offer of help

[watchbloke]

Hi guys. I thought I posted this last night, but it was late and I may not have submitted it.

I'd like to give some support.

I administer another (not watch related) forum and I'm a dab hand at php, MySQL, Linux etc. I have that forum ticking over nicely, backend admin is automated as much as possible, and I'd like to offer some support to TRF too. No charge of course, watches are a passion of mine, too.

I've had a look through the threads in this sub forum and think I may be able to help some of the recurring themes.

I could take a look at the paypal pledge payments, to integrate the process with the forum directly and automate the update of member profiles. Perhaps add an auto-renewing subscription option too? Save you some admin time, and give pledging members an immediate response.

I guess we have a weekly/nightly database backup in place? I could automate that if not automated already, and/or implement database replication and some selective rsync to avoid backups having any impact on forum performance. Perhaps some automated DB table optimisation too to keep things running smoothly.

Not sure if you use @rolexforums.com email addresses, but those would be delivered to the web server currently, if that (this) server has issues you also won't receive emails. On the other forum the directors and admin team all use google apps for @domain.com email (and shared calendar, docs etc) so outage of one doesn't affect the other.

Another income stream to compliment pledges could be eBay links. No impact to members at all, but eBay will pay handsomely each time someone clicks on an eBay.com link. It's quite easy to change existing eBay links in posts to benefit TRF, like amazon. Conservatively this could add ~$400/month to the forum running costs fund.

Hope I can help

Cheers