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Yours truly, Basil, owner/operator of British Car
Forum |
British
Car Forum was started in December 2000 as a way to bring
enthusiasts of all little British cars together in one
place. As the owner of this
site, I own a number of different British car marques, to
include a Jaguar E-Type a Triumph Spitfire, and a Daimler
SS. I had participated in a number of different
forums that catered to each of these marques independently,
but I could not find any good forums that dealt with all the
the British marques in one place. I also
participated a number of Mailing Lists, but quickly grew
tired of my inbox filling up with stuff, most of which did
not interest me. I felt there must be a better way,
so I decided to start this forum.
I researched a lot of different forum software and
ended up using a program called UBB Classic by a company
then called InfoPop. The Classic software used
"flat files" to store all the messages and user
data. This was ok for a small forum, with only a few
hundred users, but eventually, the site grew to the point
where using flat files was very inefficient. The
forum would slow to a crawl when too many people were
trying to open the same message files at the same
time. So, I upgraded around the 2nd year to UBB
Threads, which uses a much more efficient SQL database for
storing and retrieving all the data. I have been
using "Threads" ever since and have made
numerous modifications to the software myself (called
hacks).
For the first couple of years I ran BCF just using web
hosting space that I leased from a standard
provider. This worked well for awhile, but
eventually I wanted to have more control over the server's
operations, so I leased what is called a "Virtual
Private Server" or VPS. This gave me root
access to what amounted to my own server, but in fact I
was sharing a single machine with several other
customers. This worked ok for awhile, but eventually
the forum outgrew the VPS, and we finally had to get a
dedicated server, which is what we have to this
day.
When I decided to start this forum, the obvious name
for such a place was "British Car Forum" but I
was certain that such a perfect domain name would have
long ago been taken. To my surprise and delight, I
learned that Britishcarforum.com was in fact available, so
I registered it without delay! Over the years I have
had numerous offers to buy that domain name, but it isn't
for sale!
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