News Item - August 25, 2000 02:22 PM
Well, we FINALLY have the new server up and running. Hopefully you'll all see the site to be quite a bit faster. This is a pure hardware upgrade at this point, so we still have some things we're working on to continue improving the speed. Of course, we never miss an opportunity to add new functionality, so here goes:
I guess that's about it for now. Hopefully you'll enjoy a dramatic speed increase with the changes that we have made.
Greg (Dallas) Dallas DamonZ AlxLee (Admin)
Written by Greg (Dallas)
News Item - August 09, 2000 08:35 AM
*grrrrr* 38 hour service outage. My office, where the server is at is right next to where the new American Airlines Arena is being built. Lots of construction work going on 24-7. Just so happens a lot of the utilities have to come down the street to my office and then onto the worksite, so the road is constantly ripped up while they lay in power, fiber, gas, etc.. Unfortunately, this pretty much requires someone to run into the cables & drop my telco service. Lost phones, ISDN and T1. That's bad enough. Everything recoved when the line was repaired with some help.. except the T1's equipment was fried. Had to wait for the Worldcomm guys to come on site to repair/replace the box. What a freaking PITA. If it weren't for bad luck, I guess I'd have no luck at all. Sorry for the downtime.
Written by Dallas DamonZ
News Item - August 02, 2000 01:37 PM
Well, I'm officially fed up with Verio (the ISP this site is operating on). After having a month of horrible connection difficulties and talking to CS people there about it repeatedly... Then having a 13 hour outage with no real resolution (my company pays a crapload a month for this T1, I'd expect better) on why it took so long to fix. They were the ones to originally report the outage, but I had to call to get things moving on the circuit correction, which took all of a half an hour to complete. They are monitoring the line now to try and resolve all the bounces that have been happening over the last 3 days. Hopefully this will improve site performance, but I have a feeling the only way to improve it is to get the server moved elsewhere.
Yes, we know Classifieds 'wanted' and 'selling' buttons are not working properly. There's a few other features that are down right now. We're not going to fix them because they all work on the new server (long story, not going to spend time explaining), any time we have (Greg and I) is being spent on the new server for the speed increase. All bugs should be fixed when we make the move over. The network is not making me want to make the move yet, because even though the server is a *lot* faster, the network performance reflects poorly on the overall site performance. Hopefully all the pieces will fall in line very shortly (fingers crossed).
Sorry for the inconvenience
News Item - July 25, 2000 02:14 PM
We have now been back online for nearly a month now and things seem to be running fairly well. We are still having a few issues with speed. However, that problem will soon be solved. Damon, Greg and Steve have splurged and purchased a new server. The new server is a dual 800mHz. Improvement should be seen immediately since we are currently on dual 300s.
For everyone that has had problems with your left menu bar, please clear your browser's cache first to see if that cures the problem. 99% of the time, this will solve your problem. Also, everyone seems to be getting a bit more used to the dual forum setup. I'd just like to remind everyone to keep technical items in the tech side. My moderators and I will now be moving more of the posts over to the technical side from the general side (And vice versa if necessary). There's also no need to post the same questions on both forums. Simply use your best judgement and decide if your question should be on the tech side or the general side.
That's about all I have to say right now. Hope everyone is enjoying themselves!
Written by Alex Lee [DE]
News Item - July 05, 2000 05:04 PM
I'd like to welcome everyone back to TwinTurbo.NET. Unfortunately, our re-opening comes during my vacation time. However, rather than having everyone wait for my return to start the interactive forums back up, I have decided that I will leave it in the hands of my capable staff of moderators. Should any problems arise, the moderators will be able to take care of the situation. I will try to gain access to a computer while I am away; however, that may not be possible. I return on July 14, 2000 and I look forward to seeing everyone then. Welcome back!
Before I start rambling, I must ask that everyone pause and pay tribute to two of our members who have lost their lives in the past month. 'Drewky' and 'chrisZX'. I also ask that you tie a black ribbon around your driver side mirror in order to honor the lost members of TwinTurbo.NET.
I must say that it is definitely good to be home. Although home has changed a bit, I hope everyone will find the slightly revised forum even more helpful. Many of you are probably wondering how I have ended up as Admin so please allow me to give you a little background about myself and my history with TwinTurbo.NET.
I have been on TwinTurbo.NET since the beginning. I first started visiting the forum when it was at twinturbo.com and it was a senior project for a computer student in college. A few owners and years later the project had become a thriving BBS that was run by Damon, Greg and Steve. These three were assisted in their duties by a team of moderators including myself. Damon and Greg chose me to take over the Admin spot after I sent in my proposal for TwinTurbo.NET. I asked the other original moderators stay on as Sr. Moderators while we added several more moderators to keep TwinTurbo.Net an orderly place.
With the new Moderation Staff, it does NOT mean that TwinTurbo.NET is going to become chaotic. We will be keeping the rules pretty much the same. Non Z Related (NZR) posts will still be deleted when a moderator comes on and notices it. There is now a new forum for non-technical questions and posts. We are going to let things slide a bit more on this forum. For example, we will allow certain Z related poll questions here. Posts that are going to be deleted are going to be those that tell people to check e-mail, NZR posts, spam, and other posts that are determined to be of non-use to other forum members.
Tell everyone, that’s about all I have to say for now. I am very happy that we are able to bring this forum back. There was just too much information and too big of a family to let slide away!
Alex Lee [DE]Admin - TwinTurbo.NET
We're back, Alex is on vacation, so I'll handle the new toys part. OK first and formost, the old 'main' forum is now split into a Technical forum and a General forum. General is for regular discussion, the things people used to get cranky about having deleted can be posted here within reason. NZR stuff is still NZR though. Technical is for the nuts and bolts aspect of owning and operating a Z. Messages can be moved from forum to forum by the moderator team. So a message more suited for the Technical forum, but is posted on the General forum can be moved across instead of just deleted because it's in the wrong place. Vice versa as well. So if a message dissappears, then check the other forum to see if it's over there. A little confusing if you're the person that posted it, but better overall for the continuity of the forums. We've resisted going to a multiple forum system for as long as possible, probably too long now, with traffic the way it was it should work nicely now. Events is up now. It was ready to go when we shut down before, still some tweaks to be done, but for the most part, it's serviceable. Search is also fully indexed and faster and more accurate then it was before.
Oh, Alex's new moderator staff, in no particular order:Carlos RamirezYellowZXTTSanta CruZinjennifer_bondgot rice?
I'd like to thank all of them for helping get us back on track!
News Item - June 10, 2000 08:34 AM
SEARCH indexes are being rebuilt now. It's going to take about 4 more days to scan through the 600,000+ messages in the archives. Once they are rebuilt, SEARCH will be functional, fast and most importantly, accurate again.
Applications for admin staff roles are still being taken. If you think you can handle it, step right up. Read the next NEWS item for more info.
News Item - June 07, 2000 07:04 PM
We're back in our most limited format. Sorry about the downtime, I had to get things back up tonight for the DIYer's to get part numbers, procedures, etc. to work this weekend. Catch 22 in action. I haven't had time to get things squared away with the site with work going the way it is right now. No matter what happens in the future of this site, the established TECH & FAQ info will be available here. Interactive is being worked out one way or other right now. If you have questions you want immediate answers to that aren't already in the FAQ here, www.Z32.org is the place to be for interactive. richk & Morgan (of Z31.com fame) have set up a forum in our absence to take care of the community. Many thanks to them to have a solution in short order.
We're looking for new admin staff to handle interactive here. If you have a solid general knowledge of the Z, have spent a bit of time on this forum, and know a thing or two about computers/networking/web/cgi we're interested in you. The latter isn't the most important, as the admin tasks will mostly be the day to day handling of traffic here. The coding will mostly remain with Greg & I, but we're open to more help. We're looking for a 6 month time commitment right now with the option of going longer afterwards. Greg & I are burned out from doing it for 2 years and want to concentrate on other things (some ZR & some NZR). The current moderation staff will remain if they choose to and the new admin (or co-admins) can decide who else to add or not. It's very open right now, so if someone wants to propose a sensible game plan to get the wheels back on, we're all ears. Let us hear from you: resume@TwinTurbo.NET. If you're not currently a member, don't bother applying, we're using prior messages and e-mails to help judge character. I received several, but I haven't had any time to read through them quite yet. Hoping to score a break tomorrow.
Thanks to all of you that have stepped up and mailed us so far.
BTW here's JaimeZX's first postcard to me from Air Force field training. His handwriting is slightly better then mine.
News Item - April 04, 2000 09:59 AM
NEW FEATURE: We've added a new feature that automatically converts any URL to a link in a message when viewing it. To use it, all you have to do is put a URL in your message and post. That's it! The URL's must be in one of the following forms:
http://xxxx.xxxxxxx... OR www.xxxx.....
If the link starts with www you can leave the "http://" part off. If it starts with anything else, i.e. my.home.com then you MUST put the "http://" in front of it or the forum will not pick it up as a link. The end result will be a link to that website shown whenever you view that message. To make it 'different' the forum will automatically bold the link and put brackets around it, so if you type www.twinturbo.net, the end result will be [ www.twinturbo.net]
You can still put HTML tags in the messages and if a link already has all the HTML associated with it then the forum will leave it alone.
In other news, the forum will probably be up and down for a bit. We are moving forward with a memory-based interpreter that should increase speed dramatically. However, it's going to be touch and go for a bit while we tweak code and settings, so please bear with us if the forum magically shuts off while you were in the middle of a big post.
News Item - March 15, 2000 11:14 AM
Conspiracy! Conspiracy! We've been running super secret governmental behavior studies on the membership. Conspiracy! Conspiracy! Actually we figured we would try some changes for a bit and see if it did indeed help out on the forum. People finally put 2+2 together. So here's the whole scheme right here, right now. We were getting tired of the Vote to Delete'ed post's responses. There's no need to respond to a post you deem VTDable, it turns it into a flame war... So, we made it where if you reply to a post & then VTD that same post, your reply is removed. There's no need for a reply when the VTD has been cast against that same post. In the future, just click the VTD button & go about your business, remove it instead of spending time to reply. It's not worth your time or anyone else's. We've got enough going on here as it is. So, it's still on a trial basis to see how it works out. It might stay, it might go away, but it seems to be a fairly solid solution to the problem.
News Item - March 07, 2000 03:54 PM
No update in awhile, sorry. Couple things going on right now. First off... We had a UK member pass away a couple weekends ago while driving his Z. Mark Taylor. His family is choosing a charity that we can donate to in memory of Mark. As soon as I have details, I'll pass them along to you. In the meantime, I'm flying a black ribbon on my driver's mirror.
TwinTurbo.NET merchandise is finally coming. I know I've been promising this forever now. It's incredible what a pain it can be to put together something so simple.
We've been making some adjustments to the way the forum functions. We've cleaned up some small bugs, like the Duplicate Post Error should be solved now. We're specifically working on 3 things:
Speed. We've opted to work on using software acceleration. We're tracking down a bug in the software that bogs everything down from time to time when the forum is 'boosting'. So the forum might be up and down a bit while we're hunting for it.
Search. The Search function is slowly disintegrating from it's own weight. We've got over 500,000 messages indexed and the system we are running needs some fine tuning to continue to grow. Unfortunately, the tools provided with SQL are bulky and slow. We had originally hoped this would be the optimum solution. We'll have to spend some time re-indexing with our adjustments. The downside is it's going to take probably 4 days to rebuild the indexes just to see if the tweaks work.
Vote To Delete. There's been a lot of side discussion about the VTD feature. From an Admin standpoint it works exactly as we had intended it to. I haven't seen but a few messages getting VTD'ed that should have stayed from a moderated standpoint. It's the cost of letting you have the VTD power. We've made some minor adjustments in how it functions to hopefully get the line a little straighter between stay & deleted. If it's non Z related, don't complain when it gets deleted by the moderators or VTD'ed. You knew when you posted it that this is a Z forum. Whatever you're posting that's off-topic probably would be better suited on another forum somewhere else. I don't run this site to be a discussion of everything in the members life, just the Z. Complaining about it will fall on deaf ears and get deleted as well.
This leads up to the general attitude of the forum lately. If the message you're about to post isn't going to help or add anything worthwhile to the current discussion. DON'T POST IT. We're here to help each other not just rattle off comments you probably wouldn't have the nerve to say face to face with someone else. If you have a habitual record of just spouting off worthless comments with no real contribution to what we're doing here, I'll just ban you straight out. I've got my eye on about 3 people right now that need to stop posting worthless messages everywhere and start contributing something. If you feel guilty, maybe you are one of them. I'm getting tired of the vets being rude to the newbies when they post the same question day after day after day. Newbies are newbies, they rarely look at the FAQ or Search (yeah, I know about Search, but when was the last time you looked at the FAQ? It's growing quickly.) before posting. So we're ALWAYS going to see the 'my car sounds like a coffee maker' or 'my car squeaks when going slow' questions. Just give them the friendly '<===FAQ' message. Nothing more is needed. Posts that should be in For Sale should just get a '<===post in For Sale please' message. Nothing more needed. Sometimes people's grammar or spelling isn't perfect. So what! Consider the fact this isn't a US only site. It's global. Not everyone uses English as a primary language. Ripping someone for their spelling and grammar without knowledge of where they are coming from is pretty worthless. OK, so I ripped on the fake 'Max Power' guy... he was claiming to be the publisher of either Max Power US or UK. Either way, it's a Queen's English publication. I would expect nothing short of perfection from a professional in the publishing business when it comes to grammar and spelling. I knew where he was coming from and it was proving my point he was trying to BS me. I don't have time to read everything, so 'Just VTD It' and help us out. The community can self govern, we've given you the power to do so. If you don't think it belongs, Click VTD. If enough people agree, then it's gone. That's what VTD is all about. I monitor what gets VTD'ed so I can make adjustments to the VTD function to make sure it's not being 'abused'.
