News Item - March 23, 1999 01:31 PM
All my news stuff has been aimed at the Z Concept Action letter writing campaign. Here's the skinny: We started sending e-mails to Corporate Nissan about 3 weeks ago and collecting written letters to be bundled along with pictures of prowd owners and their Zs. I want to take a sec and mention a LOT of them were from 240-280Z owners and Z31 owners as well, it wasn't JUST a Z32 effort. I thank each of you that came over from other sites to participate. I sent off the last batch of e-mails yesterday. 103 total. This morning I got a reply: "You don't know how helpful these have been. but you will soon" Jason Vines, VP Corporate Communications, Nissan USA. I'm mailing out the 26 written letters today. It appears as though we really HAVE made some sort of impact over there. :-)
Now, to help with getting folks motivated to write, we scored some prizes from our sponsors. Here's the list of winners:
For snail mail, $50 SGP gift certificate:
Mark West "WeST" west@cyberrealm.net
For snail mail, Z valve-stem caps from SGP:
Ryan Davis "ryand" davisryan@worldnet.att.net
For snail mail, Nick + Roxanne T-Shirts from Courtesy Nissan:
Arthur Golebiowski "Arthur" zzzzmydust@aol.com Jonathan Howlett "YellowTT" jonathan.r.howlett@jci.com Phuong Tao "got rice?" gotrice10@yahoo.com Chris Ham "JCH" jimham@ixlmemphis.com Jennifer Bowden "Jen" JBowden21@aol.com
For e-mail, $25 SGP gift certificate:
Red3ooZX@aol.com
For e-mail, Nick + Roxanne T-Shirts from Courtesy Nissan:
billw@connect.ab.ca Good2Zya@aol.com money@collector.org MVANMETER@aol.com schoemf@mtco.com acapsouto@earthlink.net stevez32@yahoo.com KSchenholm@aol.com mag_bag@istar.ca
I want to thank JoshZ & TomB for gettin things rolling. I also want to thank everyone who participated. Courtesy & SGP want to thank everyone who participated as well. I want to thank Courtesy & SGP for helping out. This really was rather successful! You're welcome! It looks like we might have really done something here!!!! =)
As far as the site goes... um, Greg and I have been cleaning up a few things and working out some bugs. Please be patient, some of these things are just hard to track down to crack them. Arthur sent me a pile of stats on the Z32 from Motor Trend and Automobile magazines. I've compiled them into Z32 Stats in the Z32 FAQ. I left in the comparisons to the other cars in the tests to show how the Z stacks up. The one with the Viper, NSX & Vette is interesting from a cost standpoint.
Nothing else to report right now...
Written by Dallas DamonZ
News Item - February 26, 1999 11:09 AM
OK, couple of bug fixes are done up now. The problem with editing your profile causing your initial login date to be reset has been fixed. For everybody who was a member before 1/30/99 your ORIGINAL login has been restored.
Member Search has been repaired for the time being. You should get accurate results when searching any field EXCEPT mods. There's still a problem there and you will have erroneous results when looking for mods. We'll get that fixed as soon as we can.
Written by Greg (Dallas)
News Item - February 23, 1999 09:36 AM
Finally, a new modification to the search "engine" to make it a little easier to find things. Now, when you search for something, all the results are returned in reverse chronological order, such that the most recent posts with the search words in it show up first (page 1) and then progresses to the oldest posts (last page). I hope this helps a lot of people out. I often found myself searching for something and then immediately jumping to the last page to find the most recent entry. There were some problems where things would appear to be in kind of a random order and where the same post would show up multiple times, artificially inflating the hit count. This is now fixed as well.
Enjoy!
News Item - February 22, 1999 01:31 PM
WOW! Half a million hits since June... Wouldn't have imagined it! The average 'current online' is just below 30 now. We're averaging 20,000+ accesses a day. This means a LOT of traffic through here daily. The forum stays right under 24 hours on the main page. In an effort to allow members to retrieve messages by date, I've created the Twinturbo.NET Timeline. It's a chronological record of almost every post made since the beginning (minus deleteds & a few others) of the orginal Z32 forum. It's backwards from the regular forum, meaning it reads like a book... top to bottom, so the oldest post is at the top. The link will be in the navigation tools top center on the main forum... looks like this:
[ View Older Messages ]
We're still working on a few SQL issues. There have been some roll-backs in the access counters. Rather random, we're trying to track that down. If you edit your profile, the date you edit the profile becomes your first login date. We're working on re-compiling the data to accurately reflect what's true from a back-up.
I'm working on a 'Stats' section on the FAQ page. Arthur sent me a pile of photocopies from Motor Trend & Automobile magazine with all the listed stats and comparisons from several different issues. I wanted to get the widest range of published stats from the respected automobile magazines.
JaimeZX & I are working on FAQ'ed messages. We've added quite a few new ones lately. I've gotten 2 new TECH articles posted in the last couple weeks. I'm working on one for 555 injector install. Just trying to keep up with all the stuff members send me! :-) I know it's slow, but it will happen. Remember, this is a hobby for us, Greg and I have to do real work from time to time too! :-D
News Item - January 31, 1999 03:14 PM
OK, well I thought the SQL thing was going better than expected and sure enough a speed bump or two cropped up.
Sorry for the inconvenience.. Hopefully you're all noticing the forum to be a bit faster when moving around.
News Item - January 30, 1999 05:09 PM
Well, it's FINALLY done. The tt.NET member database is now fully housed inside Microsoft SQL Server. :-) What this means to you is:
News Item - January 28, 1999 02:29 PM
The database seems to be holding up for the time being. Greg already has the test forum running on SQL database. I must admit, it's like a shot of NOS! :-) This is going to allow us a few new twists in how the forum is used/viewed. Not going to promise anything, but if Greg & I can work out the ideas we've been discussing, tt.NET will improve dramatically. I've added a new feature to the EVENTS forum. It allows filtering of individual locations on the forum. So you no longer have to go hunting for events in 'Englishtown, NJ'. Just select it at the top. That's really the only superficial item out there now. We've been working on a LOT of behind the scenes things, that's why occasionally things don't work right... If you happen to find a bug, or something wrong, or something doesn't work anymore, etc. Fire off an e-mail to Admin@Twinturbo.NET. We'll get to the bottom of it as quickly as possible. We know chat has a problem. Something we're unable to deal with at the moment, because when Greg's laptop got stolen (see last NEWS update), the source code went with it. Once we get the SQL set up, we'll see what we can do about the chat room. It's still better than ParaCrap room we used to use. Gotta strive for perfection though. :-) Got Joe (Ft. Laud) working on the LINKS page. Hopefully we'll see what he's been up to in the next week or so. It's only been 7 months now, anything he can do is quicker than I am. Thanks for your help Joe! If he requests links on the forum, please respond.
News Item - January 14, 1999 12:56 PM
The 'fix' on the database appearantly didn't work, it was broken when I got into the office this morning. When it rains it pours around here, Greg's office got broken into last night and his laptop is now stolen... which means Greg's coding is elsewhere, which means... well......... you get the picture. :-( We're still working on getting the database ported over to SQL now, but kinda handicapped doing it right this second. Please understand that we're having to revert to a back-up of the database, so any settings changed in your profile will be lost the next morning when we revert back. Including new members. It's not a whole lot of fun here either, we'll be back on track before you know it. :-)
Sorry for the inconvenience this will cause.
News Item - January 13, 1999 03:51 PM
Back on-line now. Hopefully the database Greg rebuilt today will last until we can get switched over to SQL. Thanks for your patience.
News Item - January 13, 1999 10:34 AM
The member database is down right now, this means the site is pretty much down as well. :-( Greg & I are working on it. Hopefully we'll be back up by end of day.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
