Ask a kinda/sorta lurker anything while we test out the new digs.

I've been around the TFP Community for 7 years now, and realized that I just barely passed 1000 posts over all that time. I visit almost daily and hit a handful of forums to see what's new, but I don't post as much as I maybe should.

So, maybe moving over here will kick me in the butt to post more. In the meantime, ask away.

 

I've liked cars, and just about any type of vehicle, ever since I can remember. My dad is/was a car guy, and it kind of rubbed off on me. About 10 years ago I got very involved with the F-body community for several years. I had a TransAm that I used to take to the drag strip, went to about half a dozen huge national shows, and became involved in helping run a very busy automotive forum. I'm not as totally immersed into the car scene as I once was, but I still do have an interest there, and continue to help with the forum.

 

What have you cooked on the Big Green Egg lately?

 

Unfortunately the heat wave works better at keeping me off of it than the cold does. I was traveling all this week (then sick the last two days), and last week it was 100*+ heat indexes, so I've been locked in the A/C.

The last thing I think I grilled was a hanger steak, and it turned out awesome. I don't remember if I posted about it or not, but I also did pizza a couple weeks ago. It was delicious!

 

On the recommendation of a friend. I don't think that person is active at all on TFP anymore, but we knew each other well from two other forums (one that I used to own/run, another that I currently admin) of which we both interacted on. The recommendation was that TFP was a cool place for mature discussion, with a totally different vibe than I was used to on other boards. I decided to check it out, and you've all been stuck with me (albeit hiding in the corner most of the time!) ever since. There were also a couple other members here that I knew from other boards that I discovered posted here around the same time. Hard to believe it was 7 years ago.

 

I'm not sure. My original sign up date was Aug-04. Was there one change shortly after that maybe? Making this the third? Or maybe I'm misremembering and this is only the 2nd?

 

*shameless self promotion if anyone else is bored enough to ask, I'm bored enough to anwer*

 

Why haven't you posted more often in the past?

 

I don't have a good reason. I've visited almost every day for years. I have literally hundreds of thousands of posts on 3-4 other forums that I've visited for a long time. I think this is one of the most civil, mature boards I've ever seen. I think because it's always appeared in my head like I was the new guy at a gathering of old friends, and I was hanging around the fringes watching instead of participating. Which is my own fault, because I could've included myself at any time.

I also think I have a bit more of a sarcastic sense of humor than many hear seem to, at least by their posts. And I come to message boards to goof off and try to be light hearted, and many of the discussions on TFP are more serious in nature.

But I've tried to be a touch more active in the last few months, and I'm trying to step it up another notch with the new format. If anything, maybe it'll help keep the momentum going as we switch over to this software.

 

Borla, what is your favorite color?

 

Yes, yes it does lose something if you have to explain it.

I generally don't take myselt TOO seriously when online. I come here to relax and have fun as a mini-escape or stress reliever, so I might as well try to entertain others in the process.

Awesome, that made my morning. You're welcome, and thank you for the fine compliment. I'm glad to contribute.

As much wood as a wood chuck could chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood. *yup*

I've spent quite a bit of time on staffs of various forums. I was a SuperMod on one of the biggest automotive forums out there years ago. The forum was big enough to bring in income sufficient for the owner and his family to solely rely on it to support their household of four. It was a pretty big deal back in the day. Unfortunately, from what I understand (and I believe it) he and his wife both developed prescription drug problems and started squeezing every penny out of the site to the point where they stopped paying server bills. They were completely hands off owners, so the admins were told by them at least twice "hey, I found a better deal with company X, let's move the site". So the admins did, only to find out that they moved without telling the first company, and it was to stiff them on huge bills. The admins figured it out and confronted them about it, threatening to quit and leave. Things got better for a while, but eventually they tried to do the same thing again. The admins (stand up guys), wouldn't be complicit in ripping someone off, so they told the members what was going on, and we as a staff decided we were not going to be party to that type of behavior. We left and started a new site, which exploded overnight.

The new site, which also has an automotive flavor to it, is still around. I became an admin for it shortly after it got established, and am still an admin there. For a while it was ranked as around the 90th biggest message board anywhere on the internet (pretty impressive I think). It has almost 30,000 members, several thousand unique visitors every day, and over 13,000,000 posts.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that I became involved with a former friend's small message board (couple hundred members, couple dozen regular visitors, a couple hundred thousand posts) and helped her admin it for several years. She eventually ended up closing the site.

Finally, several years ago I opened my own message board. It was just general discussion, and many of the people I'd made connections with on the other sites came there. I ran it for 3-4 years, and at it's peak it was actually big enough to rank on BigBoards.com as well. Over time I realized it was more involvement and drama than I wanted to handle, especially because of how full my plate was in my personal life at the time. So that too went by the wayside.

So to conclude a very long answer to your short question, I actually do still help as an admin on a very large board. My experience as a mod/admin covers at least 4 different fairly busy message boards (I helped with a couple really small ones along the way, but don't count those as they never took off), 2 of which were big enough to list on the largest message boards on the internet at the time. The board I admin now is very busy, and a lot of fun. If asked to help on some other board I would definitely weigh the thought. It would depend a lot on the rest of the staff, and if I believed in their basic philosophy and thought they were already doing a good job. I wouldn't join a staff that I thought I'd have fundamental disagreements with, or with the thought of "I can fix this place" unless it was in an ownership role. And actually, I don't think I want the burden of an ownership role again.

Yeah, I know I'm bad at lurking. I never could figure out how I did it on the old TFP so well. In the same 7-ish years that I had 900 posts on TFP, I probably had 200-230k posts on 4-5 other boards that I frequented during that time.
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I can't say I have one. It really depends on what I'm choosing it for. In general I think I prefer darker colors, like dark greens, dark blues, or dark maroon type colors. But I like variety too much to say that I prefer one color over another across the board.

 

Too late to give it one final bump on a boring Sunday night?