On May 9th 1997 DMR Limited (who host this site) added a new 192K lease line to their network and we asked the visitors at the MG Enthusiasts' site to complete a performance survey.
Here are the results
We have 259 completed surveys between May 9th and 15th
Notes: Poor access from AOL users (over a minute) and from parts of Southern and Eastern Europe with 14.4 modems (21-60 secs). Sub-5 second access available from the UK and the USA.
Connection type
14.4 modem 15%
28.8 modem 56%
ISDN 6%
Lease line 14%
Notes: Lease line users are mainly located in the USA (60%) and UK(31%). There were some lease line users in Italy and Germany but their response time was slow.
Browser
Netscape 1 3%
Netscape 2 19%
Netscape 3/4 54%
MS IE 1/2 1%
MS IE 3/4 11%
AOL 4%
Lynx 1%
Notes: 84% of users can see the html tables, but only 65% are ready for frames
Country of submitter
USA 55%
UK 21%
Europe (excluding UK) 11%
Canada 8%
Australasia 4%
Asia 1%
Comments
We have be inundated with compliments, for which we thank you. But we did have one or two improvement suggestions that we are considering:
I can't read the light blue text on the light grey buttons!
This happens with Workstation versions of Netscape - please let us know if you suffer from this.
With the statistics page it would be very interesting to know how many members are in each country.
We are not ready to divuldge this, but we have added a breakdown of owners records by country. Take a look also at the Country percentages above.
The MGB BBS takes too long to load
The load time is proportional to the number of comments and the MGB BBS is one of the larger subject area. Remember that you can press stop when you have seen the top 20 or so as they are come up latest first. I will try to archive the BBS more than once per month.
Just wondering if it is possible to restructure the format of the bulletin boards. What I'd like to see is a questions posted and all responses to that post indented, and listed directly below the question. This way responses are not scattered all over the place to a question. Otherwise, it is difficult to tell if a posting is a question or a response. Many other BB's have this type of format and it works well.
Yes, I agree this could be done. But I do not believe that multiple thread layers are a good idea. The redevelopment of the BBS is a substantial amount of work and as a free resource will probably stay as is for a while, unless anybody would like to fund a replacement?
Please keep this site text-mode friendly for those of us who can't run those fancy graphical web-browsers!
We have used tables quite extensively, but have not moved to frames for this reason. The survey results confirm that we would lose half of our readers if we moved to frames.
MG BBS is great but should be archived more often
OK we'll do it once every 2-3 weeks rather than once a month
Would be nice to withdraw a comment on the BBS - from different reasons.
That is under our control - just send me an email and I will do it.
Add a search engine?
It is on the things to do list
I think that it would be most helpful if a larger portion of the site would be devoted to repair and restoration (by amateurs).
We are happy to publish owners articles if they are submitted to us by email, otherwise we can only republish what is available in the magazines and newsletters that we are permitted to republish from.