blazinlow89
Member
- Jan 25, 2012
- 2,088
Ghoster is not a tool, he is a nice lady.Robbabob said:What a tool....
so who still uses the old site?
- Thread starter BuzzQ
- Start date
blazinlow89
Member
- Jan 25, 2012
- 2,088
I have never looked at his location, did not realize he was in NOVA. Would be awesome to meet some of you guys, feel so out of the way down here in SOMD.MAY03LT said:
corky
Member
Sounds like alot of egos got bruised, but forum sites are sites that people go to to help them with their vehichles or show of something they have done or sell a product. Not all the people who visit these sites are aware of the politics behind them it really shoulndt matter. Are you on the site to help people out or not seems to me that is what the sites are set up for. Helping others out. And these so called noobs that roadei likes to call people will some day be learning this stuff and giving out valuable info to some other new person to the sites. We all started off as noobs at some point or we woulndt have come to these sites in the first place. You cant tell me that everyone on here has never not knowen an answer to something or never posted a question. How are the new people going to learn anything if the ones with the answers are to mule headed to help. I understand that some of you had problems over there with others but that doesnt mean you should take it out on others because they would still like to help people with there problems. You can be dedicated to a site but still help others after all thats what thes sites are intended for, am i wrong.
Mounce
Member
That's what they're intended for, but trailvoy is ran as an ad farm and that's what ran the experts away and made them make this site. The only people that are being "mule headed" is everyone on trailvoy that refuse our help by trying to lead them here. And when Roadie calls people noobs, he's not saying it to be discriminative or talk down to people. He understands that everyone starts off as a noob, and that's fine.
Playsinsnow
Member
- Nov 17, 2012
- 9,727
The biggest kick I get out of it happens to be that some folks over there are complaining no one answers tech questions anymore. Then get worked up when someone points them to a different direction.
No one waits long here. I triple dog dare someone to test the knowledge here vs there with an original/uncommon problem. Time it too.
No one waits long here. I triple dog dare someone to test the knowledge here vs there with an original/uncommon problem. Time it too.
Mounce
Member
I would volunteer to be the Guinea pig on that but everyone there already knows where I'm at and are getting a distaste for seeing me there, it seems.
Jman423
Administrator
Mounce
Member
You really don't have the background of how long we TRIED to work as unpaid staff with Vertical Scope back there after they bought the place from the second owner who needed the money. They broke their promises of access, improvements, and no increased ads.corky said:
Seriously, Trailvoy is an ad farm, plain and simple. Vertical Scope's entire business model is to buy forum member's eyeballs, and sell ads to various advertisers in about TEN different placements on their forums. Many of the ads are disguised as forum posts and can't be filtered out by the usual means. It's positively insidious how many ways they have to make money off eyeballs.
So basically we have two business models. VS, for-profit, all about the ads. They can't even motivate volunteer staff anymore to do their work for free - so the spammers run rampant, posts go unanswered for days if they EVER get a reply. They get the eyeballs by having all the content (which many of US wrote) and Google leads new members there (that I contract as noobs - I guarantee it's just shorthand and not disrespectful!)
VS lies about the benefits of paid memberships, but folks are starting to see that as a bald-faced lie. They haven't had a SINGLE new paid membership in almost four months. VS continues to lie that they get sticker packages from the store - there is no longer a trailvoy store.
Here, we run on the business model that all forums used to: A non-profit, enthusiast-run site that takes in just enough to cover the hosting and some to give back to support the community through major meets like Carlisle. About a dozen staff members give their time and experience to help the needy new members, and we welcome folks enthusiastically in the Introduction forum, where the Intro forum on trailvoy is a ghost town.
The proof that Vertical Scope doesn't want to help the members is that nobody there answers troubleshooting questions in real time. The best they can do is search, locate a post from the past when there was an active helper community, and parrot it back. Vertical Scope doesn't care if there is staff, they don't care if members get the help they need to repair the trucks, they just need the eyeball numbers to be able to charge the advertisers a premium. And they CONCEAL where the active volunteer community is by editing any reference to this site that isn't in some way obscured.
They believe we COMPETE with them and you don't talk about the competition.
We only compete in trying to be HELPFUL, like Boy Scouts! We're altruistic in the purest sense. All we ever want is to help the members and get their trucks fixed for the least amount of money possible. At Trailvoy, they allow a GM Customer Service social media flack to run around and her answer to all tech questions is :"Let me help you make an appointment at your local dealer to get that looked at."
We are NOT too-mule-headed to help. We left Trailvoy precisely because VS was driving members away with the incessant and ever-increasing ads. And they removed our admin's ability to fix problems. We refuse to go back there and answer questions because increasing their post count unjustly enriches the profit mongering corporation who sucks all the profits to Toronto instead of helping the community. So it's clear - there is no longer a community there. Members no longer organize meets. There are no more calendars, meets, t-shirts, stickers, chapters. And VS is doing it with hundreds of other forums where the spark has gone out. And they don't care! A ghost town of a forum can STILL generate ad revenue!
But it's non-profit sites like this one where owners get help.
The politics and economics matter on forums, in the same way that you probably evaluate the politics and economics of where your coffee is produced, or your pesticides, or your ball joints, or your sweatshirts. If you bought a new car windshield, and the manufacturer etched little ads into the edges so they surrounded your field of view, you might think that was an unfair thing to do to YOUR windshield. If you bought a ball joint, and found out it was produced in slave-wage conditions by a worker making $2 a day, wouldn't it bother you? So if you're searching for folks with decades of experience diagnosing problems with THIS vehicle, and Google led you to a ghost town where the support community USED to be, wouldn't you feel disrespected when the owner of that ghost town refused to allow anybody to tell you where folks moved off to, simply out of spite?
We don't compete with Trailvoy - we won that battle. What they do by clutching onto their new members who are CLEARLY not receiving answers to their questions is evil and selfish and that's always going to be the difference between commercial profit-driven corporations and proof that they don't care a whit for their members. They're just eyeballs to Rob Laidlaw in Toronto.
blazinlow89
Member
- Jan 25, 2012
- 2,088
It's not just the email address. For safe browsing and account creation you have to use proxies. I'm not certain if all new members have to be approved still. They did that for a while to cut down on the truth getting out there.
Now I think they're even more lazy and pragmatic. Every post in public, even the recruiting posts, increase the value of the site to advertisers. They think. The unpaid volunteer mods don't have the time to chase every little thing, and the admin who only can spend 5 minutes a day per site does zippo.
How stupid does one have to be to carry water for VS for no glory, fame, OR dollars?
Now I think they're even more lazy and pragmatic. Every post in public, even the recruiting posts, increase the value of the site to advertisers. They think. The unpaid volunteer mods don't have the time to chase every little thing, and the admin who only can spend 5 minutes a day per site does zippo.
How stupid does one have to be to carry water for VS for no glory, fame, OR dollars?
blazinlow89
Member
- Jan 25, 2012
- 2,088
Dont think we have much of a choice these days, companies that used to be known for high quality, and being American made have begun to fall victim to the bottom line. It is sad, and discouraging that we used to have one of the strongest manufacturing bases in the world, and that is being destroyed in the name of profit.The_Roadie said:
As for the OS, it amazes me that people just look at it as another forum that should be utilized. You know its bad when they wont even offer any help or support to people who want to be mods, they have no issues letting spammers run rampant, posting adds in forum text as if they are a post from a user, and letting the site burn to the ground. I also fail to understand why people get upset that us as a community welcome anyone with open arms, I can understand the "spam" aspect on their end, but why would you want to stick around in a third world waster land when you have a wealth of knowledge, great support and a thriving community just around the corner. You can lead a horse to water, but you cant make them drink.
Mounce
Member
Yeah I know it's free, it's just time consuming.blazinlow89 said:
And for approval you just have to click a link in an email they send you.
I don't consider the word noob to be demeaning. I'm a noob when it comes to suspension and steering and Im ok with that.
blazinlow89
Member
- Jan 25, 2012
- 2,088
Im a noob at a lot of stuff. However I have no issues jumping into something with a bit of guidance, you know this first hand after the alarm/RS that you helped me with. Being mechanically inclined is a huge advantage, a bit of self confidence helps as well. I have seen the horror stories that turn a simple job into a nightmare, however they always seem to get either solutions, or at least guidance to get back on track.MAY03LT said:
IllogicTC
Member
- Dec 30, 2013
- 3,452
I think part of that is produced by being a "public" company, that is being traded on the stock market. A private company can put as much or little work into their product as they want, and can charge accordingly. If it's a quality product, people will buy, and now the company is known for its quality.blazinlow89 said:
With a public company, you're not only balancing price vs. performance for the end user, now you're trying to cut the price you pay for that performance for the sake of stock holder dividends. If you don't do that, they'll vote someone else into your board chair.
blazinlow89
Member
- Jan 25, 2012
- 2,088
This is one of the bad aspects of the free market. With the free market, the end user decides who survives. However these days the end user wants it fast, easy and cheap.
Jman423
Administrator
Another thing to keep in mind is that all of the posts that got that site ranked in Google came from the era when we were still there. Until VS got their hands on things, the ads were reasonable enough and far, far less intrusive. We had TrailVoy merchandise, we had meets, we had Chapters, and we had features that benefited the members.
Now, all of the hard work that was put forth by the members that contributed specialized knowledge and experience to TrailVoy are no longer allowed back while VS makes tons of money off of said content. The whole staff volunteered their time and knowledge while attempting to maintain order and organization in an ever-growing community. I volunteered my skills of operating and maintaining the site, handling support requests, and adding features to make the community more useful. For that, we were lied to, treated like idiots, taken advantage of, and when we got tired of watching them destroy what we built while they laughed all the way to the bank, we left. At that point, we became the enemy, and they started "trying" to destroy us, but they underestimated us. There is no doubt in my mind that we are solely responsible for some of the policies and procedures that were implemented after we started GMTNation (when they finally realized we left... days later).
Blaming the members that land on that site and ask for help is foolish. They don't know any better, they're just looking for help. No one there is going to help them, and the thick-headed GMTN-haters that just want to have the "feeling" of running things will make shit up or copy/paste stuff that qualified people (from here) have posted in the past.
They say we poach on their members... hell yeah we do. But, we don't do it for revenue, we do it to help those in need of good, reliable information. They block GMTNation, we don't block TrailVoy. If we link to something over there, it's either something that someone here posted originally, or something stupid that some "full of himself" knucklehead made up to project the illusion that they are the king-shit of turd town.
We will not help the members ON TrailVoy, but we WILL help the members OF TrailVoy. That schmuck admin made a comment one day that he appreciates our pageviews... those pageviews being generated from our staff and knowledgeable members contacting poor vehicle owners that have either gotten NO responses to their request for help, or BS information that is completely incorrect. If someone goes on TrailVoy and asks for the model of the headlight bulb for a GMT360 and gets their answer, we have no reason to reach out to them... they got what they need. The pageviews he was referencing are a necessary evil to be able to properly assist those left out in the cold. The quality of our content and outward social environment that we have is something TrailVoy can never have again. Those things alone are responsible for our Google ranking and the revenue we generate to keep this site operating. However, we're not going to post our answers to members over there so VS can continue to make money off of our knowledge and experience.
The fact is, our revenue last year was enough to pay our hosting costs, licensing renewals, any incidental costs to operating the site (including new features added), and at the end of the year, we had just enough left over to throw a small gift to our volunteer staff before the Christmas holiday. This year, we'll likely be in the red since we made some major improvements software-wise, and we're growing to the point that we need more server resources, which costs more money each year. When that happens, the founders contribute the remainder to ensure the site continues to do what it does best... help GMT owners. We're not trying to be a big corporation, we don't need profits... we just try to cover our costs.
VerticalScope agreed to acquire PBNation.com for $1.38M recently, do you think they spent that much money on a paintball forum because they just want to be part of the community? No. They are going to turn that place into a huge billboard. They are now touting that they have network categories including Automotive, Powersports, Technology, Power Equipment, Sports, and Pets. The general public makes these forums useful, then some forum owner cashes in and VS turns the newly acquired site into a ad-farm. What happens to the site from there, they could care less. Some forums continue to operate, eventually getting stale and living without new features to further the communities, others, like us and a few other brave groups venture off and do it right.
Now, all of the hard work that was put forth by the members that contributed specialized knowledge and experience to TrailVoy are no longer allowed back while VS makes tons of money off of said content. The whole staff volunteered their time and knowledge while attempting to maintain order and organization in an ever-growing community. I volunteered my skills of operating and maintaining the site, handling support requests, and adding features to make the community more useful. For that, we were lied to, treated like idiots, taken advantage of, and when we got tired of watching them destroy what we built while they laughed all the way to the bank, we left. At that point, we became the enemy, and they started "trying" to destroy us, but they underestimated us. There is no doubt in my mind that we are solely responsible for some of the policies and procedures that were implemented after we started GMTNation (when they finally realized we left... days later).
Blaming the members that land on that site and ask for help is foolish. They don't know any better, they're just looking for help. No one there is going to help them, and the thick-headed GMTN-haters that just want to have the "feeling" of running things will make shit up or copy/paste stuff that qualified people (from here) have posted in the past.
They say we poach on their members... hell yeah we do. But, we don't do it for revenue, we do it to help those in need of good, reliable information. They block GMTNation, we don't block TrailVoy. If we link to something over there, it's either something that someone here posted originally, or something stupid that some "full of himself" knucklehead made up to project the illusion that they are the king-shit of turd town.
We will not help the members ON TrailVoy, but we WILL help the members OF TrailVoy. That schmuck admin made a comment one day that he appreciates our pageviews... those pageviews being generated from our staff and knowledgeable members contacting poor vehicle owners that have either gotten NO responses to their request for help, or BS information that is completely incorrect. If someone goes on TrailVoy and asks for the model of the headlight bulb for a GMT360 and gets their answer, we have no reason to reach out to them... they got what they need. The pageviews he was referencing are a necessary evil to be able to properly assist those left out in the cold. The quality of our content and outward social environment that we have is something TrailVoy can never have again. Those things alone are responsible for our Google ranking and the revenue we generate to keep this site operating. However, we're not going to post our answers to members over there so VS can continue to make money off of our knowledge and experience.
The fact is, our revenue last year was enough to pay our hosting costs, licensing renewals, any incidental costs to operating the site (including new features added), and at the end of the year, we had just enough left over to throw a small gift to our volunteer staff before the Christmas holiday. This year, we'll likely be in the red since we made some major improvements software-wise, and we're growing to the point that we need more server resources, which costs more money each year. When that happens, the founders contribute the remainder to ensure the site continues to do what it does best... help GMT owners. We're not trying to be a big corporation, we don't need profits... we just try to cover our costs.
VerticalScope agreed to acquire PBNation.com for $1.38M recently, do you think they spent that much money on a paintball forum because they just want to be part of the community? No. They are going to turn that place into a huge billboard. They are now touting that they have network categories including Automotive, Powersports, Technology, Power Equipment, Sports, and Pets. The general public makes these forums useful, then some forum owner cashes in and VS turns the newly acquired site into a ad-farm. What happens to the site from there, they could care less. Some forums continue to operate, eventually getting stale and living without new features to further the communities, others, like us and a few other brave groups venture off and do it right.
blazinlow89
Member
- Jan 25, 2012
- 2,088
I actually assumed the "tool" comment was directed at the guy on the OS. I had a bit too much TN whiskey last night and everything appeared funny.Robbabob said:ummmm, I see a joke in this... but i think only Mounce understood my comment. Well, I know he did and I'll just keep it at that; gold star hilarious!
Blckshdw
Moderator
So this just happened over there... 
blazinlow89
Member
- Jan 25, 2012
- 2,088
That is awesome. Wonder if the naysayers will get on the defensive.Blckshdw said:So this just happened over there...
Blckshdw
Moderator
IllogicTC
Member
- Dec 30, 2013
- 3,452
I'm glad to be a part of a site where if nothing else and it came down to a transfer of ownership, I would imagine it would likely be just a straight transfer to another founding member if possible. I can't speak for any people above me because I'm not them, and my sphere in the moderator group doesn't guarantee me access to the innermost circle, this is just my thoughts on how such a thing if it needed to happen, would happen.
And thinking of the split from the OS, it's kinda like GMTN is colonial America and they're Great Britain. Interesting politics, really.
And thinking of the split from the OS, it's kinda like GMTN is colonial America and they're Great Britain. Interesting politics, really.
Aarkon
Member
- Nov 6, 2013
- 5,607
Mounce
Member
so that was you? Haha I thought man, that's a coincidence.. Haha I have no idea which shill(s) is who lol.Robbabob said:ummmm, I see a joke in this... but i think only Mounce understood my comment. Well, I know he did and I'll just keep it at that; gold star hilarious!
Also, I woulda thought the original owner would've been banned..I guess not since he sold it to whoever and was outta there before the shit hit the trailblazer/envoy. (fan lol)
TimRXUV777
Member
- May 6, 2014
- 190
Question: Because of the link in this thread, I went to read the referenced thread over at T v .com. I have seen a lot of references here to being bombarded with ads and spam over there?. I did not see anymore ads there tonight than I do here. In fact, I never remember being annoyed by ads over there? Is it because I have been a registered/ logged in member there that I don't see all the ads that you speak of? My question would be where are all these ads, banner ads, pop ups and spam at the other site that I keep hearng so much about?
IllogicTC
Member
- Dec 30, 2013
- 3,452
Did you donate?TimRXUV777 said:
I just clicked the last link provided, without being logged in to any account.
Top-right corner, a banner for RockAuto.
A strip above the forum legend (the part showing you which forum and subforum this thread is in, along with title) having six text links.
Right above the first post of the page, two graphic ads, Google-sent likely as one is for Toyota and another is for a Dodge Ram.
To the right of these last two ad patches, there's a list of sponsors with links to their sites.
Right after the first post, there's an inline post from "Trailvoy.com" with a graphical ad, the same Toyota one as served previously.
In the EXACT POST linked (by Tommy), an inline ad link has been added by the VigLink ad service on the words "back in 2005."
Right below that post is another inline post from TV.com with that same Toyota ad again.
Right below that last post (which is an ad) is a banner. Again, Toyota.
At the very bottom of the page is another strip of text links.
If it were a full page rather than a partial page, there may or may not be a 3rd inline graphical ad post, and depending on what keywords are in the posts, more VigLink links. I copy/pasted an informational post here the other day that I literally stripped over a dozen VigLink links from.
Blckshdw
Moderator
If you have any sort of ad blocker running on your browser, then you won't see any adds other than the 'posted' ones within the threads.TimRXUV777 said:
IllogicTC
Member
- Dec 30, 2013
- 3,452
As an afterthought, on the old layout I only saw one banner on top and one banner on bottom on this site. Now, inside a thread, I see neither currently. It may be something that's getting worked on. But two banners isn't a whole lot by comparison, that's for certain!
blazinlow89
Member
- Jan 25, 2012
- 2,088
It is more than just the ads on the side banners. When they start putting ads in the threads, or even in the thread list as something posted by a member it gets ridiculous. Ads play only a small part in the issues, however the implementation and types of ads are an issue.
BAM!
TimRXUV777
Member
- May 6, 2014
- 190
Not logged in correct? I think I have my log in set to sign me in whenever I get to the forum, and I see none of those ads. A lot of forums are set up that way. Show ads to visitors, don't show to registered members..IllogicTC said:
Mounce
Member
IllogicTC
Member
- Dec 30, 2013
- 3,452
Wow. They don't even have the sponsor badges below the spot on the right where it says sponsors, which they specifically paid to have put there... lol, wow.TimRXUV777 said:Not logged in correct? I think I have my log in set to sign me in whenever I get to the forum, and I see none of those ads. A lot of forums are set up that way. Show ads to visitors, don't show to registered members..TV Image1.jpg
TV Image2.jpg
Mounce
Member
Jman423
Administrator