Madeline wrote:

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Thanks Count, that has got rid of the annoying notification, and the 3 messages were indeed ancient - 2006-7! However, still when I click on messages, it says at the top of the page "inbox", but it is actually my outbox and I can't find the inbox at all.

Just as well I don't get many PMs these days!

-- Edited by Madeline on Tuesday 17th of January 2012 09:27:26 PM

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There have been some changes to the look.  I think we used to have clear in and out sections.

But as far as I can see from mine, if you click "messages", yes I now notice that it does say "inbox" at the top, but what I get listed is both my ins and outs with conversations back and forth grouped under one entry.

Confused me when I first saw the layout just a few days ago, having not had messages either way for a while, but I think it's all there.

Count Zero wrote:

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i accidental clicked on an old BT.net link, and at the top of the page it says:

NOTICE: This domain name expired on 02/02/2012 and is pending renewal or deletion

does this mean it may come available again?

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That does sound slightly hopeful. I wonder how much grace they get to renew it. With luck, whoever it is has realised we have no intention of paying an inflated price for it and might just let it lapse so we can get hold of it again.

We're back (kind of) ... and this time we're ...
(er, much the same as before really )

Good news - it may not work for everyone quite yet (if not, it should within 24-48 hours, or you can try clearing your browser cache to get in earlier) but the www.britishtennis.net domain is back in our hands.

How we got it back

Following Count Zero noticing that the domain was about to expire (see above) and a tip from RBBOT (for that and for much help with the technical side since, many, many thanks!), I back-ordered it with the current registrar, which effectively meant I would be the first and hopefully last bidder in the auction if it expired without being renewed.

There was, rather surprisingly, another bidder (I checked with Sheddie that it wasn't him, in case he had found out about it and hadn't seen this thread) but the other bidder gave up just before I would have  so I got it for a reasonable amount - about £ 25 (plus annual renewal fees, which are not very much)

Short-term

I don't intend to do much with it at the moment - I have just set it up so that if you try to go to any page on www.britishtennis.net, it will automatically take you to the equivalent www.freewebs.com/britishtennis page (i.e. exactly what happened before we lost the domain name in the first place) - or at least, it will do in 24-48 hours if your cache needs to clear first. After that, feel free to report problems here, though they may not get looked at immediately.

Home page

The old home page is very out of date (the last news item on it is Bally's win against Li Na in 2010) so I have replaced it with the stats page for now. Once the forwarding works for you, the old page will still be accessible via http://www.britishtennis.net/indexold.htm 

Longer-term

At some point in the summer, when I'll have more time, I'll go through the old site and clean it up a bit, but exactly what I'll do at that point depends on what people want to do with the site.

The only important thing about getting the domain name back (and ensuring that it gets renewed in future!) is that it gives people an easier link to remember if they want to find us again. It's just a case of whether getting the domain name back gives anyone the impetus to want to do a bit more with the site again.

Possibilities

At its simplest, the site could continue to be used just to host stuff like the stats and BOTB pages and provide a link to the forum via an easy to remember URL (in which case, when I clean up during the summer, I'll take out any of the links at the top of the home/stats page that are completely out of date) ... or it could start to contain more extensive news articles (etc) again, if people want to put in the effort to do that.

Even if people do want to start doing articles again, I don't think we should even try to write news articles every day as once happened - the burden tends to fall on too few people and it's just too difficult to keep up when people get busy, with the inevitable result that you go from great coverage that is nearly always up to date to nothing at all, as happened before.

Perhaps the best way to run the home page would be for people to write articles when they felt like it (even if that just meant one a month), with a twitter feed above it (either my one as seen in the middle of the stats page or one based on a different, less stats-based twitter account looked after by somebody else) to provide up to date 'headlines'.

Anyway, feel free to post ideas or comments on here, and if any decisions need to be made, we can finalise them over the summer.

As to more sweeping changes like moving away from hosting the content on (free)webs, that is something that might be worth considering too ... though it might just be more hassle than it's worth, tempting as it may be!

Talking of (free)webs being a pain ...

Site banner

You might also have noticed that the site banner is working again, both on the stats pages (etc) and on the forum.

That's not a result of getting the domain name back, but as part of sorting things out, I worked out today that the problem was that the images were in the /pictures/ sub-directory but the pages (and forum) were looking for them in /Pictures/.

The URLs on the site never used to be case-sensitive (so /pictures/ and /Pictures/ used to both work fine) but (Free)webs must have changed the operating system their servers run on without telling us  - or perhaps they sent an email to Sheddie's old account which he never saw, who knows.

I first realised this was a problem when people from other BOTB teams reported that either the Competitions or the competitions page was showing out of date info when the other version was fine (again, they used to be the same thing!) but it didn't dawn on me then that it might explain the banner problem too.

The changes seem to have worked their way through for me so that I now get the right pages when I put URLs starting with http://www.britishtennis.net/ into my browser (it may take up to 24 hours more for it to work for some of you though) - I also wanted to say that while it's nice to be thanked, RBBOT deserves a lot of credit for working out what I needed to do and patiently answering lots of questions from me (many of them, no doubt, pretty stupid) during the process.

Tidying up

Turned out it wasn't that difficult to tidy the site up after all, so I did it last night.

To avoid the main links at the top of each page including lots of pages that are 2-5 years out of date (which was becoming a bit embarrassing when most of those pages looked like they were meant to be up to date), I have cut the number of links at the top of each page down to just 4 for now.

The first two pages linked to (the rankings/stats index page and the competitions page) are the only ones that have had regular updates in the last couple of years and the third link is to the forum.

The fourth link is to a new 'archive' page at http://www.britishtennis.net/archive.html, which is basically the old home page and news blog, with an expanded 'what this site is about' section and links to any out of date pages that still contain stuff that might be of interest - e.g. interviews, player profiles and so on (mostly from around 2007), with a note of the dates those pages were active.

Any of these archive links could easily go back up the top and appear on all the main pages again if anyone ever starts adding more up to date stuff to them.

The only other 'tidying up' I have done for now is to make the top banner and links the same for all pages other than those produced direct from spreadsheets and to rescue some of the pictures where the only reason they were failing to appear was because of the uppercase/lowercase problem I mentioned in my last post.

What next?

For now (and perhaps forever!), that's all I intend to do with the site myslf apart from keeping the stats up to date and running as many BOTB pick 'ems as time permits.

However, if anyone ever wants to add the odd article from time to time (even if it is just to show off their journalistic talent to a site that pays like Sheddie did LOL ), resurrect any of the other archive pages, produce a new site banner or add something completely new, just let me know so I can add a link if necessary.

Only two common sense 'rules' if you do want to contribute:

1) please don't write anything that could be libellous

2) please don't use pics unless you have either taken them yourself or know and can demonstrate that they are open source! (I'm not 100% sure all the pics already on the site meet those criteria but they are so old and have been on there so long without Sheddie getting into trouble that I would hope nobody would be too bothered any more)

Of course, apart from giving us a permanent home again at an easier to remember place than www.freewebs.com/britishtennis, having the www.britishtennis.net domain name back should make it more feasible to get things like press accreditation again (e.g. for DC) if that ever becomes an issue. Make idiots of ourselves once though and we won't get invited back, so as before, anyone wanting to do that as an official BT.net representative as Drew once did is going to have to be a long-standing member who has demonstrated that if they get in, they will make the most of the opportunity and be professional about it.

Btw for those who were given access to use the blog feature in the past, it works just as it did previously with the same freewebs logon as before, while if anyone wants to bypass the blog function and upload whole pages (or upload pics for use in pages/blog posts), you can do that in webs or using any FTP program, of which Leech FTP is a good free example.

I'll probably put some of this up on a new thread as a sticky at some point, but I'll give you all a chance to shout me down and/or point out any mistakes first!

That should be the last of the really long posts for now, you'll be pleased to hear