State of the forum - The ΩF news thread

Made this a sticky thread and updated the title. We'll use it to announce ongoing info and news related to the ΩF forum platform itself.

Frankly that was to save me a bit of time, such that when you and Desmond posted people took some sense of finality from the response. There are probably a few more Omega nerds that I'd like to add that title to, both modern and vintage, think I labeled your watchmaker as well. Its important that 20-30 years from now the knowledge that is floating around in books, brochures and in the minds of collectors is preserved as a part of horological history.

For that reason we need to suck that knowledge out of people's skulls as efficiently as possible, and this is one small way of aiding in that. 😗

We had initially enabled the mind-reading module, but the place filled up with loads of pornography immediately. Mostly beach blondes wearing vintage Omega pieces. There was also macros of Patek movements, among several other things that are completely unmentionable. ☕

Just FYI we've finally managed to start a google ads campaign to try to bring in some specific traffic, now by specific traffic, we're not spending much, the budget's tiny in fact and we expect almost no clicks (and are hoping for almost no clicks) but we're targeting those ads to very specific searches in google so for example...

Speedmaster Pro <-- Not interested
Vintage 145.022 Speedmaster Professional <-- Are interested

Omega Constellation <-- Not interested
1950s gold constellation chronometer <-- Are interested

The aim is to get more novices with vintage Omegas to come on and get some advice on watches they've bought, inherited or found, such as how and where to restore (or whether to at all) such that these pieces are liberated as I like to call them (recognised for their value and preserved with original dial and hands, and passed on either to the collector community or to someone with knowledge of the piece) rather than them being scrapped for gold, or sold for less than value to unscrupulous dealers.

That really is my favorite part of this forum, when people bring their vintage pieces in and get a feel for what they've got on their hands.

My question... does anyone have some detailed, specific keywords or terms we should add, that someone might be looking for information on, specifically rare, unique and special vintage Omega pieces?

Regarding new watches, Omegaforums already ranks very well on search terms, so I'm fairly sure those guys will find us if they want to, this is primarily so that someone with a vintage piece he wants information or help with can find this site and get pointed in the right direction (hopefully posting some pretty pictures if its an interesting watch too).

Hmm you talking about text colour?

At the moment there's an override which switches all text colours to black. There was a few posts in various places that had random primary colours everywhere, and it was starting to look really ugly and inconsistent. I did the style over-ride as a quick fix to clean it up.

What sort of scenarios did you think the colours would be useful for?

Doh. I just noticed where you were going to use orange 😀

Edit: I've just fixed the editor so the color selector doesn't show. Better to have consistency.

The colors and extra formatting options wouldn't make a difference for speed. The issue was that some people were making entire posts in shades of grey (not so great on a grey background), or entire paragraphs of text in primary blue, etc.

The original idea was that we don't really need multi-colored text on a watch forum, and that sacrificing them for better site-wide readability and cleaner looks was an OK compromise 😀

We can always bring them back if needed. Thanks for pointing out that they were still in the editor.

We have a new shortcut address for the Omega Forums, it's:
http://omega.fm

Hopefully it saves you guys a tiny bit of time if you're typing it on a virtual keyboard like iPhone/tablets/etc. 👍

If it's not working right away, it will be shortly (as the name servers need to update).

Further interface tweaks will be rolled out for you guys shortly. We've done some general clean-up of underlying code, and also made several interface elements more touch friendly (rather than looking like crusty, old forum software).

Pagination is now touch-friendly, along with the "unread posts" indicator, which will replace the user avatar in the thread list only when there's stuff you haven't read.

Everyone should see these updates within a day or so. Cheers 👍



Edit: You should have these updates now if you fully clear your browser cache, or hammer reload a few times 😀