Resources Area of the Forum

[peter dowdle]

Just a general comment on the lack of use of the Resources Section of the forum. There are currently only two posts in the entire 6 cylinder section yet the forum is full of interesting infomation. How do we best utilize the Resources section and when is an artical worth of saving in Resources ?. Comments and thoughts please.

[Claude]

I belong to several forums and find the architecture of the medium to be inadequate for the need. What is needed is a Wikipedia for the marque. Forums will have very important field knowledge embedded in a thread that contains a lot of banter. Finding it is hard.

Imagine instead if a wiki was part of the forum. Collective knowledge forms the current page. Talk is on another tab. I post a solution. Then someone else updates this with something I was unaware of that makes the solution better. Instead of clutter (my lesser knowledge having equal standing with the better solution), the best is on the page, with prior pages in history.

With such a tool, imagine in the UK, a retired enthusiast sits down with the knowledge holders (think Percy Kemish on tuning a Bristol 6 as an example of lost knowledge) and convinces them to leave their knowledge for posterity.

I suggest that is better than the Resource Section of the forum. Find the wiki and make it a Covid project for those locked at home.

[Stefan]

I liked this idea and we discussed setting something up a while back. I’ve tried to put as much into the BOHT website as possible - especially the videos of old Bristol heroes- but it needs much more momentum and input.
One good example is Sid Lovesy in his video which I took saying the best way to get the ignition right on a 2 L engine is to set the hand throttle at 3000 rpm and cautiously advance and retard the distributor until the revs rise. Simple and practical, no electronics needed!

[Kevin H]

Originally Posted by Claude

I belong to several forums and find the architecture of the medium to be inadequate for the need. What is needed is a Wikipedia for the marque.

Go for it Claude. There's nothing standing in your way.

[Kevin H]

Originally Posted by peter dowdle

Just a general comment on the lack of use of the Resources Section of the forum. There are currently only two posts in the entire 6 cylinder section yet the forum is full of interesting infomation. How do we best utilize the Resources section and when is an artical worth of saving in Resources ?. Comments and thoughts please.

Peter, part of the problem is that the the resources section is suitable for 'documents' rather than forum 'posts'. Posts can be turned into documents and inserted into the resources section, but I don't have the time to do that.

If anyone wants to create factual reference documents which are suitable for the resources section I can upload them. Email them to webmaster-at-bristolcars.info

[Geoff Kingston]

It is a great shame that for many years the Bristol Owners Club operated a WIKI section of their website, sadly access to that was lost a few years ago in the process of 'upgrading' the website as was a really useful database of cars the latter possibly in the fear that its presence on the website breached the provisions of Data Protection which according to my discussions with the information commissioners it did not. All was not lost though as all the past bulletins are on the website and also a lot of technical information including the articles written by Spencer Lane Jones. With a sense of impending doom when the car data suddenly disappeared I printed out all the information which I thought would be useful on my 2 Litre cars and a bit on the V8. Such a shame that such a valuable resource was lost as it was so easy to find what you needed and so hard and time consuming to start all over again.

[mikebro]

Originally Posted by Geoff Kingston

It is a great shame that for many years the Bristol Owners Club operated a WIKI section of their website, sadly access to that was lost a few years ago in the process of 'upgrading' the website as was a really useful database of cars the latter possibly in the fear that its presence on the website breached the provisions of Data Protection which according to my discussions with the information commissioners it did not. All was not lost though as all the past bulletins are on the website and also a lot of technical information including the articles written by Spencer Lane Jones. With a sense of impending doom when the car data suddenly disappeared I printed out all the information which I thought would be useful on my 2 Litre cars and a bit on the V8. Such a shame that such a valuable resource was lost as it was so easy to find what you needed and so hard and time consuming to start all over again.

Couldn't agree more Geoff. I have been trying to persuade the person concerned to re-activate the wiki, but apparently the technology on which it is based is incompatible with the current website format. I used to use the wiki a lot and it's left a big hole with its demise.

[Philip]

Not sure who I’m upsetting by saying it, but the “new” BOC car database is utterly woeful, to the point of being unusable. The previous format was old, but at least it worked.