Council sells abandoned cars on eBay

From The Guardian:

A council has come up with a new way of disposing of abandoned cars – selling them on the internet.
Westminster city council has auctioned a Range Rover on the UK online marketplace, eBay, with the vehicle fetching £6,600. It is now offering a 1962 Rover P5 which was owned by European aristocrat Countess Renee de Vismes and which has been in a car park for six years following her death.

“The countess’s son who lives in New York did not want the car so we have put it up for auction on eBay,” said a spokeswoman for the council.

She added: “We get a lot of cars left in car parks and we have now decided to see if internet auctioning is the best approach.

“We always try to track down the owners of these abandoned vehicles, but sometimes we are not successful.”

Around 200 cars are abandoned in London each day and the capital accounts for 40% of abandoned cars nationally.

Palimpsest

Palimpsest is the (mainly) books discussion site I founded with my friend Al Kitching a couple of years ago.

Essentially a phpBB forum, it now has around 30 regular members and over 15,000 posts. We don’t delete any, the forum acting as a repository for reviews and thoughts on books and things.

It costs a fair bit to run, however, and so we have decided to put into place a donation scheme, where members can contribute towards the running costs of the site. A recommendation of £5 per year was made. Fortunately, this has ben met with a great deal of enthusiasm, and it might mean that more can be done with the site.

One of the things I am interested in doing is converting the site to a new forum system. The one I am looking at is VBulletin – a paid service which costs $80 a year, which in real money is about £45-50. This includes all upgrades, of course. Part of the reason for this is that due to the popularity of phpBB, all sorts of ne’er-do-wells are targetting these sites and either spamming them or clogging up the sessions on the database so that no-one else can access the site. Using a more robust system, like VBulletin will mean that these problems will be no more.

What I have to do, and do right, will be importing the phpBB stuff into the new forum. I think people will be generally pretty upset if any of the previous posts got lost.

I also need to have a clear out of the server. There’s piles of crap in there which probably really doesn’t need to be.

Gah. So much to do, so little time…