News Item - January 03, 1999 10:04 PM
Back from 'vacation'. The server survived (whew!) this time. Actually, I peeped in a couple time to check on things. First, the New Year's Eve incident is already under investigation, the ISP the messages were posted from has been contacted about the 'behavior' of one of it's users. Totally stupid if you ask me, thank goodness for Vote to Delete & the swift actions of the moderators & Greg to shut this person down & get the messages removed from the forum. Which leads me to the second item I've noticed... the Vote to Delete discussion. Basically someone's post about Gran Turismo got deleted by the other members. Usually these don't get deleted, but like a few other 'borderline' Z related messages, people appearantly just get tired of seeing them. Valid points have been made on both sides for and against. I personally (read: moderators etc.) won't remove these type of messages because they are Z related in the way of paraphenalia. I would appreciate it if this certain topic of discussion were kept to a minumum for 1 reason... I created this forum to discuss the Z32 itself and subsequently some of the lifestyle surrounding it. I'm sure GT has it's own forum elsewhere... when I get a little free time I'll look for one, or possibly someone already knows the URL & can post it for me. There could probably be enough discussion about the game itself to occupy the whole forum here... what I'm saying is... discussion about a Z T-shirt (paraphenalia) will last about 3 posts, meanwhile this game's discussion can use up a 1/4 of the forum space discussing 'how do you get the international license' or whatever. Some people feel the game's discussion shouldn't occupy as much forum space as it does, they Vote to Delete them. There is no cut & dried answer to what stays and what goes, it's totally up to the attitudes of several members on 'borderline' type posts. My admin line is more liberal, so we leave it to the members to decide. Please take a second to scroll down the forum and see all the posts that don't have s by them and what they are about... Compare them to the ones that do have 1-2 s next to them. You'll quickly get the idea of what really should be here (Z32 discussion) and what shouldn't ('What color Yugo can my moped beat?'). I have no plans for changing the way Vote to Delete functions right now, because it's doing it's job very well. Things will always fall through the cracks & sometimes things that should be here aren't viewed that way. Keep in mind it's not an per person. It takes more votes than the 'Currently Online' average to remove a message. It takes more than one person to get the first to appear as well. While this number is a tiny minority in comparison to the amount of traffic we get here, we have to keep the vote number low to quickly erradicate flames and other BS posts (refer to the 4th & 5th sentences above). I would much rather see a borderline post fall victim to VtD then see what was on the forum New Year's Eve, that's what will keep this forum from becoming like the 'other' places. Please try to stay focused on what this site exists for. Believe me, I listen to every criticism of the site itself & everything is evaluated.
Written by Dallas DamonZ
News Item - November 30, 1998 12:48 PM
Long weekend for some of us. Appearantly the forum didn't fair so well while we were away. Found the problem that was slowing down the forum early this morning & got it fixed. Not entirely sure what caused the problem. We're looking into it now to find a solution so hopefully it doesn't happen again. Everything should be OK now.
News Item - November 17, 1998 04:34 PM
This morning's hiccups on the server were due to a downward spiral. It's all better now. One of the partions was getting filled with log data (unused data), once it got too full, it started logging errors to the same partition eventually filling it up to only 16k left. :-( When this happend, the server got a little choked up. Couple seconds with the Hiemlich manuever & everything's much better. Well, to go with the other statistics, we've logged 137M worth of visits since September when we moved to the new server. I turned logging off, as the data it was logging was kinda worthless.
On a different note, TECH is updated. Steven(Phx) was kind enough to photo & explain how to change out the IAA valve. Nice work Steven! If you want to contribute some of your work, send mail to tech@twinturbo.net for a template & details on what's needed for submissions.
Also still accepting quiz questions... see below for submission details
News Item - November 12, 1998 08:24 PM
I am proud to announce the opening of the DOCS section. Special thanks to Steve Richardson & crew at Courtesy for making this one happen for us! Just go look at it! :-) The quiz is coming along... don't forget to mail in those questions. The details are below. Also, I'm running short on www.twinturbo.net stickers. A couple pair of each of these colors are left: Cardinal Red, Sapphire Blue & Gloss Black. Check way down below for ordering details.
News Item - November 11, 1998 12:44 PM
I'm accepting questions for the up-coming Twinturbo.NET quiz to see just how astute members really are. The quiz will be 50 questions long. I'm looking for questions in 5 possible multiple choice questions or true/false/yes/no variety with the answer marked somehow. Only questions revolving around the Z32 iteself. Not lifestyle questions or other opinion/vagueness. I need 'proof' of the answers in the form of links in the Search section so I can verify the answers myself. All material will come from the archives so everyone has a fair chance at 'passing'. Yes, there are rewards at the end for those that pass. :-) I've gotten some really good ones submitted so far. If you would like to contribute, send questions and answers to quiz@twinturbo.net. Thanks!
Greg fixed a couple bugs. There were a couple problems in the Search function with the follow-ups not matching the post. All fixed now for full ability to traverse the follow-up tree.
Also slated are two 'surprizes'. One is waiting for approval, the other is on the drawing board waiting to see if it can be pulled off. Stay tuned!
News Item - November 02, 1998 12:30 PM
There are some issues that need to be addressed concerning www.twinturbo.net:
Security: There have been some questions raised about 'security' here. We have provided as much, if not more security than most programs you run on your computer. The security actually falls on the user. Just like ANY other program you run requiring passwords (like e-mail), if you leave it open & aren't in front of the computer, someone else can access the site as you. There is 1 exception, the 30 day login can allow your ID to be used by someone else visiting the site on a computer you've used with this option. This is why it's NOT checked during regular login. It's YOUR decision who/how access is gained. The site passes a 'cookie' containing a personalized ID code number to your computer. If you have 30 day enabled, this cookie lasts for 30 days on that computer. If you don't select that, the login expires when you close the browser window (just like e-mail). Now can the number be hacked? Sure, it's possible, anything is possible on a computer. Is it probable? No, not really. If you want to sit around all day & make fake logins... Remember the infinite number of monkeys?
Vote to Delete (VTD): The VTD feature has become popular lately. We've raised the number of votes required to delete a post for a 'mob' check. To make sure there's not the same collection of people voting all the time. As Greg noted on the Main Forum, the VTD on For Sale was significantly lower total to delete. I based it on a percentage of usage. For Sale doesn't get as much traffic as the Main Forum, so a lower number was utilized. This number has been raised for a 'mob' check. There has also been some frustration over what gets deleted and what doesn't. We can look at the deleted messages afterwards to see what/why they were deleted. The messages fall into three basic categories: Flames, Chats & Non-Relateds.
News Item - October 27, 1998 01:44 PM
WOW! Twinturbo.NET has cleared 200,000 hits on the site, 100,000 messages in the archives & averaging 11,000+ 'accesses' a day. Incredible! Thanks GuyZ & GalZ! Noticed a bug in the [ View Personal Posts ] you weren't able to view the follow-ups directly from the list. That's fixed now. We've got a couple new ideas on the burner right now, but time is tight for Greg & I, so production has gotten slow temporarily (hey, we have real jobs too :). Hang on tight, these next couple 'upgrades' will be pretty awesome!
News Item - October 20, 1998 07:48 PM
Greg added a re-login window under Member Services for the multi-user computers... just go to it, enter your info & the cookie gets reset with the new (your) member info. Hope that helps Tim! :-) Also added a new navigation feature the [ View Personal Posts ] on the main forum. It lists all of your current posts & the responses to them. I always find myself just looking at my own posts for responses & then backing up to read the rest of the forum in an effort to save time. I think a lot of other people are having to do the same thing, so I added the new navigation tool. Greg is working on an advanced Member Directory search tool. It's pretty awesome! Search is back up and running... what a headache that was. Thanks for roughing it out with us.
News Item - October 08, 1998 08:02 PM
Switched over to DNS from IP for cookies to work properly. Everything seems OK for the moment. Except for the forum deciding to cut it self off at some undesired length every now & again. :-( At least we have the backup working for us while we track down the problem, so all is not lost when it happens like before.
News Item - October 02, 1998 04:33 PM
Transition to the new server was a little bumpy, but overall we feel very successful. The speed increase is very noticeable. The member profiles didn't transfer well & we had to fall back to roughly a month ago. We are also in the process of getting search set up. There's a LOT of messages that need to be indexed (over 91,000), so it might take some time. We also found a couple bugs in the first few days with the delete features wiping out the board. I apologize for any inconveniences. Not bad considering we totally swapped servers/harddrive formats (XFS to NTFS)/OSs. The DNS www.twinturbo.net has been switched, so all previous bookmarks are good again.
Rides section submission is flowing along nicely, thank you to those that sent in everything as requested, it has made getting the pics post a LOT easier. For those that would like to submit, go here & read the directions. Also taking Link submissions at this time too, directions are with the Rides directions above.
The Events forum is picking up speed. I'll make some revisions people have already taken into account... namely LOCATION (oops, forgot that one!). Along with the date window, I'll put a location blank in there, so we know if events are geographically accessable to us or not. :-)
The Z32 FAQ is up, keep voting for the good stuff to be included!
Don't forget about www.twinturbo.net stickers (address & info for those is below) & the printable flier.
