We're hiring, sort of.... - September 26, 2004 09:39 PM
Greg and I have reached a point where we can't offer as much time as is required to keep the site moving forward at any reasonable pace. So we've decided to start looking for people to help out with different aspects of the site. Obviously we can't pay for the work put in since this is a 'hobby' site to us and are looking for people's donations of their time and effort to improve the community. Generally these will be committees, but in some cases it will just require individuals to get things done. If the task is committee based, either it will get an e-mail list or if it's a larger group (convention), then it will get it's own forum for record keeping. Here's what we're looking for and some of the general responsibilities of these roles:
RIDES: We need people with some aritistic talent and the tools (preferably Photoshop) to get things cleaned up and presentable. Generally this entails checking the rides e-mail account, seeing if the images are even useable, processing them properly (whiting out background, cleanup of less then perfect images, some image manipulation, resizing) and FTP uploading to the RIDES section (don't get any smart ideas). I've got a huge backlog of rides submissions to work through initially. Looking for 2 people on this task. Apply.
Convention Activities '05: We had a staff of about 12 for '04... the load was mostly carried by about 5. This needs to get expanded as I spent way too much of my time as did SeedyROM working this out, and as of last Friday my time has dwindled down to nothing. I'm not sure what we can really get done, because budget is limited ('04 had a 2 year lead time on it & we're definitely on for '06 in Dallas where Greg and I are from). No special requirements required at this point and Pat has been volunteered to head this up. Looking for a dozen people in the NE US area to cover working the ZCCA Convention. Apply.
FAQ: We've had a few people step in here and there to maintain and expand the FAQ over the years. I personally have a ton of half completed FAQ pages and other information on my harddrive that just need some images/polish applied. This will probably be one of the more difficult committees to work on, as I'm still the editor... and I'm picky. Being a true asset to the TECH forum is required. This is a committee that doesn't have time to teach how to work on the car and how to research technical topics. That should be the end result for everyone else. Looking for 2-3 Z32 gearheads. Apply.
Random coding assignments: This is a hit or miss thing. I am really good with PERL and UNIX scripting and HTML, Greg is very good with PERL, and VB (.NET) and HTML... so we've been able to make our way through life. We now work in VB.NET which is something I'm still learning (no time), so that leaves Greg bareing the burden of getting new coding and revisions built. There is some project work we can task other programmers with. This is not a learning or training committee, we're looking for professionals (not that we can pay you, but we don't want hacks). A few times in the past we've farmed things out with mixed returns. We'd just like to find a person or 2 that can just be handed some hooks and can get things done for us. Apply.
Associate Sales: Another something we've been wanting to do for a long time now, but haven't had time to do. There are quite a few companies out there that are interested in helping out our membership with special considerations on purchases, but don't feel the need or are able to afford getting into a sponsorship situation with us. Places like RC engineering or Powertrain who offer our members a standing 'club' discount for example. We're not looking to sell the site as in sponsorships (that's something we let handle itself), but just look for special consideration arrangements. Looking for a sales person or two that can consolidate the existing associates and expand on that to offer our membership even better buying power through the 'club'. Apply.
LINKS: This one is simple, we just need a single person to maintain and expand the general links section on a bi monthly basis. All associate links will be communicated by the associate sales committee to the individual LINKS maintainer as required. All the sponsor ads and associate links at the top are handled by Greg and I. Apply.
MSSQL guru: Greg designs relational databases (data warehouses) and I know how to not answer my phone at 4am when a DBA calls, but neither of us are gurus in the inner workings of MSSQL. I'm sure there's a lot of optimization of the SQL engine and indexing that can speed up the site as well as make it more stable and secure. We're looking for someone who seriously knows MSSQL and can offer suggestions on tuning our collection of over 2 million messages. Apply.
Thanks for your support!
Written by Dallas DamonZ
Welcome back... - July 11, 2004 02:33 PM
Sorry for the abrupt halt in posting & the General forum being down. We left tech up and searchable for the weekend DIYers to minimize impact instead of just leaving the 'we're down' page. We had multiple issues that occured in a short span of time neither myself nor Greg had time to deal with completely the past few days. We discovered a few members being extremely disrespectful to Greg, and the rest of the forum by abusing the Vote to Delete function and a security problem shortly afterward. Security is fixed & VTD is slightly revamped... but will undergo some more changes as time allows to avoid this sort of abuse in the future.
Again, we appologize for the limited access, that was the best we could do in the amount of time available. Thank you to the people questions/concerns/kind words about what's going on. Please understand we didn't have time to answer all of them as we were trying to get this thing back on track instead.
Also, to reitereate Greg's message from Friday: We are halting all U.S. vs. Canada and vice-versa banter. It was funny at first but has become annoying and serves no purpose in furthering the community. All messages of that nature will be deleted.
POLLS Forum debut! (and other functions) - June 18, 2004 12:01 AM
To commemorate the 2nd Annual TwinTurbo.NET Banquet at the Queen Mary, we decided to get busy and get some new functions added to be unveiled during dinner.
At this point, everybody at the banquet has just had a demonstration of the new functions and they are now open to the public.
First and foremost, we have added a POLLS FORUM!!
This forum is dedicated to poll questions and allows you to post up to 10 choices for a poll question. Members can vote on their choice and write replies just like a normal thread. Threads in this forum will be alive for 60 days unlike the other forums.
The second change, based on a recommendation I received from Kenny a few days ago is Editable descriptions on bookmarks. When you view your bookmarks page you will now see a new item next to the [X] as a [C] (for Change). This will be replaced by a graphic at a later date. For any bookmark, click the C and enter your own description for the bookmark. This new description will replace the default message subject in your list.If you ever wish to revert to the original message subject, just click the [C], leave the description blank, and hit OK.
Thanks Kenny for the suggestion!!
We hope you enjoy the new polls forum and bookmark feature.
Written by Greg (Dallas)
n00bs! - November 14, 2003 11:18 PM
So, by now you've probably seen the '00bs!' thing now and are wondering what we're up to. Well, it's something experimental we want to try. It seems being a n00b (newbie, or new member to the site) is becoming more and more difficult. The veterans of the site have nothing better to do then give new members a hard time... so we're starting a 'newbie protection program'. Newbies posting messages will be denoted with a next to their name. Veterans are expected (read: we'll just delete your nonsense, and delete your post-deletion whining about why your post got deleted, rinse, repeat...) to either simply answer the newbie's question without a bunch of BS, or just ignore them if the post is just too... uhm, newbieish or has been covered 132,452 times already. We'll probably develop some 'How to graduate from n00bdom' type classes to get newbies to learn about search and the FAQ/Auto-FAQ system for their own safety.
We've had the system up and running in the background for a few days, and it's pretty shocking to see how well things actually work and how things can work better for all of us once you see who's 'new' to the tt.NET community and who's a veteran.
For those new members that want to buck the n00b protection plan. Don't bother running up accesses or whatever. We've come up with a decently complex system for determining n00b status. So just enjoy it for the time you have it... we want you to get a handle on how things work around here instead of just jumping in and typically getting torn apart by the vets. Everyone show some respect both ways and we *all* will get along just fine.
On the other hand, if this idea sucks... we'll just drop it. But we think it will be a benefit to the community in the long run. So in short: Posters with next to their names are going to be 'protected' as best as possible by the moderators to ease the transisition into the often very deep water of tt.NET life... and vets can just ease off them a bit because you'll know who's new. Who knows you just might learn something along the way because just because they aren't a vet here doesn't mean they don't know anything about our beloved Z car.
Added support for some UBB tags - November 14, 2003 01:11 AM
I've seen several people attempt to use these recently to no avail. As we've all seen Windows beat UNIX and VHS beat Beta, even the mighty tt.NET must succumb somewhat to the bubblegum popcorn Hello Kitty! that is UBB. :-/
We now support the bold, italic, image, and url UBB style tags in messages and will parse and translate them appropriately. Example:
[ url=http://whatever]My Link[/url]
Without the space between the [ and url.
Image pop-up previews! - November 13, 2003 09:09 AM
Based on a kick-ass idea from Damon I implemented a preview popup for images. If you have Show Tool Tip Message Previews turned OFF in your profile then you will not see them.
To activate, simply roll over any image icon beside a message. The first image in the message will pop up for previewing.
Enjoy!
Events viewing problems have been fixed - October 25, 2003 11:57 PM
Anyone who has had trouble getting a blank page in Events when you are logged in, should notice that this problem has gone away.
Please don't post certain images 'inline'. - September 06, 2003 11:40 AM
We would prefer to not see anymore 'service manual' images inline (posted visibly on this site) or 'parts diagram' images (unless it's one from our own Docs section). If you want to link to the page or image, that's OK. We just don't want to see them inline in messages anymore.
Multiple ads in Classifieds will be deleted - May 13, 2003 10:20 AM
There are a lot of people lately that just post as many classified ads as they please. As a courtesy to everyone else that uses the Classifieds section, please consolidate your ads down to at least 2 (TWO), not 12, not 5, not 3, but TWO a day. Most of them can be done in 1... I usually send a nice little admin message explaining the rules that are stated at the top of the Classifieds posting page about only doing 2 at a time. I'm tired of that, so just expect your posts to get deleted. If you persistantly do it, then I'll just ban you. Simple.
Carfax requests will be deleted - May 06, 2003 08:51 AM
Greg had a sticky message posted, I figured I'd make it permanent over here in NEWS. Repeating, Carfax requests will be deleted.
