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.
Written by Greg (Dallas)
ZCON Dinner confirmations & stickers - May 14, 2006 12:52 PM
Dinner confirmations for tickets sold so far will go out later this week. I wanted to get it done this weekend, but I have to travel for business later today which has screwed up my planning. Thanks to all that have bought in so far... I guess the numbers are what we expect for this moment, but we have a long ways to go before we've reached our goals for sales. East coast is beating west coast pretty handily right now.
Also, if you have ordered stickers in the last couple months, they are getting cut now (finally) and will ship sometime this week. Sorry for the delay, I've had the sticker cutter instead of Greg for other stuff & haven't kept up with it as well as he does.
Written by Dallas DamonZ
TwinTurbo.NET attacks Scammers! - April 29, 2006 09:47 PM
This has been quite a while in coming but we finally got it done! Due to the increase in members being scammed over the past year or so by worthless people who only come here to scam through classifieds, and because lots of people can't pass on a deal that's too good to be true even if the seller has only had an account for the last 6 minutes, we have put posting restrictions in Classfieds.
Anyone who wants to post in classifieds must have an active account for at least 30 days and have 500 hits. These restrictions are fully configurable by us but this seems like a reasonable starting point. While this does exclude well meaning new members that have valid things for sale, as they say, one rotten apple spoils the whole bunch.
Hopefully this will put a stop to the blatant scams going on in Classifieds. As always if you think something looks to good to be true, stop, pull your head out of your butt, and move on.
tt.NET ZCCA Associate Membership Program - February 23, 2006 11:11 PM
At the Syracuse ZCCA Convention last year, ZCCA Chairman Paul Gasparola, Greg & Myself had a little sit down to discuss an opportunity. ZCCA is looking for ways to encourage more participation in the National Convention. With TwinTurbo.NET bringing in quite a few people that would probably not attend a ZCCA Convention through our now annual convention dinners, he thought it would be a good idea to try to expand on that.
What came of it was making tt.NET an Associate Member of the ZCCA. An amendment to the by-laws was voted on and passed a few weeks ago that allows us to get some benefits member clubs have even though we are a very loosely structured and non centralized club (regular ZCCA clubs are generally local/regional clubs). The primary advantage is we get a discount on registration for the convention... I'm told if you tally up all the events in a typical convention, it could save over $100 off the registration cost. I know it makes the (TwinTurbo.NET sponsored) track day a lot more affordable. There are also some other things your membership gets you if you read through the amendment below.
I'm not 100% sure how this will work out for us since we're getting started a little late. But we are the pilot for this and we'll give it our best shot. In short the plan is we collect $2 from everyone that wants to be an Associate Member through TwinTurbo.NET. We turn over a list of members 60 days before the convention begins that have paid their dues to get the discount on events when they register. I know a few of you have already ponied up the cash and registered ensuring your space at the convention (ZCCA thanks you)... Paul and I are working out how to make adjustments to registration fees if you become a member after the fact. We have added a membership dues item in the Store so you can join the ZCCA through tt.NET and get your discount on convention registration once the roster is passed to ZCCA.
Here's the actual amendment to the by-laws:
ARTICLE V: MEMBERSHIP
F. Associate Membership to ZCCA. An Associate Member Club is defined as an association of individuals that have no formal club structure, i.e., an internet forum. The Associate Membership Program is defined as:
The Associate ZCCA Membership will be open to groups based on approval by the ZCCA Executive Committee. There will be one Central Representative of the association for all communications There will be only one payment to ZCCA for the Associate Membership for the current year. The cost of the Associate Membership will be $2.00 per individual per year. The Associate Membership Central Representative will collect the dues of those wishing to participate and send the dues and a list of those paid individuals to the ZCCA Treasurer. The provided list cannot be updated until the next enrollment period. The specific enrollment period will be set forth by the ZCCA Treasurer. Sixty (60) days prior to the next ZCCA Convention the ZCCA Executive Director will send to the Convention Host Club a list of the Associate Membership individuals to be eligible for registration discounts, if any.
G. Associate Membership rights and restrictions: 1. WILL BE able to: a. Attend ZCCA Board meetings (the main contact per group can sit at the main table during business meetings) b. Eligible for ZCCA Discount Program c. Eligible for ZCCA Convention Discounts d. ZCCA Roadside Assistance Information e. Listed as a partner group on the ZCCA Website
2. WILL NOT BE able to:
a. Vote at ZCCA Convention Board Meetings b. Eligible for ZCCA Insurance c. ZCCA distributed materials d. ZCCA Rep Forum list e. Host a ZCCA Convention f. Listed as a "Member Club" on ZCCA Website
Just so you know, we will be holding our annual dinner on Wednesday, May 31st - the evening of the car show and before the track day... stay tuned for more details!
Nominations for new moderators. - October 22, 2005 12:33 PM
Since our last round of selections & acceptances, attrition has slimmed the staff down to a point where we need to bulk up again.
If you or you know another member that you think has the level headedness to continue to keep our community on top, send your nomination to suggestions@TwinTurbo.NET. Histories will be reviewed. Depending on the number and quality of nominations, some candidates will be decided in the Polls forum by the membership.
Thank you for helping keep TwinTurbo.NET focused!
Searching Issues II - March 06, 2005 10:56 AM
As of now, the Technical forum has been completely re-indexed and is current. Searching appears to be a bit slow, so be aware that a search may take a bit to get results. The General forum has now started indexing and should be done within 48 hours.
Searching issues - March 05, 2005 10:16 AM
As has been apparent for quite a while we've had some searching issues. I finally got around one of the problems that existed and have started re-indexing the forums.
Classifieds is already done (it's the smallest of them all) and tech is going now. It will take a couple of days for it to be fully re-indexed.
General is disabled for the moment and I will start it indexing again once tech is finished. We should be fully operational within 4 days or so again.
Thanks for your patience while we resolved the issues.
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!
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.
