Hi everyone just wondering if there could be a gramophone section added as I have a couple and I'm sure a few others do also help traffic to the website just a suggestion

Not a bad idea! I've been doing some work on the new website recently and have been looking for an excuse to add a couple of extra forums. That said, I should be able to add a forum for grammophones and phonographs this weekend.

Keep an eye out for a special announcement on either Saturday Night or Sunday.

I'm really looking forward to hearing how the new site is progressing. I'll keep an eye out for some announcements soon!

The bad news is that things have been going slow with the new site due mostly to time constraints. I first worked on the idea of replacing the current site about two years ago however I never liked any of the themes I ended up developing. This site was originally written in 2003 and although it looked very different the back end, the code that drives the site's functions, is the same code written in 2003 with bits and pieces bolted on in frankenstein fashion. The forums were added in 2005 and this piece of software was given the name Hansard. Many features have been added since then, bringing the total feature set close to what could be expected on out-of-the-box forum packages.

Two problems now exist however. These forums were developed at a time when I had little technical knowledge of what I was about to roll out. A lot of the code is inefficient and has been written in ways that obstruct future feature inclusions. This is why two or three much sought after features have never been included, such as the ability of members to include images in their posts without the need to either know the correct HTML language format or e-mailing the photos to me. In the new forums you will not only be able to include the photos yourself but each member will also be given their own disc space on the site to host them here rather than having to use Photobucket or similar. The other problem is that two small bugs exist that no matter what I try I cannot get them to work correctly. One is member post counts, all of which are far too high. Every time a member posts, everyone's postcount is elevated instead of only the postcount of the member posting at that time. The other bug is the paging function for threads that divide long threads up into batches of ten posts. This function does work in the list of threads though and you can see the row of page numbers at the top and bottom of each list - strange...

Now, here is a little secret. I used to work at night before, during and a few years after the 2000 Olympic Games. I spent much of my idle time working on the roll-out of this and other websites. This explains why I had much more time back then. Saldy, because of the cost of development work, I need to do this job myself. If I paid a leading firm to build even this website from scratch I'd be looking at something like $20,000 and I'd be stuck with having their brand name at the bottom of the page.

The new site is in very early stages of development but early signs show that with the newer .NET environment it is a very fast site and the code is smaller and more efficient. I have to say that I am looking forward to getting that job done and hopefully before Christmas.

Thanks for the update. It will be worth waiting for. It is a big task to write your own code from scratch so I appreciate the effort you are going through.