What's next for YarisWorld?

[tk-421]

I've been wondering about this question for a long time. The lack of admin engagement leads me to believe that they have no incentive to keep this site running indefinitely, especially since the vendor payment system -- basically the only known way to send money to the admins -- has been broken for a long time.

Lack of admin engagement has brought a lot of drawbacks to YW. For example:

• we have no idea how frequently backups are being performed on our data
• we have no access to those backups anyway, so if admins close shop we will likely still lose everything
• mods have almost no admin privileges, and can't be of much help when there are software or user account issues
• forum software hasn't been upgraded in a while and it's showing its age
• there is no mobile version of the forums and they are barely usable at their current state
• ever-growing amounts of spam and limited ways to deal with it are a big concern

Considering that many members here have invested a long time and effort to bring great content to YW, it would be a big loss for all of us if said content were suddenly lost for some reason or another. We have already gone through a big attack a few years ago in which the admins were caught unprepared and a big chunk of data was lost as a result.

My proposal

With that in mind, I propose a clean break from the current platform in which:

• admins are active members of the community
• said admins have complete access to our community-generated data and have the tools to maintain it
• there are democratically-elected trusted members with special privileges
• there are premium features for paid members and sponsors
• current data is not lost
• made from the ground up to work on mobile and desktop environments

Of course, all of this would have to come at a price. There are costs associated with hosting a high-traffic site, as well as installation and maintenance. Having said that, the costs to do this have actually gone down considerably since YW opened its doors in '06.

I would therefore like to gauge interest with YW members to see if this is a service that you guys would consider supporting. I am completely open to suggestions and feature requests, so please feel free to post them here.

The nerdy stuff

I would really like to give Discourse a try. It's a community platform that is built around threads instead of forums. Threads can then be tagged and searched just like in gmail, making everything much clearer and efficient to use.

Hosting and backups are of course both extremely important issues. I have dealt with both of these professionally for years and would personally recommend a distributed virtualized solution such as DigitalOcean which provides redundancy on many servers transparently. This takes care of server load issues and should guarantee smooth sailing all year long. The best part of this is, if we don't like the service, we can export our virtual server and move it someplace else very quickly.

For more information on the forum platform and their philosophy be sure to read http://www.discourse.org/about/ and try out a live demo here: http://try.discourse.org/

New features

A new home should also bring in new community features and guidelines. A few ideas:

• A way for trusted members to gain notoriety in the community
• A way for trusted members to democratically elect new moderators
• Donation and/or premium options in which members can show their support for the community and receive nice swag in return
• A way to channel donations to admins and moderators
• an official store with special rates for premium and trusted members

Feedback
I'm really curious as to what you guys think about this, so please post your thoughts and contribute as many details as you can. I think we can come up with a pretty great platform if we put our heads together…

Thanks for reading and much .

[Astroman]

Hey I'm down as I'll have a yaris for many many years to come and love the community. I know ctscott looked into buying the yw domain bit the admins wanted way to much. Anyway just wanted to pipe in I'll do whatever I can to help keep the community alive.

[tk-421]

Thanks, Astro!

Hopefully enough members are interested. There's lots of things that we could do to improve our situation and it wouldn't take much to get started.

[CrankyOldMan]

Weird--I clicked on "vote now" and went to a thread about someone's sedan...

[CTScott]

Originally Posted by CrankyOldMan

Weird--I clicked on "vote now" and went to a thread about someone's sedan...

^ Same thing happened to me.

I did contact the owners last year and actually never got a definite price from them. I recently tried to contact them again, and received no response.

[tk-421]

Weird… Looks like the votes are going through, though.
This bug also kind of drives my point home regarding my concerns with the software.

[Exiwolfman]

Im in,.... out with the old in with the new...also mobile would be awesome too and maybe i wont have to re size all my pics lol when posting. I work on Toyotas gone be with my 07 Yaris for some time then i would love the new shape 2012 up so ill be here.
I m all for little donation , free and payed members etc..so definitely count me in :)

[cali yaris]

current data is not lost

How is that accomplished?

[tk-421]

without going into much detail, I can write a script that can clone any particular thread or export its information in a way that can be imported somewhere else (all I need is a template and a list of desired links).

[tk-421]

Originally Posted by Exiwolfman

maybe i wont have to re size all my pics lol when posting.

I can fix images for you (among other things) if you have stylish installed: http://userstyles.org/styles/78697/tk-421-s-tweaks

Im all for little donation , free and payed members etc..so definitely count me in :)

[bronsin]

I would rather have YW than the dealer.

Sign me up!

[MyzticZ3r0]

Let me know what you need and I'll be glad to chip in. I'll be keeping the yarii until I drive it into the ground =].

[why?]

all good ideas. The biggest problem is the admins though. too bad we couldn't just get an entire new domain.

[tk-421]

We need a new domain for this project. It's just a matter of deciding on the name.

[fnkngrv]

It is great that you have decided to step up and make these proposals. I have recently joined another club/forum and their design and back end seem to be much more up to date and robust. I have also been a member on other forums where there is constantly redirects that are invalid, etc. I guess what I am driving at is that we need for sure a hierarchy that will allow for growth, interest, etc. I am fine with paid and VIP member type of stuff as well. I will need to read more into Discourse. At a quick glance it appears to be very similar to what you would find on Techspot, Engadget, Gizmodo, etc. Not saying that is good or bad. It would be a tremendous departure from standardized forums for sure.

Regardless the route taken it definitely needs a much more elegant mobile solution that "pinch to zoom" mobile browser access. I know there are a bunch of folks out there that don't mind that, but let's be honest...how can you be taken seriously and draw a growing/contributing user base if you are not going to cater to true mobility. It is the way of the future no matter how you slice it.

It almost sounds like we would essentially need to perform a massive exodus from YW. Special pinned posts being placed with an explanation on why we are doing what we are doing and essentially just let YW become a stale point in the ether. This isn't an "admin" thing, this is a straight up owner situation where for some reason they have the misconception that they have the ability to make money on a site that has been going the way of the DoDo for years.

[fnkngrv]

Since I am running into the same redirect issue on voting:


What do you think? (Votes are anonymous)
I like the idea and would consider paying a small monthly donation if given the chance
I support the idea, although I would only be able to make a donation every now and then
I support the idea but would probably never donate (just being honest)
I think the current site is just fine and I don't really care about what happens to the data

[cali yaris]

I'm just going to point out that the owner's resources (server/hosting/forum) are being used here to discuss this. Someone is paying so this forum continues on -- in my opinion, after all these years, that is GENEROUS of him at the very least.

Let's not forget how we were allowed to meet on here in the first place.

/rant

[tk-421]

They have been very generous for sure. It's just that their lack of communication leaves a lot (too much) to the imagination. I have sent them many messages over the years and received ZERO replies. It just wears you out after a while...