updated again to version 22.04. The forum's PHP language was also very recently updated to version 8.1, which is the current version. The MySQL database was also modernized from version 5.6 to 8.0. All of these moves keep the forum's infrastructure on a very current and modern foundation that will be good for many years to come.
Notably, we also SUCCESSFULLY launched the 126board.com forum since last year's update. This forum remains small, but is also built on an extremely efficient infrastructure and is even more modern than this one in its underpinnings -- it uses the Litespeed web server (this forum uses the old standard Apache web server), and the MariaDB database. And it runs on a very small server, and quite well.
The hosting company, Linode, was fairly recently acquired earlier this year by Akamai, which is a content distribution network (CDN) that many of you may have heard of before. I was surprised to see this, but nothing materially has changed with Linode since the acquisition, fortunately. Performance continues to be excellent, and both forums' servers are hosted out of their Newark, NJ data center.
We had some modest attacks this year from spammers, one lasting for some days, but we were able to mitigate it after watching it carefully. The security precautions we have in place have protected well against attacks and spammers, and as with last year the new forum software offered the ability to add state-of-the-art spam-fighting countermeasures, which is really nice. The countermeasures are 100% effective in stopping the automated spam-bots that try to register for the forum, and manual forum registrations by humans that get through are quickly deleted.
One of the newer countermeasures I put into place, called the "Spaminator," has stopped nearly 61,000 automated spammer registrations dead in their tracks since October 2019 -- this is how aggressive these spammers are. A year ago at this time, this number was at 43,000 attempts.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a significant increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
Key Statistics:
- 10,868 members -- up ~8% from 2021
- 17,205 threads -- up ~15% from 2021
- 253,738 posts -- up ~7% from 2021
- 98.3 GB document/photo database -- up 17% from 78.1 GB in 2021
- 619.5 MB post/thread database -- down 0.02% from 620 MB in 2021
- 157.9 MB database backup -- up 3.5% from 152.3 MB in 2021
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
| Total Members | Threads | Posts | |
| 500Eboard July 2012 | 1312 | 2810 | 26000+ |
| 500Eboard July 2013 | 2460 | 4250 | 46800+ |
| 500Eboard July 2014 | 3580 | 5770 | 73200 |
| 500Eboard May 2015 | 4600 | 7400 | 99250 |
| 500Eboard July 2016 | 6,060 | 9,210 | 125,530 |
| 500Eboard July 2017 | 6,938 | 10,540 | 143,063 |
| 500Eboard July 2018 | 7,758 | 11,961 | 164,778 |
| 500Eboard July 2020 | 9,042 | 14,563 | 208,226 |
| 500Eboard July 2021 | 10,009 | 16,166 | 236,944 |
| 500Eboard July 2022 | 10,868 | 17,205 | 253,738 |
| % Increase 2021->2022 | + 8% | + 15% | + 7% |
Gerry for all of the time & effort you have given to us all
same here
Appreciate you keeping this place running!
Holy Moly!! I am two-plus full months late with the annual "State of the Forum" update. Where did the time go? My apologies !!
Early 2024 will be FIVE full years on the XenForo platform. I have just received notice in the past week that XF will be moving to version 2.3 of the platform in early 2024. We started on version 2.1 back in 2019. I believe 2.3 will be the last version in the 2.x family, before they move to 3.0 (which I expect probably in 2025 or 2026), which will be a MAJOR revamp of everything. If you are interested, XF has begun to preview the 2.3 version -- you can find their first posts about it here:
xenforo.com
xenforo.com
Since last year's update, we have had only three significant updates to XF, in October 2022, December 2022, and May 2023. None of them were earth-shattering updates, mainly bug-fix with a few minor new features.
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum is starting to close in on 12,000 members, which I expect we'll easily hit before the end of 2023 -- up from just over 10,800 this time last year. So, roughly an 8% year over year growth in overall registrations -- generally in keeping with the ~10% annual growth.
As far as I know, we had no significant site outages over the past year, longer than 30 minutes or so. Various software updates and upgrades were done behinds the scenes literally on a daily basis, as they became available, and for the most part have been invisible to everyone. The forum's Ubuntu operating system was updated to version 20.04 from its original 18.04; we had originally planned to migrate to Ubuntu 22.04, but some significant migration issues cropped up, and I have decided to postpone the migration to the next major version of Ubuntu, which will be 24.04 (to be released in April, 2024). This will allow plenty of time to plan the migration. Usually it is a very simple task that only takes perhaps 10-15 minutes, but there are some complications that have been introduced by settings and customizations of the operating system and forum database that are going to require some significant tweaking and work to get right.
The migration plan for April 2024 will be to take a snapshot backup of the forum to "clone" it (the forum will be frozen from the ability to post or make any changes from this point). We will set up a completely separate server, and use this "clone" backup to perform the migration. Then we will revert the successfully migrated forum BACK to the original server. This will be the least disruptive way to do it, and will not affect the integrity of the original forum in the event that the migration fails -- the original forum can simply be turned back on and restarted.
We will perform the migration with a completely "wirgin" copy of Ubuntu 2024.3, rather than updating/migrating by overwriting existing operating system files. This will also help clean out the cobwebs that accumulate through the near-daily software updates that underpin the forum's operation.
I don't believe we had, as said, more than 30 minutes of forum down-time at a single point, during the entire year. We had a couple of very modest attacks from overseas spammers, but nothing serious. The security precautions we have in place have protected well against attacks and spammers, and as with last year the new forum software offered the ability to add state-of-the-art spam-fighting countermeasures, which is really nice. The countermeasures are 100% effective in stopping the automated spam-bots that try to register for the forum, and manual forum registrations by humans that get through are quickly deleted.
The "Spaminator," which I talked about in last year's update, stopped nearly 30,000 spammer registration attempts just since last July. That is about 70 spammer registration attempts PER DAY.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a significant increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
Key Statistics:
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
Early 2024 will be FIVE full years on the XenForo platform. I have just received notice in the past week that XF will be moving to version 2.3 of the platform in early 2024. We started on version 2.1 back in 2019. I believe 2.3 will be the last version in the 2.x family, before they move to 3.0 (which I expect probably in 2025 or 2026), which will be a MAJOR revamp of everything. If you are interested, XF has begun to preview the 2.3 version -- you can find their first posts about it here:
XF 2.3 - A first look at XenForo 2.3
Well, here we are with our first Have you seen thread for XenForo 2.3. It's been a long time coming, and for various reasons that we will go into later, it has changed quite a bit from what we had originally intended it to be, but it's finally ready to start showing you what's new. tl;dr...
xenforo.com
XF 2.3 - Boosting performance in XenForo 2.3
In today's 'Have you seen...?' entry for XenForo 2.3 we're going to look at how we've zeroed in on enhancing performance, ensuring your community has a swift and seamless experience. We're going to take a deep dive into the advancements we've made and how they stack up against various...
xenforo.com
Since last year's update, we have had only three significant updates to XF, in October 2022, December 2022, and May 2023. None of them were earth-shattering updates, mainly bug-fix with a few minor new features.
I've updated the table below with the latest stats on the growth of the site. The forum is starting to close in on 12,000 members, which I expect we'll easily hit before the end of 2023 -- up from just over 10,800 this time last year. So, roughly an 8% year over year growth in overall registrations -- generally in keeping with the ~10% annual growth.
As far as I know, we had no significant site outages over the past year, longer than 30 minutes or so. Various software updates and upgrades were done behinds the scenes literally on a daily basis, as they became available, and for the most part have been invisible to everyone. The forum's Ubuntu operating system was updated to version 20.04 from its original 18.04; we had originally planned to migrate to Ubuntu 22.04, but some significant migration issues cropped up, and I have decided to postpone the migration to the next major version of Ubuntu, which will be 24.04 (to be released in April, 2024). This will allow plenty of time to plan the migration. Usually it is a very simple task that only takes perhaps 10-15 minutes, but there are some complications that have been introduced by settings and customizations of the operating system and forum database that are going to require some significant tweaking and work to get right.
The migration plan for April 2024 will be to take a snapshot backup of the forum to "clone" it (the forum will be frozen from the ability to post or make any changes from this point). We will set up a completely separate server, and use this "clone" backup to perform the migration. Then we will revert the successfully migrated forum BACK to the original server. This will be the least disruptive way to do it, and will not affect the integrity of the original forum in the event that the migration fails -- the original forum can simply be turned back on and restarted.
We will perform the migration with a completely "wirgin" copy of Ubuntu 2024.3, rather than updating/migrating by overwriting existing operating system files. This will also help clean out the cobwebs that accumulate through the near-daily software updates that underpin the forum's operation.
I don't believe we had, as said, more than 30 minutes of forum down-time at a single point, during the entire year. We had a couple of very modest attacks from overseas spammers, but nothing serious. The security precautions we have in place have protected well against attacks and spammers, and as with last year the new forum software offered the ability to add state-of-the-art spam-fighting countermeasures, which is really nice. The countermeasures are 100% effective in stopping the automated spam-bots that try to register for the forum, and manual forum registrations by humans that get through are quickly deleted.
The "Spaminator," which I talked about in last year's update, stopped nearly 30,000 spammer registration attempts just since last July. That is about 70 spammer registration attempts PER DAY.
As expected, as the site continues to grow, we saw a significant increase in almost all relevant statistics across the board: total members, post count, and thread count.
Key Statistics:
- 11,917 members -- up ~9.5% from 2022
- 18,541 threads -- up ~8% from 2022
- 275,028 posts -- up ~8.5% from 2022
- 117.8 GB document/photo database -- up ~19.5% from 98.3 GB in 2022
- 566.6 MB post/thread database -- down ~9.5% from 619.5 MB in 2022
- 130.2 MB database backup -- down ~20% from 157.9 MB in 2022
I hope this update was interesting to y'all. Thanks for your patronage and support for the site.
Cheers,
Gerry
| Total Members | Threads | Posts | |
| 500Eboard July 2012 | 1312 | 2810 | 26000+ |
| 500Eboard July 2013 | 2460 | 4250 | 46800+ |
| 500Eboard July 2014 | 3580 | 5770 | 73200 |
| 500Eboard May 2015 | 4600 | 7400 | 99250 |
| 500Eboard July 2016 | 6,060 | 9,210 | 125,530 |
| 500Eboard July 2017 | 6,938 | 10,540 | 143,063 |
| 500Eboard July 2018 | 7,758 | 11,961 | 164,778 |
| 500Eboard July 2020 | 9,042 | 14,563 | 208,226 |
| 500Eboard July 2021 | 10,009 | 16,166 | 236,944 |
| 500Eboard July 2022 | 10,868 | 17,205 | 253,738 |
| 500Eboard Sept. 2023 | 11,917 | 18,541 | 275,028 |
| % Increase 2022->2023 | + 9.5% | + 8% | + 8.5% |
All that boating… time flies when you’re having fun! Thanks for all you do with this GVZ.
Cheers,
maw
Gerry where can we send membership dues? As stated before I appreciate the work that goes into this forum and the knowledge base.
I am in too, this forum is just fantastic resource.
Gerry, Thank you for the update! This forum and the W126 forum are priceless sources of information for our beloved vehicles! IMHO saying thank you for all you do for all of us just does not cover it. Alas, that is all we can say. We all owe you a great debt of gratitude! Bartles & James said it best: "We thank you for your support!. Thanks Gerry! You're the best!
Some additional and very welcome new information about the forthcoming XenForo 2.3 version.I have just received notice in the past week that XF will be moving to version 2.3 of the platform in early 2024. We started on version 2.1 back in 2019. I believe 2.3 will be the last version in the 2.x family, before they move to 3.0 (which I expect probably in 2025 or 2026), which will be a MAJOR revamp of everything. If you are interested, XF has begun to preview the 2.3 version -- you can find their first posts about it here:
XF 2.3 - A first look at XenForo 2.3
Well, here we are with our first Have you seen thread for XenForo 2.3. It's been a long time coming, and for various reasons that we will go into later, it has changed quite a bit from what we had originally intended it to be, but it's finally ready to start showing you what's new. tl;dr...
XF 2.3 - Boosting performance in XenForo 2.3
In today's 'Have you seen...?' entry for XenForo 2.3 we're going to look at how we've zeroed in on enhancing performance, ensuring your community has a swift and seamless experience. We're going to take a deep dive into the advancements we've made and how they stack up against various...
Most notably, it will natively support WebP images, which will be helpful and reduce some admin work now required to convert WebP photos to JPG/PNG/GIF format.
XF 2.3 - Image optimization, enhanced image resizing, and more!
We hope you're enjoying the "Have you seen...?" series for XenForo 2.3 so far. We still have quite a bit more to show you while we work on adding the last finishing touches before we unleash XenForo 2.3 on this very forum. This week we're going to talk about various improvements we have made...
xenforo.com
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