TVT site maintenance underway

[llamavan]

I am are currently in the process of doing some much-needed catch-up maintenance on TVT. This includes (but is not limited to) ensuring all technical posts are correctly tagged, moving misplaced posts that snuck past us, and merging multiple threads that turned out to be on the same topic.

In the short term, this will be painful while Google's indexing bots lag behind all the changes, but soon searching TVT for technical information will be VASTLY easier and more efficient.

Both the Classified forums and the General Discussion forums have been cleaned up, but not tagged at this time (most content is either non-technical, speculative, or is so mixed up in single threads that there is no way to tag it, period).
The 4WD and Diesel subforums are now fully tagged by technical content (not because they are more important, but because they are SMALLER and less intimidating).
The Previa subforum is currently being gone through, thread by thread and post by post — all 32 pages.

After that, I'll tackle the large Toyota Vans technical subforum, and that will, um, take a really long time. There's a ton of information here on TVT!!!

Thanks in advance for your patience, for your part in helping to keep the forum organized.

ALSO — please check out the "Searching TVT" thread for updated information, namely, how to search using tags!

Gwen

[llamavan]

The Previa technical subforum has been cleaned up and fully tagged.

Gwen

[llamavan]

The Toyota Vans technical subforum has been cleaned up and all remaining threads tagged. WHEW.

The tag list has also been standardized and consolidated. Tag synonyms have been merged. For instance, if you type "oil" you'll get all the results for "engine oil" without having to guess that "engine oil" was the main tag. "Dash warning lights stay on" is a main tag (and should be crystal clear to the never-ending parade of alternator failure virgins), but "christmas dash" is a synonym and will still pull up all the same stuff for us old hands. Same with "hose — water bypass" and "hod" or "hose of death" or "hose from hell"

Turns out a lot of members (some trying to be helpful and some, uh, not so much) interpreted tags as functioning like #hashtags — to attract attention — rather than as an indexing and search tool. We had tons of threads tagged with stuff like "bolt" "wire" "loose" "missing" (is a part missing, or is it the engine missing ... ???) ad infuriatum!!! It turns out, too, that a lot of spammers took advantage of that aspect as well, with loads of tags such as "nfl jersey". Yeah, real helpful. Admin/Mods are now the only ones who can create tags. If you discover a tag that you think needs to be added — that is, we have enough threads on the topic but no tag for it ... or there's a synonym that isn't searchable — reply to this thread for now. Just make sure you spelled it right when you were searching! I'll create a permanent thread for tag suggestions/requests before closing this one.

Google has been doing an impressive job of updating their search engine database, so there's not much lag time (a few days, it appears) from when something got moved or merged and when you can find it again with the Google search method; I've been working on tags only for the last couple of days, so in another day or two, things should be back to normal (google-search-option-wise).

My next puzzle is to work out how best to provide members with an index of current tags (1314 of them) and/or major tag headings. The "view tag cloud" feature in vBulletin only shows the top tags that have been searched for. Not very helpful if everyone is searching for "lift" and "camperize" ... and you smell gas in your van and want to know what to do (spoiler alert — all smells start with "smell" followed by descriptors; gas smell is a synonym tag that you can search with. too).

I still need to go through all the gazillion overlapping (can't be merged) alternator threads and figure out how to either tag them with more specific information (symptoms) or ... something. That particular task makes me want to

Gwen

[timsrv]

Site will be down a few hrs tonight while we beef up our spam protection and update the forum software. This should only take a couple hrs. Tim

[timsrv]

And again tonight 8/1/19 @ ~ 2:00 am. We will be installing an updated version of v-Bulletin software and adding additional spam protection. Thank you for your patience. Tim

[Andywear]

the Blog section is not coming up.

To use this product the plugin system must be enabled.

just a heads up in case you were unaware.

[timsrv]

I see that. We will address this tonight when we shut down the forum. Thanks for the heads-up . Tim

[timsrv]

I think everything is up and running correctly now and upgrades are in place. If anybody notices any problems or issues please let me know. Tim