YAHOO Westfalia Sprinter Website

To all the members of the Yahoo Sprinter Westfalia website I suggest that we find a way to have a live meeting online somehow to decide the future of the site. Yahoo has turned into a POS and the new format is absolute crap and more unreliable than ever. I don't know if we can somehow salvage the Yahoo site or transfer all the data and archives to another site but I believe we need to do something. While I use the computer a lot I am in no way an I.T. person but I'm sure there are list members who are very knowledgeable about these things.

So, as Yahoo members come to this site out of desperation maybe we can begin a discussion or plan a live discussion of what our options are. The Yahoo site has 8 years of information that is very valuable to any Westfalia owner and I hate to see us lose it. If anyone wants to start an off line discussion via email my email is berkemerb@uwstout.edu

Thanks, Bob (woodywesty)

Will post all responses to Yahoo group here. As more folks do that, will have migration.

Still have problems even viewing messages over at Yahoo, and ridiculous to try to respond.

The European James Cook forum is also a good place to ask our European brethren for info.

woodywesty said:

To all the members of the Yahoo Sprinter Westfalia website I suggest that we find a way to have a live meeting online somehow to decide the future of the site. Yahoo has turned into a POS and the new format is absolute crap and more unreliable than ever. I don't know if we can somehow salvage the Yahoo site or transfer all the data and archives to another site but I believe we need to do something. While I use the computer a lot I am in no way an I.T. person but I'm sure there are list members who are very knowledgeable about these things.

So, as Yahoo members come to this site out of desperation maybe we can begin a discussion or plan a live discussion of what our options are. The Yahoo site has 8 years of information that is very valuable to any Westfalia owner and I hate to see us lose it. If anyone wants to start an off line discussion via email my email is berkemerb@uwstout.edu

Thanks, Bob (woodywesty)

Click to expand...

I've been with this Yahoo-VW Eurovan site. Yes, it has lots of info for my ancient 2002 EVC but like you said: turned into a POS. It's crap and ridiculously unreliable in this era of finesse PC stuff. Tried to have all members create one in VWVortex but no takers. Hmmnn..what shall we do?

Cheers..

Zach suggested we move over several years ago, maybe now we'll make the move over to Sprinter Source.
Juju

In Germany we split our activities to 2 forums.

All Mercedes related staff is discussed in the http://www.sprinter-forum.de/
All Westfalia related stuff is discussed in http://www.james-cook-freunde.de/

Both forums recommend each other on a regular basis. This works since 2001.

I'm the founder and admin of the James Cook Freunde Forum. I have implemented Google translate so you can read anything in English. Almost everybody in the Forum can read your posts in English. Many of them will answer in English as well. Please give it a try.

Like here at sprinter-source, we have a special board for the westies: http://forum.james-cook-freunde.de/viewforum.php?f=21
What we really need are westy-fans who fill it with life!

Hope to meet you there
Peter

Hello Peter,

I am slowly working at getting used to your wonderful website but it just takes time for us old guys to get used to a new format. The old Yahoo Westfalia site was very easy to use but as many others have noted has become a real POS. Many long standing friendships began on the Yahoo site and there is a wealth of information stored there about our rather unique American version of the James Cook. Still I think us NAFTA Cook owners should use your site along with this subset of the Sprinter Forum. Cheers and a Merry Christmas to all my old friends from the Yahoo Westfalia forum.

Bob

Hello Westyans -

Archiving the old sprinter_westfalia posts is not hard. It does take time, but many hands make light work . . .

I've archived other technical posts in the past but just archived over the first few posts starting with this thread: http://www.sprinter-source.com/forum/showthread.php?t=30149

If anyone is interested in helping out with this project please let me know by replying to the thread linked above!

Thanks,

Zach

Zach, I can see that you have undertaken a lot of work for the good of the cause but it looks like there is a zillion posts by you with clipped paragraphs from our Yahoo posts with no indication of who is posting or when the post was made or any way to do searches. Maybe I'm missing something but it looks to me like you are doing a lot of work and in the end we won't actually be able to have a usable archive.. correct me if I'm wrong. Bob (woodywesty)

Hello Bob -

Thanks for the feedback.

Any Yahoo sprinter_westfalia post in which the person's post included their name / handle / whatever in the text of their post will include that identifier in the archive here on Sprinter-Source.com. If they did not include an identifier in the body text it will not appear without extra time consuming work, it is true.

You will have to show me an example of a "clipped paragraph" - I tried to maintain the entirety of every post in the order that it was posted within it's thread. Sometimes Yahoo appears to have lost some entire posts or lost their connection to their thread, though. I can only save what is still there in Yahoo.

Just as I have not taken the extra to effort copy across identifiers that are not included as part of a post, I have not taken the time to copy over the original date of posts when that date was not included in the body text. My focus is to archive the technical or other important details of the posts. The stuff that current and future Westy owners are most likely to want easy access to.

I do not understand why you say that the archive can't be searched. Sprinter-Source.com has excellent search tools. You can search across the entirety of Sprinter-Source.com, within the Airstream Sprinter Westfalia sub forum only, within the Archived posts only, and I believe you could even exclude the Archived posts if you wanted to. Try experimenting with Sprinter-Source's advanced search capabilities.

As I said in my post below, I welcome help from others to speed this process up. And I welcome discussion of improvements to the archiving from anyone who is willing to volunteer as part of the process. With more folks contributing to the archiving process there may be time enough to further improve the process.

Zach

Hello All,

I'm not sure this will help, but I've been subscribed to the Yahoo group since December 2007. I use Thunderbird as an email client and have a local copy of every email for group since that time (~200MB). This folder/mailbox is also synced to my gMail account. When I search for something in the group, I use either the Thunderbird search feature on my desktop or I search in gMail trough the web.

If the information in this form is of any use, I'd be more then happy to share it.


Cheers,
-illya