Thread: Who is the new admin?

All I have to say is this forum does not need to have tons of ads. A banner ad sure thats fine. If it gets ads between posts, intelitxt type ads, or tower style ads, then how is it better than autoforums.com? I applaud users trying to run this place. But wed dont need all that to make this place thrive.

if a non member comes across this forum, it shouldnt look like a freak show. my test is grab IE plain jane IE and surf to the page. If I get a pop up, if i get audio, if i get 30 ads, then its not acceptable. Even with just contributions this place can survive. I know of plenty of forums that have more and less membership than any sr forum, that does fine with out tons of ads.

Mike if you want to make your network fine...thats good. I hope its style and personality doesnt clash with this place, and if it does...hope it doesnt filter over to here. The 'tuner' community is defiantly a different community than the sr20 people. atleast the majority of us.

I believe we can keep this place clean and functioning without a lot of the flash and pop that other places try to do. Make contributing worth something. Make people want to keep paying. Do reoccurring contributer accounts for 2-3 dollars a month. Do stuff like paid for vendor ads that are a 3 month buy in. Do fun things that make the users want to pay in. Do a monthly drawing. You pay in 5 dollars for a raffle ticket as many times as you want, and once a month have a drawing for like a gift certificate with Calum, GregV, Miko...any of the vendors, but still make a profit for the forum off it. Like on another forum I go to, you can pay 5 dollars, and change someone else's title....so you can start messing with your friends by giving them funny titles. 10 dollars you can change their avatar there are all sorts of ways to make money to support this place other than loading it with ads or the such.

i just say...keep it as clean as possible, 1 maybe 2 standard sized web banner ads, one at top one at bottom...max

It may not be what I do for a living, but could not agree more. I owe a lot to people with that kind of attitude, thanks Mike. There's a lot of support here, you guys work it out, and plenty of people are willing to help out, myself included! Just let us know, this is a GREAT group. I can't tell you how much help I've found since April with this community - much appreciated.

As for ads, I've been on my350z forum since 2002, there are sponsors, ads, but no pop-ups and I've never been the least bit annoyed by the way it's run. There's room to take things to next level (over time, and IF that is what people want) w/o being obnoxious. One benefit there is we have had some really good sponsors help out with events, that's hard to w/o sponsors. There may also be downsides to their arrangement that I never see, too.

Btw Dave's "old" B13 is doing just fine in "retirement" in CT






Look familiar?

i bitched when the first changes started on sr forum...........then i fell on the floor when "IT" happend.

with that said i have absolutly no problems with any change as long as someone in the comunity does it......and askes first. however, pretty much anything you could do mike would be A OK in my book.

DO YOUR THING! lets make this forum more widely known that the bought out one was...............without a giant corporation behind us.

I am against contributor accounts. They take time and effort to admisister and its hard to stay on top of it and keep people coming. All member should have access to all features for free.

We my take is that the forums remain clutter free and the content rich parts of the site can have the waterfalls and other types of ads. I am totaly against pop up ads, those piss people off and are basicaly an anti impression if you ask me.

But think of it this way, if you want articles from guys like Dave Coleman, photography from guys like Mike Shin, hard core project cars and tests of stuff, something has to pay for them since it would be free for view content, not like buying a magazine.

However this is in another area of a potential site besides the forum. I really don't think more than banners really fit in a forum.

Not at this time Crim and I are just starting to talk about stuff.

I dont see how contrib accounts are all that difficult. there are plenty of plugins/hacks to VB that allow easy integration of that stuff. Why turn off a potential river of revenue?

Ads like "waterfalls" which i guess is what you are getting at...and what ive always heard referred to as tower's....i dont believe fit in anywhere. All they do is take up valuable realestate for real content. Its all about what is above the fold as they say. And the fold is 768 high, as you have to cater to least common denominator. if you take up horizontal space by placing a tower ad on the sides, you loose valuable screen realestate cause now you are no longer 1024x768 but 960x680 or less considering toolbars. I dont think an ad belongs above the fold in a community like here. one ad upper right conner for a contributer that is part of the community. Google ads at the bottom of the page. Taking up screen realestate with ads ... i dont think this community likes, i know i dont.

Then you bring up a good point about the content makers. Sure in years past people like Dave and Mike S were highly reguarded. Not saying they are less than stellar. but today on the net...its about user generated. Look at stuff like Shawn did with the suspension write up. Look at Calum's open source articles. Look at Swiss's documentation of a turbo Sentra SE. The users are where it is. Sure big stars bring in big names and big ads... But today its about what we all do. We ALL are content makers. Look at what happens when you get big names doing things...you get the writers strike. Perfect time for things like podcasts to come in and take a big market share. WE are content. I hope Dave will provide content....to say hes any better than Shawn cause he's been in a published magazine...holds no weight to me. We are all equals in terms of content generation ability.



Now....you go outside of this forum....all bets are off. This forum is about this community. Take your ideas and throw ALL this at them...it will stick i think. what your idea was, was good. And yes starting up something new, you have to have some names to get that 'wow' factor, it helps. I hope your idea comes to fruition. and you know ill be here to help however a 30 year old linux sysadmin geek just needing some direction can provide. I do consider you one of my friends since meeting you at Dallas....i still occasionally hear dad trying to mock your accent which is funny ... and him talking about suck squish bang blow and that was in what 00 or 01. Lets run y0 shit up the flag pole and see who salutes. Ive done a lot of this net stuff... so if you need a hand in the central time zone just ask.

This forum....i dont know. i liked some of the models of having the forum members being a driving factor of keeping it alive. donations, contrib accounts, purchasing of features...all that....makes the users feel more vetted in the well being of this forum, not just making posts


quick edit...
as for your statement of "buying a magazine". it was always my understanding of the economics of the magazine industry is that subscriptions barely pay the circulation costs...never mind the content. Its the ads in the magazines and the circulation size that paid the most. So for that sort of content...i for sure see ads as a necessity. for content here....on this forum....why shouldnt the users have the opportunity to buy in for various things? you have to make that buy in go toward something worth having. not that its limiting to non payers...but something that isnt trivial, and it will help support the forum.

Because this is a new place and because perhaps I can be more active about running it. Since techincaly I was sort of a competitior with my other site, I did not do to much on the old one out of my respect and freindship with Matt. Now that Matt has gone, I don't care about competing with the old site anymore.

It is true that many elements in the comunity drve me nuts and often those people have a louder voice that those who actualy care and make things happen. It recently seemed like they had outnumbered those who cared and I became discoraged with how things were going. Some things like how sr20turbofreak was treated really made me upset. He was our best assit in my opinion and he was not treated with respect and driven away.

What drives me the most mad is when people would talk about why can't we compete with the Honda guys or someone should build something like this so we can have respect. Well, if you don't support people like SR20turbofreak or even JWT we will never be able to commpete with anything on any sort of serious level. EBAY, OBX and SS autochrome isnt going to help us get more power. Instead of talking, those who talk and critisize need to be DOING. If you cannot afford to be doing, then get behind those who are doing it even if it is in sprirt instead of peanut gallerey commenting, hating and other crap.

In the old days, thats was how we were, we were a family. When we went and won the first USSC it was like everyone was there with us, We we were breaking into the 12,11, and 10's in quick 16 racing, it was like we had the forum with us. I am sure you felt that way when you were pioneering things on the east coast. The last time we were together as a family in spirt was the Nissan vs Honda race years ago.

Most of my old school friends from the SR world felt this way as well. It was like no one cared anymore.

What has changed my mind was the fact that enough people in mass cared about the comunity enough to try to keep it going even with this takeover. This has made me enthusiastic again and I want to be a part of this. I can also do something in the SR world without competing for traffic from a friends site as well. I hope that perhaps we can be a family again.

heres how i feel about contributer accounts.



when i buy my account i am paying for more features/space/smoother running of the forum for everyone to use.....contributer or not. i just get niffty little things like chat or the contrib forum. i never really used the contributer forum, but i LOVE the chat. and no offence, but i feel like you should have to pay to get something like that. chat was the shit, and i miss talking to people on it.

Then I think you will really like our features, like I said, we will be totaly geared towrd the web 2.0 environment. We have a thing where the users can provide content. All users have access to a CMS tool where they can compose articles that will have the same look and feel as the "pro" site. Our top user articles end up on our front page with the pro content. Our model also includes a profit sharing scheme for sharing the banner revinue that user generated content creates with the creators, a way of giving back.

I also belive that you need Professional writers and editors to provide real information. In the industry the net really lacks credabilty. Even hardcore people in the know feel this way. I want to change that. If you look at shawn b's suspension stuff, look whos work was the backbone of it. I think he is a certain well known engineer/magazine editor.

All user articles will be archiced in a searchable user database.

I really belive in free content. We had contributor accounts with our old site and they were just a small generator of revinue even with hundereds of contributors.

I belive in getting advertising so all can benifit from a good very active site.

Of course we are proably getting way ahead of ourselfs here. Crim and I have to talk alot and figure our working relationship out. I apologize if it seems like I am upstaging him here. This is his show.

I am hoping that everyone might want to take part in what could be something really cool. I guess we can talk in more detail once we have more details.

I can assure you that NF and NPM were not really businesses, more like hobby sites. I think you will be impressed when you can see what our professional efforts can do for the comunity.

As far as what happend, I can say this. One person ruined it for that entire comunity. It was one person against all.