There is this car commerical, it's two guys in like a new focus or some shit. The passenger is trying out the new voice music selection feature (think it's called sync)... and he's calling out gay shit to see if it plays and it does. Then the driver gets all butthurt and calls out Korn. This song comes on and they cut to the end of the commercial.
WHATS THE NAME OF THAT KORN SONG!?!?!?!?!
Thanks,
And now back to your player hatin'
Edit: to contribute..... It would be nice to get the page numbers back next to the topics so we can jump to the last page instead of clicking into the first and then loading before they show up.
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Last edited by moltenice : 11-29-2007 at 12:06 AM.
here is my contention. he wants us to pay, but i fail to see any guarentee on anything. all he will have to do is add some adds to the paid-user accounts, then create a new super-user section so tha there are no adds. what is stopping him? then, you are stuck with supstandard slow website, like this one has become over the past 2 years. i spend a lot of time here, and have contributed SIGNIFICANTLY over the years, but this isnt worth my cash. simple matter of fact, i dont trust people on this site, the leadership has been shitty, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been scammed from the users, the administration has done nothing to stop it, and now they want me to pay into it?
sounds like a mob ploy doesnt it? paid protection...to protect yourself from those offering you the protection.
not convinced, and quite frankly, if it doesnt get better soon, with the adds/load time, i will pack up my things and move on.
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How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
I will be waiting to see what happens... If things work out, I will pay for lifetime membership. This site gave me a lot, and has been a great place to buy/sell parts, so I would return the favor.
Just me rambling here for a minute. My first thought after logging on tonight after all the changes for the first time went something like this: "Let me get this, in addition to all the vendors paying fees, the thousands of dollars in AdSense and other revenue, now he wants me to pay to be less annoyed?"
There probably was a time when I wouldn't have had much of a problem with this. And there are other web sites I'm currently on that have minimal advertising, great moderation, and an active forum owner (for example focaljet.com and couple of the turbo Dodge sites) where I wouldn't mind forking out a couple bucks because I feel the site is worth something. But over the last couple years srtforums has turned into a commercialized cluster and I don't want to support the site, i.e. fork over money for services I don't see a value in.
This comes across as trying to milk every last penny of revenue from the forums while you can. I think everyone knows that the Neon SRT-4 is out of production and anyone who has been online for years dating back to automotive mailing lists to the dawn of internet forums has seen the life cycle where everything starts off strong and eventually dies down and people splinter off as cars age or get discontinued. That's what is going on with the SRT-4 right now.
And if there are going to be less and less paying vendors I can somewhat see adding some advertising or looking into other means to support a site and make money. But when the forum looks worse than many porn sites and is more commercialized than most, me, as a customer has to ask "why should I pay?"
One of the main reasons I've started to drift away from here has not been the slow site and all the ads. It has been about things like pretty much zero moderation. There have been a couple good admin/mods but there's only so much one or two people can do. And I never see Mr. Gonzalez active on the boards. There are off topic posts that spread to every part of the boards, there's flaming and racial slurs thrown around, tons and tons of miss categorized posts, vendors that jump into every single tech thread of someone asking a question and trying to push products, and on and on. There are some sections like the California area that have not had an active moderator for literally years. The current one hasn't even owned an SRT-4 for two or three years now and never logs on. I'm pretty tolerant of a lot of things, but when I take the time to flag something blatantly inappropriate like NWS stuff in a sig or avatar and it takes a couple weeks to get corrected that tells me this place is on auto pilot.
The scamming vendors used to really be a sore point with me and it still bothers me a lot. I'm sure most reasonable people understood you as a site owner can't be responsible and baby sit every single transaction, but after multiple giant group buy fiascos and countless tens of thousands of dollars lost it was never publicly made clear whether any internal policy had been set up or changes made in an attempt to limit it from happening in the future. Things like maybe requiring a business check, business license information, etc. before allowing a vendor to sign up. Just washing your hands and stating essentially stating "caveat emptor, I just let them pay me to sell here but you're on your own" doesn't sit very well.
That's how I generally feel about this site now days and there are a lot of people who have been around a long time that feel the same. So by not doing anything to correct real problems and taking the time to make this a better place, not just make more money I don't see why I'd want to pay. Adding things I don't want (crappy ads filling every square inch) or taking things away that we had before in order to get people to pay into something isn't a great idea. It's a community and if you drive people away you're left hoping new members will join and keep it going, and while that is required to help sustain a community, if everyone else starts leaving it's going to fall apart and people will go elsewhere even more than they're doing already. Is that why these changes are being made?
Now that I'll get off the soap box and offer my suggestions on what I feel is reasonable and what I'd like to see. I fully understand you don't have to listen or even care about what I think, but I don't like to complain without offering suggestions to fix the problem (but then again if you don't care about your member base and what they think you'll get the same in return).
- There needs to be active moderation and admins for every section of the forums watching for posts in the wrong sections, profanity/racial slur/flaming, etc. Just the very basic stuff every forum needs. Add more of them and be selective on who you add. Unbiased as possible and fair should be a requirement (a few have been fairly hypocritical).
- Vendors. They shouldn't be allowed to enter every tech section and push products and argue with other vendors. That's why they have their own sections. Make a policy that they can answer questions and discuss their products in the performance, tuning, fuel sections, etc., but when they start arguing and/or jumping in everywhere trying to push something an admin needs to step in. Otherwise it leaves a bad commercialization feeling in the mouth of members.
- Ads. Figure out a policy and stick with it. Even if I were to pay today what guarantee is it that there won't be other changes in a few months that add some new venue generating content to the site? There's a fine line between providing a service and getting a little revenue in return, but when a member in addition to a guest is hounded with fifty thousand ads it's too much.
- Do not implement paying a "premium" membership to get features. Get rid of it. I absolutely hate when a site that's making good revenue (i.e. enough to support themselves) asks their member base to pay to gain access to common forum features. If, and that's a big if this was a small web site that didn't have a lot of people on it (in other words not enough to bring in ad clicks) or didn't have enough paying vendors to support it I could see asking the member base to contribute and maybe give them stuff in return as an incentive. But on a large scale site like this has become it ticks people off and comes across as blatant money grubbing.
- Availability and performance imprevements need implemented. Bandwidth alone does not appear to be an issue here. For those familiar with SQL databases and web site/forum design I'd bet the biggest problems most people have and complain about are caused by extra content such as ads loading and the database server being overtaxed and/or the forum software not flexible enough for a giant site with large numbers of concurrent users. I'd suggest spending some time working on the backbone and improving performance if you want people to pay. More servers. Faster drive arrays. Better software. Whatever it takes, spend the money to fix it. And if you can't because a lot of it is due to the extra ads and things added to the site to produce revenue I'd maybe reassess those items. Nothing infuriates people more than hearing "looks great from my end" or "upgrades are being put online" while it remains the same experience or marginally improves but is still worse than it has been in the past from the user's perspective.
- Back to vendors again and the scams. I've never really heard anything that has been done and don't know what steps have been taken to prevent it in the future, but it would be nice to come out and state either way what's going on. Put up a section on the forums or a link that shows the requirements and provides information on how to become a vendor. That way the general user base can look at it and see what's required. If you're then requiring a lot of information and taking steps to ensure it isn't a fly-by-night operation they'll know about it (and if you're not there are bigger problems). There needs to be more active admins that can and should keep an eye on big group buys or watch for developing problems they could bring to your attention before it spirals out of control. On a side note I'm sure people enjoyed seeing the rotating banner ads still on the forums for a company months after that vendor had disappeared without a trace (Kustomatix, Glacial, etc.).
-More involvement with the community. I get the feeling you're in it ONLY for the money (and perception is reality). And there's nothing wrong with that, but maybe consider bringing in more site leadership who actually cares about the subject the site is promoting, or in other words people who care about and are involved in the SRT-4's. You'll get less resentment to changes and maybe having people truly involved in the community can help it grow or at least sustain itself better. Otherwise you'll see the continued fragmentation of people leaving, new members not sticking around, and in turn less ad clicks, vendors, and money in your pocket.
Last edited by blackbird_R/T : 11-29-2007 at 02:50 AM.
should have a dropdown box to buy admin spots, too.
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Quote: Originally Posted by satyr
Well, Darrell, it's not that I am cheap, it's that I don't want to pay twice as much for a piece of shit product just because it has your faggoty seal of approval, especially when I can get the same thing, probably in higher quality, for half the price...k?
Eric, I couldn't agree more with you. This site has been on a downward spiral ever since, well, we'll say war stories was removed. I find myself coming here less and less because of the lack of moderation, constant changes, and now this. It really is a shame what has happened to this place. It use to be great, now it's just a sad shell of what it use to be.
But hey, the almighty dollar rules all
Congrats Ekool. You've taken something great and turned it into crap.
I may pay if they guarentee no fricken banner ads outside of the vendor scroll.
Moo.
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