News Item - January 10, 1999 06:49 PM
Well, I understand there's some debate about what happened here... basically 3 things within 1 hour. 1st & second: Bugs were discovered in the forum that were detrimental to the future of the forum. I have fixed one of the bugs. Waiting for Greg to get home from skydiving to look at the 2nd one. 3rd: The ethical debate about Althug's ticket. I'm not 'censoring' anything, & if you feel I am... Please spend a little time reading your Constitution... particularly the 1st amendment... censorship is an act of government, not me. It's my house, I make the rules & for the most part we get along fine, but when a line is crossed, I will intervene for the sake of the forum's future. I offer no apology for my actions. I'm trying to keep this forum from turning into a s&%thole, if you have a problem with that, go elsewhere, please. I removed the messages of no relevence/bad behavior at least for the most part... I haven't had time to read everything & have no inclination to do so. My time is VERY limited right now, otherwise there probably wouldn't have been a 'shutdown'. Sorry, but I'm protecting the forum from misuse & since I can't babysit some of you, I'll take the 'toy' away from everyone & we'll have a little 'time out'. Not bad for a guy that's horrible with kids. LOL.... Hopefully we'll be back on track before tomorrow. Sorry for the withdrawls. I hope you understand my position. The people I have spoken with today agree it was the right move. I'm certain a majority of you would agree considering the circumstances that lead up to the shutdown.
Written by Dallas DamonZ
News Item - January 09, 1999 05:59 PM
A situation has happened on the forum that I personally don't have time to moderate/deal with at this very moment. I've been working a LOT of hours here at the shop & happened to stop & look at my computer. I'm pretty much burned out on the ethics conversation. I think I'll leave the server off for a bit while working out some bugs here during breaks in my project. I also think some people need a little time out to clear their heads & stop seeing red. More later.. gotta go.
Sorry for the inconvenience of those members waiting for answers on technical information.
News Item - January 09, 1999 01:21 PM
Bad news. The member database has been corrupted. This has happened a couple times, but it was recoverable. Remember Thanksgiving? :-( Anyway, we are working on recovering the proper info & get the forum back on track. Please be patient if your account 'dissappears'... we have it, but the file keeps folding on itself & losing some data, so we just keep reseting it to a backup file from yesterday morning. The backup is corrupt as well, & starts the cycle over again... but appearantly all the data is still stored in it.
Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause.
On the flip side... Greg's chat room is getting a LOT of use. :-) I want to thank him for the hard work he puts into the site. Chat is yet another A+... we've still got more improvements to make on the room, so it will be even better (and more useable!). 'Boss Mode' :-)
News Item - January 07, 1999 06:14 PM
NEW CHAT!! We've been working diligently on a replacement for ParaChat and have finally gotten something that we like. The new chat is a bit of a hybrid between ICQ Chat and Parachat and is based on ActiveX technology. This means that members using Internet Explorer 4.0 can just surf to the chat page and work with ttNETChat inside the browser. Those of you using Netscape, which doesn't support ActiveX, will need to download a standalone ttNETChat program that you can run at will to connect to the chat server. Some of the goodies in the new chat include:
Written by Greg (Dallas)
News Item - January 05, 1999 10:23 AM
Opened a new 'wing' on the site today... the 2000+ forum is now open! It's intended for discussion of what we'd like to see in the NEW Z, by whatever name it may be. :-)
News Item - January 03, 1999 10:04 PM
Back from 'vacation'. The server survived (whew!) this time. Actually, I peeped in a couple time to check on things. First, the New Year's Eve incident is already under investigation, the ISP the messages were posted from has been contacted about the 'behavior' of one of it's users. Totally stupid if you ask me, thank goodness for Vote to Delete & the swift actions of the moderators & Greg to shut this person down & get the messages removed from the forum. Which leads me to the second item I've noticed... the Vote to Delete discussion. Basically someone's post about Gran Turismo got deleted by the other members. Usually these don't get deleted, but like a few other 'borderline' Z related messages, people appearantly just get tired of seeing them. Valid points have been made on both sides for and against. I personally (read: moderators etc.) won't remove these type of messages because they are Z related in the way of paraphenalia. I would appreciate it if this certain topic of discussion were kept to a minumum for 1 reason... I created this forum to discuss the Z32 itself and subsequently some of the lifestyle surrounding it. I'm sure GT has it's own forum elsewhere... when I get a little free time I'll look for one, or possibly someone already knows the URL & can post it for me. There could probably be enough discussion about the game itself to occupy the whole forum here... what I'm saying is... discussion about a Z T-shirt (paraphenalia) will last about 3 posts, meanwhile this game's discussion can use up a 1/4 of the forum space discussing 'how do you get the international license' or whatever. Some people feel the game's discussion shouldn't occupy as much forum space as it does, they Vote to Delete them. There is no cut & dried answer to what stays and what goes, it's totally up to the attitudes of several members on 'borderline' type posts. My admin line is more liberal, so we leave it to the members to decide. Please take a second to scroll down the forum and see all the posts that don't have s by them and what they are about... Compare them to the ones that do have 1-2 s next to them. You'll quickly get the idea of what really should be here (Z32 discussion) and what shouldn't ('What color Yugo can my moped beat?'). I have no plans for changing the way Vote to Delete functions right now, because it's doing it's job very well. Things will always fall through the cracks & sometimes things that should be here aren't viewed that way. Keep in mind it's not an per person. It takes more votes than the 'Currently Online' average to remove a message. It takes more than one person to get the first to appear as well. While this number is a tiny minority in comparison to the amount of traffic we get here, we have to keep the vote number low to quickly erradicate flames and other BS posts (refer to the 4th & 5th sentences above). I would much rather see a borderline post fall victim to VtD then see what was on the forum New Year's Eve, that's what will keep this forum from becoming like the 'other' places. Please try to stay focused on what this site exists for. Believe me, I listen to every criticism of the site itself & everything is evaluated.
News Item - November 30, 1998 12:48 PM
Long weekend for some of us. Appearantly the forum didn't fair so well while we were away. Found the problem that was slowing down the forum early this morning & got it fixed. Not entirely sure what caused the problem. We're looking into it now to find a solution so hopefully it doesn't happen again. Everything should be OK now.
News Item - November 17, 1998 04:34 PM
This morning's hiccups on the server were due to a downward spiral. It's all better now. One of the partions was getting filled with log data (unused data), once it got too full, it started logging errors to the same partition eventually filling it up to only 16k left. :-( When this happend, the server got a little choked up. Couple seconds with the Hiemlich manuever & everything's much better. Well, to go with the other statistics, we've logged 137M worth of visits since September when we moved to the new server. I turned logging off, as the data it was logging was kinda worthless.
On a different note, TECH is updated. Steven(Phx) was kind enough to photo & explain how to change out the IAA valve. Nice work Steven! If you want to contribute some of your work, send mail to tech@twinturbo.net for a template & details on what's needed for submissions.
Also still accepting quiz questions... see below for submission details
News Item - November 12, 1998 08:24 PM
I am proud to announce the opening of the DOCS section. Special thanks to Steve Richardson & crew at Courtesy for making this one happen for us! Just go look at it! :-) The quiz is coming along... don't forget to mail in those questions. The details are below. Also, I'm running short on www.twinturbo.net stickers. A couple pair of each of these colors are left: Cardinal Red, Sapphire Blue & Gloss Black. Check way down below for ordering details.
News Item - November 11, 1998 12:44 PM
I'm accepting questions for the up-coming Twinturbo.NET quiz to see just how astute members really are. The quiz will be 50 questions long. I'm looking for questions in 5 possible multiple choice questions or true/false/yes/no variety with the answer marked somehow. Only questions revolving around the Z32 iteself. Not lifestyle questions or other opinion/vagueness. I need 'proof' of the answers in the form of links in the Search section so I can verify the answers myself. All material will come from the archives so everyone has a fair chance at 'passing'. Yes, there are rewards at the end for those that pass. :-) I've gotten some really good ones submitted so far. If you would like to contribute, send questions and answers to quiz@twinturbo.net. Thanks!
Greg fixed a couple bugs. There were a couple problems in the Search function with the follow-ups not matching the post. All fixed now for full ability to traverse the follow-up tree.
Also slated are two 'surprizes'. One is waiting for approval, the other is on the drawing board waiting to see if it can be pulled off. Stay tuned!
