Email goes back to the very early days if the development of the Internet (ARPANet) and one of the problems not then forseen was the trouble unwanted emails could cause (spam) once email became the standard mode of much modern communication.

As a result of this various ad hoc techniques are used by internet service providers to try to filter out spam. Unfortunately many of these are overly suspicious of email that comes from bulletin boards or from IP addresses which are shared by many users - some of whom may indeed be generators of spam.

Messages from or via this board are much more likely to be marked as spam than your everyday emails. Thus you should whitelist the email used by the forum. If you are using Microsoft Outlook the searching Help for "whitelist" will show you how to trust addresses in your Contacts. Then put bestcar@castlewoodconsultants.com in your Contacts.

Sadly even this does not always let you see everything sent to you. For example the mail service on btinternet.com filters some stuff and never even sends it to your computer mail client. You will be able to see these messages in some sort of spam folder by using the webmail client for your service provider rather than a desktop client like Outlook or Thunderbird.

A very common difficulty is if you forget your password and use the Forgotten password link on the login screen then the forum sends you an email with a link to reset the password. These often are falsely marked as spam.

The URL for access to this bulletin board and more importantly the prototype database App is not now sensitive to upper and lower case thus:

wwW.CASTLEWoodConSultants.com/tBCiWa/aPP

would work when typed into your browser.

Although not the default on web-servers this seems to have negligible downsides and many upsides for the general public.

JAP

The Best Car In World Archive (TBCIWA) is accessed from any device with a web browser so you can use a smart-phone, a tablet computer, an Apple or Windows PC lap- or desk-top computer. For serious work a reasonably large screen will help so computers are best but you can certainly demonstrate the system on a 'phone.

The system has been tested with Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Safari as browsers.

To use you favourite and browse to the following: www.castlewoodconsultants.com/TBCIWA/App 

You will be invited to login, by default, as a GUEST. See attached

   

Just click the Submit button and after a short delay you will see the current database items in the archive. See below

   

Underline words are action links. For example you can sort the display based on any column by clicking its column header and you can open a dialog to allow you to filter the items you see based on the date they were written (usually within a range), up to three keywords from the item's Subject and by the Reference (initials) of its Author. The keywords and Reference initials can all include "wildcards" - the character * matches and number of characters and ? matches exactly one character. For keywords one often uses something like *carb* as this will find carburetor, carburettor, carburetter, etc., anywhere in the Subject line. You would avoid wildcards in the Author as *R* would find e.g. R, Wor and Rg

The filters all have to be matched to include an item except that an alternate set of keywords can be given and either they OR the first set must find a match for inclusion. An empty box matches anything but beware as spaces ARE significant so if you get unexpected results check you don't have invisible spaces by using the <delete> key on your keyboard. Upper-case letters match lower-case and vice versa.

Once set a filter will persist for your logged in session.

Obviously the complete database is many thousan records which would not be sensible to show at one time so the display is split into pages of 40 entries. You select the desired page by clicking the relevant numbered box viz:

   

where page 8 is displayed.

To see the scanned document for each item click the scanner icon in the first column.

   

The result is

   

You may find you do not instantly locate what you want and think that this is because the system does not have good keywords indexed. In this case once you have located what you want, click the light-bulb icon to make a suggestion of keywords to be added to the index. This will be emailed to the system administrators and copied to you and in time, if accepted, your keywords will be added to help other users conducting searches. That way everyone can contribute to the continual improvement of the system.

   

There are other links but these are not important or relevant to GUEST users.

Signing up to this Forum (bulletin board system) whose working title is "bestCar" gives you access to make changes to the Prototype cloud database system and its scanned documents (TBCIWA - The Best Car In World Archive).

The Indexer's Handbook can be downloaded here

Of course, new people will not be able to see this post (Catch 22!) so when you are introducing someone you probably want to copy the above into an email or text to send to them or use the "Send this Thread to a Friend" link below this message.

Other posts here give further training on using TBCIWA as if you are a general user and on how to login to develop the system. Active volunteers should see this as the go-to place for help in preference to emailing other people directly as this makes any advice given available automatically to everyone involved.

The SHRMF and RREC are engaged in a project, called ARCHIVES~Online,  to make publicly available, in the cloud, a searchable database of scans of all the archived documents relating to the development of R-R cars  in the period up to World War 2.

The expertise of many people will be used to construct the index to these documents.

Currently the project has a Prototype System available that is populated with high resolution scan of aroundf 250,000 documents from the Experimental Department in Derby, from West Wittering, from Springfield and around the world where cars were being tested. About 10% of this has been indexed.

This Forum is part of the support mechanism for people working with this Prototype.

Membership of this forum allows volunteers to share their best practice and experience, ask for help on details and discuss developments of the Prototype into a working system for Foundation and Club members and the worldwide general public.

A important additional feature is that the log-in credentials here are also the login credentials to allow indexing and other management of the cloud database.

Thus the database and the forum have a shared membership but are actually quite separate pieces of software. To make this clear you will see this forum has a red "R" icon in your browser tab. The database displays a blue icon - see attached.     

Keywords are typically embedded in the Subject of an item. 

When new ones are added as a result of a user suggestion or reconsideration by original indexer I suggest that the should be added in brackets at the end of the Subject. See attached screenshot of example.

   

Thoughts please

   

Welcome

John Prentice