***IMPORTANT*** IMPENDING FORUM/CLUB UPDATES!

[humbucker]

Hi all,

Just a quick post to alert you to some fairly significant changes as far as the forum and wider club activity is concerned.

The forum will be down for important maintenance work at some point across the weekend (likely Saturday night/Sunday morning) while we switch to a new server. This essential housekeeping also provides us with the perfect opportunity to make some much-needed changes, not only to the features and technical aspects of the forum, but also to the way the club operates.

It hasn't escaped our attention that the forum has become a little quiet of late. Our 'new member' sign-up rate is actually very good (click here to see for yourself: memberlist.php?mode=&sk=c&sd=d), but the overall structure of the forum and an outdated theme that isn't as feature rich as it could be has undoubtedly stood in the way of new user contributions. That's not to say that all new members are going to be posting on the forum every minute of the day, but we are aware that guides and technical information isn't structured as well as it could be, and the 'social' forums could do with expanding. Furthermore, we plan to merge the 'Work In Progress' and 'Showroom' sections in order to avoid duplication/confusion regarding the home for project threads.

We've been listening to your feedback and suggestions for improvement, and we have taken note. With that in mind, additional features will be introduced to the forum following the move to our new server; a fully responsive design to assist with tablet/mobile viewing, advanced navigation, improved user interface for replying and posting to topics, social media integration, RSS feeds, a list of 'similar topics' for every forum thread (particularly useful if looking for the solution to a technical query) and an advanced forum search system are just some of the new features that we will be introducing for members.

We want to make the club the best it can possibly be, and that means expanding it beyond the confines of a forum. In other words, our intention is to use the revamp as an opportunity to arrange/encourage more club activity (shows, meets, parties etc.), making us much more of a 'traditional' owners club. Of course, the forum will always be the beating heart of our Mk3 Cavalier community, but with no other owners club catering for every incarnation of the Mk3, it's fair to say that in our current form, we are a sleeping giant.

Building on the rock solid foundation that we are in possession of means a shake-up of structure, both in terms of forum content and personnel. With regard to the latter, we are delighted to welcome James McGrath to the team as a forum moderator. His considerable knowledge regarding the technical specification of all variants the Mk3 makes him the ideal choice to oversee our forthcoming 'archive' section (an area of the forum that will be populated with fun facts and figures, model specification, Mk3 Cavalier history etc.). We're still ironing out the detail, but expect this - and much more - new content to be rolled out during the coming weeks.

With James joining as a moderator, another long-term contributor (and our resident electronics whizz), Robsey, will be joining Envoy CDX and myself as club/forum administrators. Robsey has already been ably helping with forum management, and he provides answers to a large number of Cavalier technical queries alongside his fellow moderators, PlanetC and TurboDan. We’re sure you’ll agree that his increased involvement in the running of the club is a positive step forward.

A revised ‘guides’ section will also be introduced in the coming weeks, with all existing guides re-written, reformatted and restructured. Plenty more guides will be added as time goes by, but expect the forum to be continually evolving with new content.

Of course, all this and more will be outlined in further detail as we pull the final pieces of the puzzle together, and we are always keen to hear from forum members regarding feature requests and suggestions. Click here to speak your brains: viewforum.php?f=39.

Finally, the ‘rebirth’ of the club will be accompanied by a new domain name: http://www.vauxhallcavalier.com. Don’t worry – you will still be able to log in using your existing username and password, and all forum posts will remain unaffected by the switch-over. That said, please do remember to update your bookmarks after the weekend’s server activity (although a redirection from the old URL to the new one will be in place for the short term).

That’s all for now, but we look forward to a bigger, brighter future for the Mk3 Cavalier Owners Club. Thanks for your continued support.

Dan (humbucker)

[Robsey]

Weekend Reminder.

For those who have not read this yet.