You may have noticed our Homepage is updated. It's been completely redesigned to adapt to any screen, so it looks good no matter if you're on a phone, tablet, or computer. It's also streamlined from what it once was and still offers a central location to see the latest news, events, and forum posts. I've included links to Stateline Wagens, Village VW, S&P, and Aircooled Werk as a way to promote our family of clubs and businesses that support us. Eventually, the rest of the pages on the site will be updated to this new design as well. This will be the 7th major redesign of our site since it began in 1999 so I'm calling it 7.0.

Also, the photos in the gallery are taking up so much space that I'm almost out of room. When we started the gallery, hosting it ourselves was the only real solution. But now Flickr offers 1 terabyte of space for free and they have powerful tools for managing and sharing photos. I've moved the majority of the gallery over to Flickr and even with 11,240 photos uploaded, we've only used 1.3% of 1TB. So basically we will never run out of room for our gallery at this point. What this means is if you have any photos from previous shows, doesn't matter, let's get them in our gallery! I will continue to have the upload feature on the site which makes it easy to add them simply by dragging and dropping.

Visit our gallery here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/volksfolks/albums

Help me fill it up then!

Speaking of Bug-a-Paluza 3, we are severely lacking in photos from that year. Virtually all I have are thumbnails pulled from an archive of a gallery that Perk hosted. I fear the originals are lost and nobody has ever come forward with any additional photos.

That's sad.  There were a LOT of pictures made that year.  Too bad they are lost.    There are several Bug-A-Paluzas that are light on photos.  We need to make sure that we don't let it happen again!  I tried to get at least one photo of every vehicle this year . . . I think I snapped over 600 . . . and I know I missed a bunch of cars, and I didn't get any in the campground.  Now that we have room, I think we should set a goal of at least a thousand pictures next year.   

Continuing into 2017 with more improvements and enhancements to the site. All pages have been updated to the new design and the entire site is served over HTTPS now. Any old non-SSL links will be automatically redirected.

Both of these are important for one reason. Google is constantly adjusting their algorithms for how well a site is ranked in their search results. Lately, they have been pushing mobile-friendly and SSL. The new site design is "responsive", meaning the content adapts to any size screen. So no matter if you're browsing on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone, you will have the best experience. Google is also pushing for more encryption on the web and we have that covered, too. In fact, recent versions of Chrome and Firefox will issue a warning if a page collects passwords or personal info on a form that is not served with SSL. You should see the little padlock in your browser whenever you are browsing the site.

The forum software has been upgraded to the latest version, too. Prior to upgrading, the old software was no longer supported. Now we have access to the latest features and security updates, and I spent a lot of time customizing the theme so that it would match the rest of the site. There are additional security features for registering now too, which seems to have stopped most all of the spam bots that were signing up. I have also blocked a lot of spiders that do nothing but drain bandwidth and resources by continually crawling forum threads.

Tapatalk seems to be working better than ever. If you have any issues using it, please post in the site help forum.

If you prefer not to use Tapatalk, browsing the forums from your phone's browser works just as well too.

Your club membership is now completely integrated with the site through PayPal. You will receive an email alert when your renewal is due, as well as site notifications when you visit. Paying online with PayPal will automatically renew your membership and keep you active in the members only sections as well. When you're logged into the forums, you'll see an extra "Members" section in the menu at the top, with access to links so you can pay your dues, update your info, and view the club directory.

A lot of old site content has been removed that was out of date or no longer relevant. I have concentrated on improving the major areas of the site: news, events, and forums.

So for the 3 people still here, I hope you enjoy the improvements!


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