Happy 10th Anniversary TwinTurbo.NET! - June 04, 2008 10:43 PM
Wanted to put this in the NEWs for the archive as well as have posted it in the General Forum yesterday on the 3rd:
As far as things on the internet go, 10 year is forever. We never really thought about things this far out from 1998, but here we are close to 3.5 million posts about a car that's been out of production since before we got started.
Looking forward now, we're working on some changes to take the site into the next decade. Greg and I don't have time to do much more than manage the site anymore, so we have assembled a small team to tackle some expansions/changes to the site we've been wanting to implement for a bit.
As always we owe our success to you, our membership for keeping things active and interesting around here and our sponsors for helping keep the power on and the bits flowing.
Thank you all for making it what it is and what it will be!
Happy 10th Anniversary TwinTurbo.NET!!
-Damon
THANKS to all of you for creating the community that we all share. We just created some code and launched the site, but you guys have given it life (life I'd like to smack sometimes.. but I digress. :)
It really doesn't seem like it's been 10 years ago that I first met Damon at a dyno day. I'd had my NA for a couple of years and hadn't interacted with any other Z people at that point. He took me for a ride in the Green Queen and I just about peed my pants. I bought a POP charger that day and never looked back, lol.
I don't get to spend much time on the site any more, even during the 10th anniversary as today is my 8th wedding anniversary (yes, I don't mention tt.NET to my wife today), our son turned 1 last week and our daughter turns 4 tomorrow, so it's just a big celebration right now!
We do have some things in the works... don't we always.. and if I can wrangle a bit more time we'll get it all out there and going. Thanks for sticking with us for 10 great years. It will be interesting to see what the next 10 bring us... hell our cars will officially be classics by then!
-Greg
Written by Dallas DamonZ
Search Changes and IE7 - March 18, 2008 12:42 AM
Finally after a year or so I was able to sit down and do some work on the forum. You should all now notice that the search results page shows up properly without the 'double' display of junk at the top of the messages.
Auto-indexing is implemented but I'm still having a problem with it that should be sorted out in a few days. Once that's done all forums will be kept up to date as posts are made.
Also, thanks to Damon we have a fix for the message preview popup not working in IE7. This should be working now. If you continue to have trouble with it, please post details or email us.
Enjoy!
Written by Greg (Dallas)
Z1's sponsorship - March 07, 2008 09:12 AM
Recently, there has been a rash of Z1 Classifieds posts being VTD'd. In the interests of fairness, we investigated just to be sure that it wasn't the same small set of people able to repeatedly kill the posts. We had been making adjustments to the number of votes required to VTD a post (we do this periodically to keep VTD balanced properly, often in the General forum) during this time. After increasing the total required significantly, posts were still being deleted by an ever increasing group of diverse members.
Three nights ago, 3/4/08, Russell from Z1 decided he wanted to know the total number of VTDs required to remove a post in the Classifieds forum. 3 distinctly 'Z1' profiles were created (shown below in the screencaps as Josh@Z1, Will@Z1 and Nick@Z1) specifically to VTD a slightly older Classifieds post by 'predator' as coordinated with other existing Z1 accounts and hangers-on:
Normally we would not share this information, but we feel this case warrants complete transparency.
I was in contact with Russell emailing him that we were monitoring the situation in Classifieds and were making adjustments between the time he posted about the VTD count and when I researched to see where he figured out the number. Once I saw the VTD'd Classifieds message done by them, I just logged the info in my head and found it ironic that he would complain about VTD abuse and then perform it.
Contrary to what some of the community may believe, Greg and I have always prided ourselves on remaining vendor neutral and never taking sides for or against any vendor, including our sponsors. We believe that this neutrality is one of the core values and benefits of TwinTurbo.NET. If a vendor does something that needs to be called out, it doesn't get swept under the rug. Likewise a vendor has every right to respond to any valid or invalid criticisms in a public way so we all benefit. The only time we typically remove these kinds of posts is when they devolve from point-counterpoint into direct personal attacks.
This leads to Wednesday night, 3/5/08. I wasn't online from Wednesday afternoon until about 9pm that night. When I logged in, I found odd emails and IM's from a few members who were getting red VTD boxes about messages of theirs from years ago. As I gathered information from the forum and emails/IMs here is what we determined...
Z1 (representatives/affiliates) decided to VTD a list of messages posted on the General forum, dating back for several years that were in some way disparaging to their company. They did this by blatantly exploiting the VTD feature by adding more new 'Z1' accounts and utilizing them in a systematic attack to VTD this list of posts along with other hangers-on like before. On top of that, Z1 found a way to VTD posts that by normal interaction with the site is not possible.
OK, LOL. We stole your design... Gosh darn those Z1 boys..Driving the car is the best way to find problems..Just road in Z1motorsports "PeaceMaker"...I ordered a Z1 ECU day after I put injectors in, and turnsZ1......and there stage 3 turbos. VentingIm having some trouble with Z1 Motorsportsif your comfortable with Z1, then you have been scammed.Won't that make the dyno chart not a good chart??Nice ECU's you have for sale on your website.For all members that have fully built Z1 engine...Well, your first mistake was going to Z1...nice car, but...Let me ask you a question Michael...My experience with Z1 Motorsports>>>>I do not recommend Z1 MotorsportsWas anyone else on this forum involved with the Z1 Volk GTCHeh, I suspected as much. >>>>>Watch out for Z1!WARNING! do not purchase engine from...whats up guys? I have another post of bad Z1 packaging.Except for the fact you didn't install the rear bushings...Warning: Z1 Motorsports...Well, I'm never going to Z1 again...Guess what..Z1 did it againHelp please! Question for those with Z1 GT600R kit...
With this group of accounts:
And specifically the accounts created to help the organized effort:
screen cap of list:screen caps of member profiles from this list:
These accounts are still there now and can be looked at through member search, but will be removed shortly.
In the past when an individual takes it upon themselves to obviously violate the spirit of the system by creating any amount of dummy accounts required and VTDing a post solo, we would ban the member, delete all the accounts, and restore the message(s). Our response for exploiting a hole in the system depends on the severity of the results of the exploitation.
It is obvious to us that Z1 planned and executed this knowing that it would not be considered good conduct. What really surprised us is that they chose to do this while we were in active dialog with them about the VTD situation against their posts.
We have tried hard to remain neutral but this type of behavior is not becoming of an organization that we want to be associated with. To that end, we have terminated Z1's sponsorship of this site.
Our 10th Anniversary Year! - January 04, 2008 12:11 AM
Going live June 3rd 1998 was the end of a flurry of activity that started when Greg and I were at a Z meet. I was sitting at the table with the gang talking about what I'd like to do about this lack of a good forum once TwinTurbo.COM had hit the crapper. I didn't really know Greg from Adam, as I had only shaken his hand and looked at his Z at a meet a few months prior. He's a Z guy, he appeared pretty bright, and he just happened to be sitting in earshot of me listening to what I wanted to do and confidently volunteered to help.
10 years later a lot has changed & a lot hasn't. The Z32 was never in production (for the US) while this site has been live and it amazes us what the following for it is still like a decade after we started. Granted the audience is shrinking since time and accidents have taken out a chunk of the fleet, and the potential joy of ownership along with them. The new members joining us have to look harder and harder to find something of high quality, but they are still out there and generally come from enthusiasts who have to part with their prize possessions. There are those that buy the lower dollar fix-r-uppers and use the site for more then what we intended, not just maintenance, but we see people talking about 'restoration' now. Very odd, but a sign of the times. Then there are those that just buy the low dollar fix-r-uppers because they are more affordable than they were 5 years ago and drive the hell out of them for that joy of ownership (welcome to the club!). On the other hand, even after all this time we really don't care what color you paint your calipers.
Thanks to everyone that has been along for the ride, be it a day or the entire ten years, members and sponsors alike for making TwinTurbo.NET what it is! We'll be doing some new things in 2008 to celebrate our 10th year supporting our favorite sports car legend -- the Z32. As always, stay tuned!!
Thanks! - October 01, 2006 06:08 PM
The Cliff notes: If you donated to the hardware fundraiser Kenny ran these past weeks for us, from all of the tt.NET staff... thank you!!. If you want to get back to the action click Forums->General in the menu. Otherwise, here's the longer story:
A little over a month ago, we were working on the database server when something locked up and we needed to reboot the machine. The reboot, unfortunately, failed. This resulted in a small scramble to get things back online in a limp-home mode. To repair the problem, we were going to have to spend some money and time.
Not to go into a lot of detail, but while advertiser's dollars pay the 'rent' for bandwidth, we tend to push the remaining money back into the community with things like hosting the annual convention dinners, sponsoring the ZCCA Dallas convention, etc. Our account stays fairly empty and setbacks like this DB server crash are usually resolved out of our own pockets.
We now have the DB server back up and running as you have probably noticed with the site speed getting back to what it was before. Back when the DB server crashed Kenny started IM'ing me about offering help. I wasn't really sure what he could offer besides some advice/information which is always appreciated, but he's insisted he had a plan to 'help'. We started talking about some other potential things to do to the site besides just getting the DB server back on track (haha... pun intended) that Greg agreed would definitely enhance things around here. But to support those things we needed to upgrade some hardware. Remember the part about out of our pockets? Greg just built a house and I'm in the process of building one, and neither of us are bachelors with a bunch of extra money to blow on modding cars or servers as much as we would like (damn responsibilities!). So we were stalemated until advertising dollars piled up enough to do something about the situation. Those that have been around here know that we do not and never will beg/ask people to donate money to keep the site alive.
Kenny decided to short circuit that logic and start a donation campaign to raise money for new hardware from the membership here. As you've seen over the past week or so he'll pop up with an update of totals, etc. The membership has donated $4,595.28 (we let Kenny include sticker sales as donations during the fundraiser) of which the site gets $4,372.08 after PayPal takes it's bite of the pie chart. We've already bought the new search engine software we've been using since the spring on a trial basis which has sped things up considerably and having a license for it expands some capability in the software we'll explore in the future. We've made a list of hardware/software to make improvements on all the tt.NET servers we can afford on the donation budget and it will be getting purchased on Monday after being evaluated for compatibility and performance.
Needless to say we're all floored with the amount of money raised since Kenny had arbitrarily picked out $2,000 as a goal at the start of the fundraiser and you far exceeded it... but every bit gets rolled into improvements to the site and allows Greg & I to concentrate on the things that can't be bought (tt.NET software updates) instead of finding money to fix a problem.
The tt.NET staff thanks all of you who donated and especially Kenny for organizing and executing such a thing. Absolutely amazing!
Back running on two servers - September 20, 2006 01:23 PM
We've managed to rebuild our crashed database server and did some software upgrades at the same time. It is back live and we are no longer limping along on a single machine. Hopefully the site will be a bit quicker although we still have more things to do in the future to speed it up more.
Search Update - August 30, 2006 02:35 AM
All forums are now indexed and searchable! See the older news post (a couple down) for details on the new searching capabilities.
Machine troubles - August 23, 2006 01:54 AM
OK, so we had some unexpected developments this evening. I was doing some routine maintenance on the database server when things started getting squirrelly. I decided to reboot and apparently it has a hard error when it restarted. At this point we haven't been able to see it directly for ourselves and will have to go onsite to the hosting facility to attempt to get it up and running again.
For the meantime, we are running a copy of the database as of yesterday (8/19) from backup. Any messages posted since that backup or changes made to profiles are gone for now, so please be aware of that. If you happened to change your password since then, it will have been reverted to your old one so you may need that to re-login.
Thanks for your patience. Hopefully we can get this sorted out quickly.
New Search Function - August 21, 2006 01:27 AM
OK, so this is basically a beta test, but have some fun with it anyway.
I've put the new search live. After many years we have scrapped what we were using as it pretty much sucked and have found a new search engine. It has a ton of new functionality, not the least of which is that the indexes are actually up to date!
Some notes:
A) The indexes currently do not update automatically when new posts are added. For the time being I have to trigger that, and will do so every day or so. The upside is that the update takes about 10 seconds to execute so no more waiting 28 hours for indexes to rebuild :)
B) The help function is incorrect and is the help for the old system. If you are a search geek and want to see how this works and what you can do with it, go here: http://support.dtsearch.com/faq/search.html and look at the right side of the page. Most of that is relevant for this search.
C) You can now search ACROSS forums, and even search user profiles. This will later be extended to search tech pages, etc. from one spot! It's controlled from the dropdown.
D) Classified is temporarily not searchable. I'm working on that and it should be fixed shortly.
E) I thought it would be cool to show the last 10 searches that have been made on the site, so you see that as well. Of course, it took about 10ms for somebody to see that you could make a great game out of that, but we'll see how it plays out.
F) Search results now actually have a score associated with them and they are displayed with highest score first by default. HOWEVER, you can change the sort order of the results by clicking the headers at the top. For instance, if you want to see results posts chronologically just click the 'Date' header and voila!
G) You can control the search algorithms from the 'advanced' pop up. Feel free to play around with that and see how things work.
H) Searching for single words is a really bad idea, i.e. if you search for 'turbo' that probably matches over a million posts so waiting for that result set to come back would take a few lifetimes. If your search times out its most likely because you are too general in the query and its matching way too much stuff. Even putting in an additional word will speed the query up greatly. While this is a great improvement, it's still a single server with a single set of hard drives, not Google, so try to be a little intelligent about what you search for.
I) If you have issues, email me at greg@twinturbo.net. I may not respond but I will read them and deal with the issues as I can.
Profile updates - June 13, 2006 12:52 PM
We've had a problem for a while with some members not being able to update their profile and getting a 'this screen name already exists' error.
Thanks to help from ZSki as my guinea pig, I think I finally got that sorted out. So, if you are one who was affected by this, please try to edit your profile and see if it works. If not, feel free to email me at greg@twinturbo.net and let me know what problem you are having.
