but I have some questions to how some things work here at fotobus.msk.ru, so I can make life easier for the database moderators (and me). Both some technical questions and some best practices. I have tried to read the instructions, but Google Translate doesn't give anything meaningful.First i wonder how the vehicle history connection works. At first I thought that they would connect if both/all had the same technical data like serial number and chassi number, but it doesn't seem to work.
Here are some that I added, but they never showed up with history. I must admit that when I first made them I forgot and set them to still "operating" and not "send to other company", but I corrected it soon after.
NE 54193 > DGB 107
NE 55159 > FCJ 477
NE 64405 > 220 BDV
NE 69318 > FCJ 476
SP 69532 > DFC 582
How should I do it to make it work? I plan to add a lot of photos of buses in Norway that later have been exported, but I don't want to make too much work for the moderators. Or is this something the moderators have to do manually all the time?
My next concern is about best practice when companies change their names. Should one say that it arrived/left a company when the name was changed and have several history steps for it, or should one count it as one company despite several different names?
Here in Norway, Veolia Transport sold out in the spring of 2011, so since then they changed name to Boreal Transport. That is a significant change, and shows a new time in the history of the company. Would that deserve the two names to count as two companies?
Also on 01.01.2011 two of the companies in the Nettbuss corporation in Norway change names; Team Trafikk AS became Nettbuss Trondheim AS, and Nettbuss Lillestrøm AS became Nettbuss Øst AS. The change of names was all that was done and it didn't impact anything else. Can we still count them as new companies, or is just a small name change not significant enough?
And what is the best way to describe a transfer? Is it "send to other company (or to the factory)", or would maybe "renumbered (within the company)" be better?
I'm asking these questions so that I can fill in correct data and make it look more clear how the history of companies and buses were.
Another thing I can't find how should be, is where to put a VIN on new vehicles that have a complete VIN. In some cases they are put under chassi number, and on others under VIN. Does it matter where I put it?
In some cases both the chassi and the body have their own VIN, so which one should I put where?
For example all the Scania OmniExpress have a VIN for the Scania chassi, a VIN from Lahti for the body and even a body/serial number for Scania Omni series, like this one: NF 51671. Did I do it right here?
There seems to be a bug in the english version of comments, because when I click on either of these links; "Comments to user photos", "Comments written by user" and "Comments to photos from this city", I get the following error:
Warning: require_once(cache/types_en.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/home/www/red/fb/public_html/comments.php on line 9
It is okay if it is not yet implemented, but it doesn't help the user when it just shows a PHP error message. I hope you can fix it or just hide the error.
And lastly there is something I didn't manage to do. In the profile there is a field called "real name", but I'm not able to put my real name there, because it doesn't accept the first letter in my name, which is Ø (& Oslash ; in HTML). It could also be written with Ö, but that isn't allowed either. Then I have to use "Oe", but that looks kind of stupid. Is it possible to accept the Scandinavian letters, or is the field intended for showing names in cyrillic text only?
And I really hope some models are added (see thread "Missing models"). I am currently holding back a lot of updates until some of those are added, so I don't have to do it again.
