pdisme
02-21-2007, 05:08 PM
There's not a way to say this without hurting some feelings, and that's not my intent by any means, but the purpose of this site is, in my opinion, to pick up where Lambo Power has left off. What I mean by that is my goal here is to provide Lamborghini enthusiasts, and anyone else who would enjoy this forum and its topics, the functionality, availability, performance and data security that Lambo Power has not been able to offer while keeping the same fun, light hearted, unpretentious, open and sometimes rude :lol2: environment that Lambo Power had before the huge loss of data and regularly posting members. I personally lost over 1100 posts along with many personal messages from people I now do not have contact information for; compounding the issue for me is the fact that I joined Lambo Power after purchasing my first exotic and many of my first posts were related to that. Even if I document my whole experience again, I'll of course not be able to convey the excitement the same as when it had just happened.
This site was not born out of a desire to compete with Lambo Power but rather its purpose is to give members a stable environment with more of what they want, some extra features they'll love and hopefully we can rebuild the community that was severely fragmented by that loss since there just wasn't any Lamborghini-related forum out there quite like Lambo Power before the crash.
To that end, what I've put together is Talk Lambo! and here is a general run down on some of what makes it tick:
The forum software is vBulletin with many of the advanced features enabled. Those of you that post on fchat, they run the same software although they don't let you post image links and certain other things.
An advertisers mod to vBulletin is installed which allows for rotating and static ads to be displayed in a number of places. Lambo Power advertisers can have three months of free ads if you contact me. It's undecided, or rather not even thought about yet, what rates will be after that but my initial idea is that I will keep rates very low to cover site expenses while screening advertisers so only ones that forum members would find of interest are accepted; i.e. performance car parts, luxury consumer items and Cristal are good, computer hardware, breakfast cereal, etc. not so good unless you give me some Cristal to change my mind. :)
Three different skins, all of which should work now but that need customization. I'm getting some help on the graphics since I've got no Photoshop skills, so you'll start to see the generic headers and things disappear while new branded graphics start to show up.
I've loaded in a variety of offensive smilies I've collected from forums that all Lambo Power users love. :lol2: If you see any you want elsewhere, send me the gif, a link to it or how to find it and I'll load it in.
More storage for private messages and attachments. Levels are still being discussed but for now, registered members get 100 private messages, 5 MB storage, lambo owners get 10 MB/200 msgs.
Photo Post should be installed and ready for use later this week. My intent is to let people post galleries of images like photobucket does for easy integration with the forum; you won't even need a separate account, your registered status here will apply. If it works the way I want it to, I'm going to set it so that the more you post, the more storage you get.
To ensure nothing is hidden, yes, the site is hosted by a company I have an ownership stake in, and that's why we get the free banner ad at the bottom of all pages advising that. :) That being said, the specs on the backups, server hardware and network side are as follow:
The site is currently running on a very redundant and high end Dell PowerEdge server which can survive power supply, hard drive and network card failures without an outage.
The website is being backed up to tape every night and having an additional database-only (posts and PM's only, no file attachments) backup done mid-day. If there were a disaster of an unrecoverable physical nature, we'd lose 24 hours at most, while a disaster of an administrative nature (i.e. I do something very stupid, a vbulletin secuirty flaw is exposed and exploited before a new version is out, etc.) should result in no more than a 12 hour loss.
The tape backups are kept for two months and are rotated off-site weekly. This allows us to recover from an environmental disaster that wipes out the facility, server and tapes to within one week and also allows us to go back historically if something has gone wrong but is not immediately noticed.
Our network where the server is housed has connectivity through five providers which should result in excellent speed on downloads, etc. as there is typically very few different networks between the site and you.
The forum software will be monitored for new versions and security patches.
So, welcome to the board, please post well and post often, unless you're a spammer and then you can :2up: , and for our members, this community is about all of us that enjoy Lamborghinis and exotic cars in general, so please ask for anything that you want but don't see and I'll do my best to accommodate. If you see any errors or something you don't like, tell me or a moderator about that and we'll do our best to get it fixed quickly.
David
This site was not born out of a desire to compete with Lambo Power but rather its purpose is to give members a stable environment with more of what they want, some extra features they'll love and hopefully we can rebuild the community that was severely fragmented by that loss since there just wasn't any Lamborghini-related forum out there quite like Lambo Power before the crash.
To that end, what I've put together is Talk Lambo! and here is a general run down on some of what makes it tick:
The forum software is vBulletin with many of the advanced features enabled. Those of you that post on fchat, they run the same software although they don't let you post image links and certain other things.
An advertisers mod to vBulletin is installed which allows for rotating and static ads to be displayed in a number of places. Lambo Power advertisers can have three months of free ads if you contact me. It's undecided, or rather not even thought about yet, what rates will be after that but my initial idea is that I will keep rates very low to cover site expenses while screening advertisers so only ones that forum members would find of interest are accepted; i.e. performance car parts, luxury consumer items and Cristal are good, computer hardware, breakfast cereal, etc. not so good unless you give me some Cristal to change my mind. :)
Three different skins, all of which should work now but that need customization. I'm getting some help on the graphics since I've got no Photoshop skills, so you'll start to see the generic headers and things disappear while new branded graphics start to show up.
I've loaded in a variety of offensive smilies I've collected from forums that all Lambo Power users love. :lol2: If you see any you want elsewhere, send me the gif, a link to it or how to find it and I'll load it in.
More storage for private messages and attachments. Levels are still being discussed but for now, registered members get 100 private messages, 5 MB storage, lambo owners get 10 MB/200 msgs.
Photo Post should be installed and ready for use later this week. My intent is to let people post galleries of images like photobucket does for easy integration with the forum; you won't even need a separate account, your registered status here will apply. If it works the way I want it to, I'm going to set it so that the more you post, the more storage you get.
To ensure nothing is hidden, yes, the site is hosted by a company I have an ownership stake in, and that's why we get the free banner ad at the bottom of all pages advising that. :) That being said, the specs on the backups, server hardware and network side are as follow:
The site is currently running on a very redundant and high end Dell PowerEdge server which can survive power supply, hard drive and network card failures without an outage.
The website is being backed up to tape every night and having an additional database-only (posts and PM's only, no file attachments) backup done mid-day. If there were a disaster of an unrecoverable physical nature, we'd lose 24 hours at most, while a disaster of an administrative nature (i.e. I do something very stupid, a vbulletin secuirty flaw is exposed and exploited before a new version is out, etc.) should result in no more than a 12 hour loss.
The tape backups are kept for two months and are rotated off-site weekly. This allows us to recover from an environmental disaster that wipes out the facility, server and tapes to within one week and also allows us to go back historically if something has gone wrong but is not immediately noticed.
Our network where the server is housed has connectivity through five providers which should result in excellent speed on downloads, etc. as there is typically very few different networks between the site and you.
The forum software will be monitored for new versions and security patches.
So, welcome to the board, please post well and post often, unless you're a spammer and then you can :2up: , and for our members, this community is about all of us that enjoy Lamborghinis and exotic cars in general, so please ask for anything that you want but don't see and I'll do my best to accommodate. If you see any errors or something you don't like, tell me or a moderator about that and we'll do our best to get it fixed quickly.
David