News Item - February 11, 2000 11:34 PM
Poll is closed on the contest, we have a winner!
'Boost Your Knowledge' by a very, very slim margin:
324 votes total
The winner's name and e-mail is at the office, I'm at home right now (amazing!). LOL I *think* the winner is JimmyC(KY). Don't shoot me if I'm wrong. congrats to Jimmy either way. ;-)
OK off on today's tangent of 'What happened to TwinTurbo.NET?'. The attitude around here isn't as friendly as it once was. A lot of it has to do with newbies not taking the time to read the FAQ/search/lurk before posting and when they post the inevitable 'NA to TT conversion?' post, the veterans unload on the unsuspecting newbies. This of course, puts everyone at odds...
Let review some quick rules on what is appropriate to post here: discussion 1 discussion 2 I've been a little lenient lately, mostly because I don't get to spend a lot of time on the forum. I'm going to get the moderators to step up the deletes, if it really adds nothing to the discussion, then why bother posting? Please make a conscious effort to post meaningful accurate information. I've noticed a lot of people just throwing out answers that sound like they were passed down from generation to generation. If you don't have first hand knowledge, then keep reading, someone else will take the time to answer the question correctly. We all like to be the 'answer' person, but I hate it when someone throws out half baked information as the final answer without including 'I've read' or 'I think' or 'I'm not 100% sure'. Misinformation is worse then no information. Please be careful here, especially when newbies are involved. A lot of them are in a panic about something with there Z, and the last thing they need to be told is 'It's definitely the starter', when in fact it's the more commonly failed starter inhibitor relay. So they buy a $125 starter that doesn't make a bit of difference, when a $36 relay solves it. Face it, the joy of this place is being able to pool our collective knowledge to solve Z problems and save everyone involved some cash. It does make it worthwhile when I see that (very timely) "thanks another happy customer later all (n/m) - fastauto 23:38:06 02/11/00". THAT my friends is the comment we should all be shooting to get from another member. You rarely see that anymore. It was extremely common in the 'olden' days.
Everyone use your freaking noggin. It's attached for a reason. Vets, be nice to the newbies, newbies, read the FAQs/search/lurk before posting (fat chance, but hey, I can dream!). We've got to get back on track here. I'm going to just start banning people for a month at a time if the dumb comment, rude, misinformed, antagonistic, etc. posts keep appearing. It's obvious my patience has been worn through. Consider this your written notice.
Written by Dallas DamonZ
News Item - February 07, 2000 07:04 PM
We narrowed all the slogan entries down to 4. Now it's your turn to choose which you want to be the winner! The poll will be open for the entire week and I'll post stats at the end. The winner gets a round of tt.NET gear. ;-)
News Item - January 30, 2000 11:49 PM
OK, getting some excellent entries in the license plate by-line contest. After seeing the artwork for the T-shirts, I'm thinking I want to add the by-line into the shirts as well... just turn it into a slogan for the site. ;-) Read the news item below for more details on the contest! Thanks to all that have submitted, really clever stuff so far.. going to be hard to decide.
News Item - January 22, 2000 12:29 AM
Well, things went pretty much as expected when we went live. We trimmed back on some features to speed up the rest of the operation, like no chat server for now & 'Views' are defaulted to the original style. We're working with some software acceleration now. If you've been here during the afternoons over the last week, you've probably gotten a taste of it. Just a few more kinks to work out & I'd say it'll be just as fast as it was before the switch to V2K.
Everyone wants T-shirts, stickers & license plate frames. As soon as I get my final artwork from one of my designers, we'll be getting it all made. I do have one request from the membership. On the license plate frame, I need a by-line to go with the logo. Something like 'Enough info to choke on' as someone once put it. :-) E-mail suggestions to suggestions@twinturbo.net. Best phrase will score a free round of tt.NET gear, not to mention being put on the plate frames. And don't bother sending me 'Enjoy the Ride' that's been done already. Just something else short & catchy. :-)
News Item - January 01, 2000 09:04 PM
We're live! Hopefully the server overhead will be sufficient to handle our traffic levels. It just keeps growing... I never imagined it would be this way after a year and a half. Over 2 million hits, and an average of 830 individuals checking in daily. The largest Z Club in the States is around 600 members. We might have more territory, but our active membership is still larger, the overall size of the TwinTurbo.NET community is well over 5,000 members.
OK, OK, enough with the feel good, here's the pay-off as it were. Greg & I could have been content with the forum the way it was, but with a couple additional tweaks to make life easier on us. We decided to raise the bar for the membership, offering an even better site for the Z32 community. We've had features sitting in the background of the old forum waiting for the chance to be set 'live'. Once the pile got large and we felt the old tricked-out freeware had exceeded it's usefullness in our hands, to go further and add these features, we needed a fresh approach. The V2K software is still pretty raw, there's a lot of performance tweaking to be done. The platform and theories behind it's creation will allow Greg & I to really propel TwinTurbo.NET to the next level. Things might be bumpy at first, like it was when we first started 400,000 messages ago. Be patient with us, we refuse to issue a substandard forum. This might mean scrapping everything we've got built here now. I'm ready to make that sacrifice if need be, but I'm sure it won't come to that. Greg & I have worked too long and argued way too much over this thing for it to fail.
We could only program so far. Our Beta Test Team beat it around quite a bit and offered many opinions on the functionality and overall feel of the new site. I want to thank them for taking time to help us with the new forum, they will benefit the most. I also want to thank Greg for putting up with me when I would insist on things working the way I wanted them, even when it went against everything he was programming. More often then not, I would ask for a change and he'd already have it done, or be working on it. A better programming partner and teacher I couldn't ask for. Thanks G for making all this possible! I'd still be fumbling around with the For Sale forum trying to make it work on the old forum, now I can actually understand the old software. I won't comment on the new stuff, it's on a totally other level. :-)
Wish us luck!
News Item - December 31, 1999 03:02 PM
The time has come! Hope everyone is having a pleasant 1-1 or 12-31 depending on when you read this. Happy New Millenium!! How does it relate to tt.NET? V2K forum software launches tomorrow. We'll be kicking offline at 11:30pm cst tonight and the server will start indexing the remaining messages into the database. I backed up all the current messages, the total size was 2.4G of disk space. Not surprising, as we're passed 450,000 messages now. We should be back tomorrow evening sometime with the new forum software. As always, stay tuned!
News Item - December 28, 1999 05:51 PM
Yeah! 2 Million hits!! We nailed this one in the last 7 months, the first one took a year to attain. Thanks for all the support since we've opened! Now... drumroll please! The winner is:
PriZe package: 1 Z hat & shirt from RT, 1 1/24th scale model TT from JeNN, 1 SGP T-shirt from SGP Racing & 1 Z Commercial CDROM from TTZD.com ALSO late entry to the priZe pile... the new Austin Powers movie on DVD courtesy of Jack B. (thanks Jack!)... Justin, shoot your address to me, we'll get stuff mailed directly to you!
Dallas DamonZ, Greg (Dallas) & Steve Simmons - the TwinTurbo.NET Admins
News Item - December 28, 1999 03:19 PM
SGP Racing has thrown in a SGP T-shirt to the priZe package! Thanks to SGP, JeNN & RT (insert today's subtitle here) for the 2M goodies. More details below & lower.
News Item - December 28, 1999 02:52 PM
JeNN just added a Tamiya 1/24th scale model Z32TT to the prize list! Thanks to JeNN and RT for making 2M a contest today!! ;-) More details below.
News Item - December 28, 1999 02:16 PM
Notice something different about the site's counter? Yep, here we go again! 2 Million hits should roll sometime tonight. We're tracking the hits to see who the 2 millionth visitor really is. Prizes??? Prizes???? RT is throwing in one of his cool black Z logo hats. The logo is in white, same one used on shirts he did a month ago. I'll throw in one of those fabled CDROMs with all the Z commercials on it. Fabled you ask? Well... Mike B. STILL hasn't gotten his stuff from the 300Z.com re-launch contest. Sorry Mike! :-((( I get working on it & then get sidetracked with work or V2K here. Anyway, if I sit down and burn about 2 more tries, everything should be totally revised and ready to roll! So... 2 million scores a Z hat and a CDROM of all the Z commercials I could find (33+). If you don't have a valid e-mail account in your profile... tough luck! That's the only way I have of contacting you. The next hit with a valid account wins the goods.
