FTO Drivers Club — Western Australia (ftowa.com)

A read-only static archive of the FTO Drivers Club – Western Australia website, a Perth-based car club for Mitsubishi FTO owners, active roughly 2002–2006. The site featured news, event/cruise write-ups, photo galleries, technical "workshop" articles, motorsport results, a phpBB forum, and a member-profile system.

This repository preserves the original hand-built site exactly as it ran, and hosts it statically (it was migrated off its original Windows/IIS host to static hosting).

Heads-up: This is an archive, not a live site. See What works vs. what is broken — the interactive membership/forum features do not function on static hosting.

The archive is hosted at https://ftowa.allanson.org.

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What / Why

• What: The complete content of www.ftowa.com as it existed in the mid-2000s — every HTML page, image, gallery, the full phpBB forum dump, member profile photos, downloadable documents, and the original Perl CGI source that powered membership.
• Why: Historical preservation. The site documents a real enthusiast community, its events, and a body of FTO-specific technical writing that is otherwise lost.
• The repository is essentially a single snapshot: the git history contains one commit (Move to vercel) that relocated the files to this repository for static hosting. No build step is applied to the original content.

The original site was authored by Mark Allanson (marke@iinet.net.au, mark@ftowa.com); the footer reads "(c) 2002, All Rights Reserved" and the form-mail script cgi-bin/fmail.cgi is explicitly marked "© 2002, Mark Allanson".

Provenance

Leftover WS_FTP.LOG files across the tree record the original upload workflow — files were authored under C:\ftowa\… on Windows and pushed via FTP to the /public_html/ web root. The web.config confirms hosting on Microsoft IIS with PHP 5 via FastCGI and the Perl CGI scripts run from cgi-bin/. This Windows origin explains the C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe shebangs in the CGI files.

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What works vs. what is broken

This is the single most important thing to know about the archive.

Area	Status on static hosting	Notes
Static HTML pages, CSS, images	✅ Works	The bulk of the site content.
Photo galleries, workshop articles	✅ Works
Event write-ups, links, calendar	✅ Works
Archived phpBB forum (forum/)	✅ Works (read-only)	~9,100 pre-rendered topic pages. Links between topics resolve, but you cannot log in or post.
Member profile pages (profiles/)	✅ Works	Each is a static HTML page + photos.
Downloads (docs/, pub/, sound/)	✅ Works	Word/Excel docs, zips, video, audio.
Join (/cgi-bin/processmembership.cgi)	❌ Broken	No CGI runtime on static hosts → 404.
Member list (/cgi-bin/memberlist.cgi)	❌ Broken	Same.
View/edit profile (/cgi-bin/showprofile.cgi, profileedit.cgi)	❌ Broken	Same.
Contact form (/cgi-bin/fmail.cgi)	❌ Broken	Same.
News scraper (cgi-bin/newsgrabber.cgi)	❌ Broken / obsolete	Scraped live third-party sites that no longer exist.
Any web.config / IIS behaviour	⛔ Ignored	Windows/IIS-only; irrelevant to static hosts.

Navigation links pointing at /cgi-bin/*.cgi will return 404 on static hosting. The affected buttons are: Join, Members (the CGI one), and the in-page edit profile links. This is expected for an archive.

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Repository layout

.
├── index.html              # Landing page + news archive (2004–2006), links to older archives
├── 404.shtml, 500.shtml    # IIS custom error pages (ignored on static hosts)
├── web.config              # Legacy IIS config (Windows hosting) — not used by static hosts
├── css/mainStyle.css       # The (one-line) site stylesheet
├── html/                   # Content sections
│   ├── workshop/           # 11 technical "Workshop" articles (DIY, cambelt, dyno, etc.)
│   ├── motorsport/         # Motorsport / Wanneroo track content
│   ├── gallery/            # Gallery index pages (Auto Salon 2002, JoJo's 2003, Calendar 2004)
│   ├── events/             # Event write-ups (Dwellingup, Yanchep, Swan Valley, MCM cruises…)
│   ├── gallery.html, workshop.html, links.html, contact.html, calendar.html
│   ├── join.html, joinThanks.html, members.html, messageboard.html, feature.html
│   ├── memberlisttemplate.html, memberprofiletemplate.html, memberdetailsedit.html
│   ├── index-archive-*.html# Older news (July 2002–March 2003, April–Dec 2003)
│   └── ASNews.html, AutoNews.html  # Scraped news fragments written by newsgrabber.cgi
├── images/                 # Site graphics, logos, gallery images, workshop illustrations
│   ├── Gallery/            # Photo galleries (AutoSalon2002, Cal2004, Jojo2003, MC28062003…)
│   ├── motorsport/, video/ # Track photos + video (mcmotorsport1.avi, PA190147.MOV)
│   └── gearshifterprob/    # Gallery tied to a workshop article
├── profiles/               # 13 member profile dirs (photos + a static HTML page each)
├── forum/                  # Archived phpBB forum as ~9,100 static HTML files
│   ├── viewforum.php@*.html, viewtopic.php@*.html, memberlist.php@*.html, …
│   ├── templates/subSilver # Original phpBB template
│   └── images/{avatars,smiles}
├── docs/                   # Club documents: event flyers (.doc), service-parts spreadsheet (.xls)
│   └── motorsport/         # MC motorsport results as .zip archives (2004–2005)
├── pub/Ash.zip             # Public download (large: ~60 MB)
├── sound/raw_crank.wav     # Engine-crank audio clip
└── cgi-bin/                # Original Perl CGI (see below) — does NOT run on static hosts
    ├── processmembership.cgi, memberlist.cgi, showprofile.cgi, profileedit.cgi
    ├── fmail.cgi           # Generic form-mailer (© 2002 Mark Allanson, GPL)
    ├── newsgrabber.cgi     # Scraped autospeed.com / autosinfo.com news feeds
    ├── showpage.cgi        # Incomplete stub (mostly commented out)
    ├── run.cgi             # ⚠️ Dangerous remote command-execution script (see AGENTS.md)
    ├── ptHTML.pm           # Tiny template engine: replaces ~token~ placeholders in HTML
    ├── ptDIO.pm            # Flat-file load/save + sendmail wrapper
    ├── cgiecho             # Third-party CGI echo utility
    └── access_log, error_log  # Original server logs

About cgi-bin/

The interactive features of the original site were plain Perl CGI. The source is kept here for completeness, but it cannot run on static hosting (Vercel and similar have no Perl/CGI runtime), and the scripts use Windows Perl shebangs (#!C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe) that wouldn't execute on Unix even if a runtime existed.

Previewing locally

There is no build step — the site is plain static files. Serve the repository root as the web root so the absolute paths (/css/…, /images/…, /html/…) resolve:

# Option A — Python (no install needed on most systems)
python3 -m http.server 8000

# Option B — Node
npx serve .

# Option C — any static file server, pointed at this directory

Then open http://localhost:8000/.

Note: links that hit /cgi-bin/*.cgi will still 404 locally — this matches the behaviour described above and is expected.

Deploying

The intended target is static hosting (the Move to vercel commit targeted Vercel). Because the site is a flat set of files with no framework:

1. Set the publish/output directory to the repository root (not a dist/ or public/ subfolder).
2. No build command is required — every file ships as-is.
3. (Optional) If you want clean URLs or redirects for the legacy /cgi-bin/* links, add a vercel.json / host equivalent. None is included here.

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License & attribution

• The site content is marked "(c) 2002, All Rights Reserved" by the original author, Mark Allanson. It is preserved here as a historical archive; no new copyright claim is made over the original material.
• cgi-bin/fmail.cgi is released by its author under the GPL (per its header).
• The forum was powered by phpBB (GPL) using the subSilver template; both are preserved as static archives.
• No LICENSE file is present in the repository.