Benefactor
- 15,584
- First Name
- Michael
- Last Name
- Murguia
- Member #
-
0000
- Ham/GMRS Callsign
- KM6YSL
Hey all,
I was just thinking, "Hey, folks probably don't know exactly what we have done to insure a quality forum experience here and they might be interested!"
The benefactors and supporters of these forums help us to provide the following exceptional features, free to registered users. If you see that banner in their profile, THANK THEM!
We will continue to grow these forums and overlandbound.com to support what the world-wide overland community needs. When the community provides to us, we will use our wit and tenacity to turn that around and give back 10x.
We continue to develop functionality at a rate supported by our members. For example, we are currently working on a feature to be able to search by member number. We are also working on a feature to make upgrading to "Member" once you purchase a OB Emblem automatic. We are working on a broadcast feature so you are notified when a new member in your area registers, and an Event Planning feature to organize your own Overland Bound Member Events. We will continue to develop overland-specific functionality.
We will continue driving the Overland Bound movement, mission, and community to make overlanding and a connection with the great outdoors accesible to as many people as possible.
Outfit and Explore,
Michael
I was just thinking, "Hey, folks probably don't know exactly what we have done to insure a quality forum experience here and they might be interested!"
The benefactors and supporters of these forums help us to provide the following exceptional features, free to registered users. If you see that banner in their profile, THANK THEM!
- No Ads: Ads slow down forums and get in the way of your access to information. That violates why we started OB in the first place. We want you to have the information you need to explore - no barriers.
- Dedicated "Bare Metal" servers. Our servers are dedicated to hosting overlandbound.com only, and not shared with any other hosts. THis also means they are more secure from attack. Poor security measures by other hosts will not affect us.
- Https Security: See that green lock in your browser bar that says "secure"? That means your posts and any messages sent in our forums are sent encrypted, meaning you are protected from all kinds of nastiness.
- Terabytes and terabytes of data storage to host the content you upload including videos, images, and GPX map files. This means we are not depending on any third party hosting sites. We store our own data, and it is all archived on our servers.
- High resolution image uploads so you do not have to use an external image host service (your image links will never break). This also means that we are not dependent on the performance of any other hosts or servers. You will not experience "lag" because some other website is slow.
- Real-time chat for members, which includes video conferencing and file sharing. This is huge, and exerts a tremendous load on servers due to the real-time nature of chat message transmission. This is why facebook can afford real time chat, and most forum hosts cannot. But then again, FB has ads.
- Dedicated push servers to relay Instant chat messaging for speedy response. I mention this separately from the above bullet because this is what makes chat possible, and it is an additional cost that is dedicated to nothing else but pushing your messages. It's a push server just sitting there saying, "come on! give me a message to send!"
- Unlimited Google Map Query Quota ($) to support the Member Map and map filtering. Without this service, the Member map would not be possible. Every load of the Member Map is a query that counts toward our quota. Every "fetch" or map load has to retrieve thousands of OB Member locations. Every filter checkbox is a new query. With thousands and thousands of users, this is a lot of queries. It costs $
- Dedicated Firewall Security monitoring every "request" of our servers. That means if someone goes to our website, they don't get access unless the firewall deems the visit and request to be OK. It gives us tremendous flexibility to configure, monitor, and react to brute force and malicious attacks.
We will continue to grow these forums and overlandbound.com to support what the world-wide overland community needs. When the community provides to us, we will use our wit and tenacity to turn that around and give back 10x.
We continue to develop functionality at a rate supported by our members. For example, we are currently working on a feature to be able to search by member number. We are also working on a feature to make upgrading to "Member" once you purchase a OB Emblem automatic. We are working on a broadcast feature so you are notified when a new member in your area registers, and an Event Planning feature to organize your own Overland Bound Member Events. We will continue to develop overland-specific functionality.
We will continue driving the Overland Bound movement, mission, and community to make overlanding and a connection with the great outdoors accesible to as many people as possible.
Outfit and Explore,
Michael
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