Vintage Caravans Website

[Geoff & Jude]

i'm wondering what has happened to mark's original vintage caravan website?
when i go to www.vintagecaravans.com the link has changed to another website.

geoff 'n jude

[Don Ricardo]

Hi Geoff & Jude,

Mark T decommissioned his website several years ago, and it looks as if the web address is now being used by someone else.

Mark is still the sponsor of this Forum though, so a great deal of thanks go to him for being willing to keep it up and operating, and funding it.

Don Ricardo

[Geoff & Jude]

thanks richard

i guess that just goes to show how often i went back to the website.

pity though, it had some good stuff on it, but that's life i suppose.

and as you say, we really do owe mark a lot for what he started and how he continues to support the hobby - thanks mark, you really did get a lot of people involved in vintage caravanning.

geoff 'n jude

[thegeneral]

Hello Jeff and Jude, Don Ricardo yes the V.V. movement was started by Mark,  here in W.A. we do a weekend away  at Binningup
as close as possible to the Forum's birthday. about 2nd week in August. normally wet and windy so we all cuddle in one of our annexes
The colder it is the more Port we drink.  

[cobber]

Yes, Mark and Jenny started this forum eighteen and a half years ago in WA and those of us on the east coast couldn’t understand why we didn’t have a bigger following here at that time.
There were a few car clubs that had some members with vintage caravans but it took this forum to get us talking to each other about our vintage caravans and displaying them.

The hobby gradually, quickly grew 😉

Cobber.

[Franklin1]

G'day All, if you are familiar with using the internet archives (ie. Wayback Machine), you can see what the original Vintage caravan website homepage looked like in the old days. The earliest record is 28 November 2002, with plenty of examples following since that year.

www.vintagecaravans.com

Cheers.
Al.

[cobber]

Thanks Al,
Never heard of that feature and it took me all day to make it work before I found,

web.archive.org/web/20160516062416/http://vintagecaravans.com/introduction/

The date on that home page says May 16 2016 but Mark and Jenny started the web site well before that because Jenny posted the welcome to the forum in July 2004 that started a couple years after the web site, as you have indicated around November 2002 ( I can’t find that post 🤪 )

I was hoping to see photos on the old ‘Forum member profiles’ page and maybe copy it and past it here but apparently the wayback machine didn’t archive the photos, do you know if that’s the end of the story, can’t get the photos ?

Cobber.

[Franklin1]

G'day cobber, I'll see what I can recover from the website's early days, and post it in the DHL section. I remember we were able to salvage some info about picnic baskets that we thought was permanently lost from our main Board. Will see how I go.
Cheers, Al.

[Don Ricardo]

Hi Cobber and Franklin1,

The first post for the Vintage Caravans Forum has been preserved here and is dated 26 July 2024. Next year will be the Forum's 20th anniversary!!

Maybe it would be a good idea to take a snapshot of the website page from 2016 and preserve it as an historical artifact in the 'Hall of Fame' section? At least we'd then have that.

Don Ricardo

[cobber]

Crikey Al, having trouble making this Wayback Machine do as it’s told because I basically don’t know what I’m doing, but thanks heaps for introducing me to it.

Did manage to find the original 28 November 2002 home page

web.archive.org/web/20021128083719/http://www.vintagecaravans.com/
It’s sort of interesting to scroll through the index on the left of the page to be reminded of how the hobby was in 2002.

August 28 2004 is the first time the ‘discussion Forum’ is announced on the home page.

October 2012 shows the first appearance of a new home page.

web.archive.org/web/20121024045815/http://vintagecaravans.com/

Sorry Don R, I can’t work out how to post these images in the Hall of Fame 🤪

Cobber

[Don Ricardo]

Hi Cobber, Franklin1 and all,

As you've seen, Cobber, following our exchange of posts, I've posted a thread in the 'Hall of Fame' section here which shows the pages from the vintagecaravans.com website as it appeared in 2002.  I've also stickyed the thread to the top of the board.

I quickly put together an into, but I'm happy to change it if anyone has amendments or additions to suggest.  What I wrote was really just to put down some basic facts as a starting point.

As I mentioned in the post, all the photos on the website pages could be clicked on to see larger images.  They still can be on the Wayback Machine and I could go through and copy them all and then post them somewhere, but it would be a bit of work and I'm not sure that's what we were trying to achieve...were we?

I don't know where the vertical blue line on the pages came from. It wasn't in the website's original pages, but I think you can read 'through' the blue line quite satisfactorily?

Of course all this raises the question of where this forum with all its precious information is preserved/archived? Is it preserved on the Wayback Machine? Checking that out is your department Cobber and Franklin1!

Don Ricardo

[cobber]

G’day Don R,

I reckon your quickly put together intro is spot on.
I wouldn’t worry about the blue line we can see through it no worries.

As for Wayback Machine saving pages from the forum all I can find is that it saved some home pages 38 times between March 2013 and February 2023, some (most) of it I am not able to see, I might be doing something wrong.
can’t say how long it will last.

Long live Wayback Machine.

Cobber.