R32OC 2009 – First Email of the year.
Good Morning/Afternoon everyone!
This is the first email of 2009, so although it’s late, I hope everyone has had a great Christmas and New Year. How many of you have failed your new year’s resolutions? Be Honest! :P
This is going to be the biggest email update in the history of the R32OC so please bare with me, I’ll try not to bore anyone with useless information.
THIS EMAIL CONTAINS IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR ANYONE LOOKING TO BECOME A PREMIUM MEMBER!
User Profiles and Email Addresses
We are fast approaching 3500 members, now although 90% of you have the correct email address in your profile there are a few of you that don’t. This caused a bit of a problem when sending out any information regarding the site, including private message notices, and other important information. Each time one of these messages is sent and bounces back it floods my inbox with MAIL SERVER DAEMON error messages and fills up the logs on my server. To help rectify this problem, I'm making it a point in this email (and also copying this entire update to everyone’s inbox via PM) to ask you all to
PLEASE update your profile with a working email address. This will only take a couple of seconds and will make things allot easier for!
J You can get to your user control panel by clicking here >
http://www.r32oc.com/usercp.php Site Updates, Changes and upgrades.
Some of you will have noticed a drastic change with the user garage system. I did try my best to transfer over everyone’s garage from the previous system, alas my efforts were in vain as last night proved. The old system threw a proverbial ‘wobbler’ completely crashing my server and bringing the site down for a good 15 minutes or so as well as every other server hosted on it. This led me to immediately remove all traces of the old system including everyone’s hard worked on garages.
I apologise for this, I tried my best to get everything over to the new system but the fact was that the old system was just not built for such a large site.
The new system, available at
http://www.r32oc.com/garage.php is miles ahead of the previous system in so many ways. You can have up to 5 cars in your garage, list all your mods, add up to 10 images per car, add companies, track times, drag times, lap times, 0-60 times the list goes on. Also, your cars will be listed underneath your avatar on all threads and posts. You can also link to the garage outside of the site so you only have to have one car garage updated and installed – I promise I won’t lost all your hard work again :P ! The only problem with the current system is that it is running on an almost empty database of cars, tuning companies and mods. This is where you guys come in. If you could all spend 5 minutes on the new system, adding your car(s), mods, tuning companies, garages etc this would be greatly appreciated, as you can imagine doing this myself would take a long time! If there is something you want to add to the garage system that isn’t already there, it’s almost certain that you will be able to add it to the system on the same page. Like any new piece of software, there will be teething problems. Anything you come across please don’t hesitate to let me know. You can email me, use the contact form on the site or PM me. The current known issues are as follows;
•Image error on main garage page.
•Problems uploading images of a larger than average file size.
Anything else, please let me know.
I have updated the video embedding system on the site. You no longer have to put any videos in [media] tags, simply paste the link to the video into your thread and the site will pick up that link and embed it into your post. Originally there was an issue with duplicate videos posting inside a thread but I've since sorted that out. Again, any issues with this system please let me know. Its setup for over 2000 different video websites so it should work for almost any site, if it doesn’t, let me know and I can implement the code for it.
Some of you will have seen allot of ads around the site for around a week or so. The original idea was that users who were not registered on the site would see these. After much deliberation and talks with some sponsors I've scrapped the idea of having any ads other than the sponsors on here.
There have been other changes behind the scenes to the software, yet another server upgrade and many other improvements. My current “to-do” list is still extensive, primarily improving site loading times and size.
To update you all on the statistics of the site, last year the R32OC had over 6 million page views, and over 400 thousand unique hits. That's an average of 33 thousand different people on the site, per month. January of 2009 alone, we had almost 100 thousand people in a single month! Now consider the fact that we are a humble community all built around a limited production car that's pretty amazing, and I want to thank everyone who comes here for making the OC what it is today.
Now, the bit you have all been waiting for Premium Membership.
Premium Membership
Now, I don’t like that term “Premium Member” so from now I’ll call it “Club Contributor”. I have been working on this side of things for a while now, and it’s still not 100% complete. However I know allot of you have wanted to contribute to the site for some time so while I put in the very last details for the system I have enabled the subscription system now so people can get in early.
Here is a brief list of what you’re going to get. Most of you will know that I didn’t want to charge people for something that weren’t worth it, but I think I've done a good job at getting things that will more than outweigh the cost of membership.
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Forum Contributor Status – Your username either coloured differently to regular members, or a special contributor user group only image below your name on threads to signify that fact.
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Image Hosting – you will get a certain amount of your own image hosting web space, much like all the other currently available systems but much easier to use and no adverts. You can use it to link to images anywhere on the web. Specific details of this are to be finalised.
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Greater Private Messaging Allowance –Forum contributors will be given 5x the current instant messaging space. That's 500 messages! No more full inbox, well, unless you’re really popular!
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Membership Card –You will receive, as part of your membership pack, a special numbered membership card. This will be used on conjunction with the special offers from our sponsors.
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Specialist Discounts – I have acquired special “Contributor” only deals from almost all the sponsors on the site. These won’t be available to regular members, and will be offered up only to those who have the R32OC membership card! Details of these deals will be in the...
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Members Area – Special members only area of the forum. This is the area that will be used by all the sponsors and myself to put all the details of the special members only discounts that I have obtained.
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Insurance Discount – I am currently in talks with a very reputable insurance company over offering support, advice and discount to contributors. I'm sure you will have heard of them, GreenLight! This is currently in the process of being implemented, but details will be posted very soon.
That is a very brief list of benefits you will get by becoming a contributor. Now as said above, all the details are not 100% finalised yet, the first batch of membership cards is underway, and I'm taking bids on the card numbered 32 ! :P
To become a contributor is very simple. You can go to
http://www.r32oc.com/payments.php and click the yearly subscription. At the moment the only payment method, online at least is via PayPal. I am going to be taking cheques or cash of members, the postal address for this will be posted on the club info page here :
R32OC | VW Golf R32 Owners Club clubinfo
Paying via the web system will mean that you are automatically transferred to the correct user group and will see the member’s area immediately.
The cost of subscribing is £25 for a year. I realise this is more than some places, but also I believe allot less than other places considering what I am offering with the membership. The costs of running the site are not cheap, and while the sponsors help towards this, it is still very costly! All money earned from the membership and subscription system is going straight back to the site to improve the user experience and provide what you guys want!
If there are any queries or complaints about this don’t hesitate to ask me or let me know. I have spent allot of time researching this and putting deals into motion and I don’t want anybody to think that I'm doing this for anything other than improving the club. Although I might treat myself to a pint down the pub! :P
Now, last thing for the club update information is
Merchandise.
Its been a long time coming, but I have finally got the ball rolling to offer members a range of merchandise that can be ordered as and when they like. The quality is very good and the price is respectable.
On that note I want to take a moment to ask all of you to join me in thanking Mak and his wife Shelly in all that they have done for the merchandise side of things for the R32oc. They have put their own money and time into getting some OC merchandise out there and have done a very good job.
Those of you who have missed out on the last group buy, I'm sorry. There will be hoodys available in the line of merchandise however they will not have the same amount of graphics and embroidery that the group buy ones had.
All information regarding the merchandise will be coming very soon, will all be able to be ordered online and in different colours and all the sizes you would expect. I have a few samples of the work and I can vouch that the quality is second to none.
Well, that's it for site news and updates, at least for now.
====Now a short message from me====
Without going into too much detail, 2008 was a shockingly bad year for me personally. I made allot of mistakes, poor character judgements and I have and still am paying the price for those mistakes. I realise a few people think that I am no longer interested in the club, and that I will run the site to the ground. To tell the truth, there was a time last year that I was perfectly prepared to do that. Very soon I will be ‘R32-less’. This was entirely my decision, and I came to it for a number of reasons.
My .:R was considered the “grandmother” due to her having over 100k miles on it, yet she still ran strong every day. A few things last year regarding the .:R that went awry have left me with an R32 that has a very shoddy complete respray even though it only went into for a front bumper and bonnet and a ruined stage 4 clutch masters clutch and stock DM flywheel. I won’t go into much detail over what happened since then. I was perfectly happy to take a punt on both those issues and get them sorted professionally however the latest thing to crop up has been with my shoulder.
Some of you will know that I had a long career racing motocross. From the age of 5 to 19 I raced almost nonstop. However certain injuries have now caught up with me, specifically a pretty busted up left collarbone. I broke this twice and the second time it set in a very awkward place. The doctors decided not to reset it because, and I quote, “I don’t wear a bra and it won’t affect my bra strap”. I replied of course what about weekends?
Anyway, last year after a long time my collarbone started giving me allot of pain, I found it very difficult to sleep and even harder to get fit again due to how badly damaged it is.
I am now finally going to be getting it fixed, but it’s a very big operation. It will be re-broke, pinned and plated. You might wonder what this has to do with my R32. Well I've been told I will be unable to drive for possibly 4 or 5 months after due to the nature of the operation and the following course of rehabilitation it will need. So I've decided on a fresh start for 2009, which actually is only going to start about now. The car is pretty much sold to a friend, I've just bought mk2 golf GTI and as soon as I can I WILL be getting another R.
I won’t lie, I did have some dirty thoughts of Jap crotch rockets last year, the 350z in particular but what drives me to those types of cars Is the following they have from tuning companies and the sheer amount of options.
When I came to the Krispy Kremes meet at the end of January, it was an eye opener, I hadn’t been to a club meet in some time and had forgotten just how much fun they were. To turn up and see the entire car park filled with R32’s all brought together by my club filled me with pride and I'm not ashamed to say it.
So on that note, thank you all for saving me from my inevitable Jap car days and I will repay you by letting you know that the R32OC is 110% still my baby, and I will always strive to push it forward and keep it running regardless of what happens.
I think that about covers it, the last thing I need to tell you about is a special offer that JBS has running currently, all the details of which can be seen here :
http://www.r32oc.com/jbs-auto-design...age-deals.html
Well, I hope you are still here reading this now and I haven’t bored you too much!
Look forward to seeing you all soon on the site and at meets!
Regards,
Wayne
R32OC.COM
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R32oc 2009
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