A few have noticed that I "did a thing" a while back

"Brian, The Life of" (familycar)
10/29/2019 at 17:40 • Filed to: None

Hi Gang,

I haven’t officially mentioned this yet - mostly because I haven’t had the time to really *do* anything meaningful with it yet - but almost a year ago now I bought !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . I’m not even sure why I pulled this trigger, other than I saw that it was available and the price was less than I thought it should be and I happened to have the shekels to spare at that moment. I suppose the biggest reason I did this was as a hedge against something potentially happening to this here Kinja site.

While our comfortable little backwater in GMG’s Kinjaverse is probably not exactly front and center on our corporate overlord’s radar, I’ve been growing more concerned with how they are “handling” some of the GMG sites. Their decision to shoot Splinter in the head and then firing Barry Petchesky this morning and the subsequent revolt at Deadspin today seems to be indicative that the wheels might be coming of this here GMG bus. I’d like to think our Baby Daddy site jelopicnik will be ok but who knows?

Anyway, I’d been meaning to let it be known that I was the owner of “our URL” for some time but life has gotten in the way and I’ve been remiss. My original thought was to come here to the community and maybe crowdsource some ideas on what to do with it and recent developments here have made me realize that the time has come to do just that. Whatever I/we end up doing with it, my goal to imbue it with the same kind of culture we’ve built over the years here.

So what do you think, Oppostiles? This is a special URL that deserves a special purpose and I can’t think of a better cast of characters to help me decide what that purpose should be. Fire away below!

DISCUSSION (83)

Echo51 > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 17:47

Set up a chan-board, grab your popcorn, lean back and watch the fire.

MonkeePuzzle > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 17:48

have you considered making it awesome? I suggest thats what you do. make it awesome.

HammerheadFistpunch > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 17:48

Its true, I totally forgot about that. Still hope something cool can be made of it!

Snuze: Needs another Swede > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 17:48

A few of us have already been discussing this on the Oppo discord, and in some various posts today. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I have to jet in a couple minutes . I’ll come back later tonight and share detailed thoughts, but I can summarize as I want more or less what we have now, just out of the clutches of G/O or GMG or w hoever. And maybe something slightly less broken than current Kinja, if that’s not too much to ask.

Arch Duke Maxyenko, Shit Talk Extraordinaire > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 17:50

Can you just put the gif of the dumpster fire floating away on the site?

Cash Rewards > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 17:52

God bless you, you brilliant man. I agree with monkey puzzle

MonkeePuzzle > Arch Duke Maxyenko, Shit Talk Extraordinaire
10/29/2019 at 17:52

Kinja'd!!!

and an “optimized for netscape navigator” logo beneath that?

Kinja'd!!!

Brian, The Life of > MonkeePuzzle
10/29/2019 at 17:53

I have! That’s why I’m asking for input ... otherwise I’ll probs just chooch it all up.

Jordan and the Slowrunner, Boomer Intensifies > Snuze: Needs another Swede
10/29/2019 at 17:55

Oppo Discord?

MM54 > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 17:55

I’ve considered setting up a fall-back plan but just never have time, looks like you have a good start.

Brian, The Life of > MonkeePuzzle
10/29/2019 at 17:55

Do sites still have web masters? Because you should be our webmaster.

MonkeePuzzle > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 17:55

well it should be all *mouth making explosion sounds* and it should have all like *mouth making laser sounds* and over here all like *mouth making car racing sounds*

bhtooefr > Snuze: Needs another Swede
10/29/2019 at 17:56

I feel like - as annoying as WordPress can be (the annoyances are mostly around getting horribly pwned if you don’t keep it up to date) - you could get it by just standing up a WP instance, setting it to require membership to comment, and promoting people to authors.

TheTurbochargedSquirrel > Snuze: Needs another Swede
10/29/2019 at 17:56

It’s good to know we have the URL, now we would o nly need to get an interface and backend to go with it.

Supreme Chancellor and Glorious Leader SaveTheIntegras > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 17:57

time to party

MonkeePuzzle > Cash Rewards
10/29/2019 at 17:59

damn right you do!

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 18:00

Davesaddiction mentioned maybe having a google doc with usernames/contact info if people wished. Maybe something we could host there?

MoCamino > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 18:01

Very cool that we have an exit door if it becomes necessary. Thank you for doing this. Hopefully it won’t happen, but as they say - plan for the worst, hope for the best. Part of me would love to see a more robust actual forum site with separate channels, private messaging, etc. But mostly I have to agree with Snuze - if we have to bail on Kinja (or they pull the plug on us) I think I’d want to see essentially what we have here. Just a simple place to create posts and share ideas/gripes/rants. (Hopefully without the constant brokenness of Kinja.) The problem then becomes how to pay for it - membership fees or advertising? Both are fraught with issues.

Spanfeller is a twat > bhtooefr
10/29/2019 at 18:08

Nick has some great ideas

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Jordan and the Slowrunner, Boomer Intensifies
10/29/2019 at 18:10

Yep. Should be three comments back on my profile.

I’m on mobile right now otherwise I’d grab it for you.

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 18:10

How about him and Nibby.

Brian, The Life of > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
10/29/2019 at 18:12

What could possibly go wrong?

TheTurbochargedSquirrel > Jordan and the Slowrunner, Boomer Intensifies
10/29/2019 at 18:15

https :// discord .gg / UrH4 Qh

Take the spaces out of it and that should get you in.

Spanfeller is a twat > MoCamino
10/29/2019 at 18:16

Oppo has 1M views a month; we could have limited advertising to pay for the server... I actually think we could even break even.

ttyymmnn > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 18:23

Your ideas are intriguing me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Oh, wait, I just did.

Brian, The Life of > ttyymmnn
10/29/2019 at 18:26

Subscribe? I was hoping you’d be the Minister of Aviation!

Jordan and the Slowrunner, Boomer Intensifies > TheTurbochargedSquirrel
10/29/2019 at 18:27

Joined

ttyymmnn > MoCamino
10/29/2019 at 18:27

What sort of costs are we looking at?

Nibby > MonkeePuzzle
10/29/2019 at 18:27

as a netscape navigator user i approve of this message

Nibby > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
10/29/2019 at 18:27

hi bud long time ho w goes

ttyymmnn > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 18:27

Only if I can have epaulets.

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 18:28

Absolutely n othing.

Galileo Humpkins (aka MC Clap Yo Handz) > ttyymmnn
10/29/2019 at 18:30

I, too, would like to see some real numbers on this.

vondon302 > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 18:31

Well that's pretty damn cool.

PowderHound > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 18:44

Kinja'd!!!

Brian, The Life of > ttyymmnn
10/29/2019 at 18:49

I would insist on epa ulets. Also some sweet mirrored aviators. And a jaunty mustache .

gin-san - shitpost specialist > Jordan and the Slowrunner, Boomer Intensifies
10/29/2019 at 18:49

I didn’t know there was one... it would certainly make the live race threads (for F1 and MotoGP) a lot better since live commenting on Kinja is not great.

ttyymmnn > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 18:54

Kinja'd!!!

You mean like this guy? This is Bernard Ignatius Lynch, B.E.M., the first man to be fired out of a plane by a Martin Baker ejection seat.

MoCamino > ttyymmnn
10/29/2019 at 18:59

That’s what I don’t know. I just know that there are costs for site hosting, but there are plenty of options.

Matt Brown > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 19:00

Whatever it becomes, it should have auto playing videos on every page.

gin-san - shitpost specialist > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 19:04

That would be really cool, and it would be interesting for the first members to be existing Oppositelock members.

I wonder what we’d all want further down the line, though. What may start as a simple bulletin board for us knuckleheads to chat about cars and tons of off-topic stuff could grow to be something bigger and really change from the laid back feel we have here.

I like that we have a small community and that the amount of posts isn’t overwhelming. Would the goal of a dedicated Oppositelock site be growth? Is the goal to maintain a small, niche community of cars and shitposts? I don’t know how much moderation goes on around here but I like that there generally isn’t much bickering . We have our circlejerks (I think the most recent one was a barrage of “ c ash” posts) but because the community is small it’s basically funny for that day (or for that period of hours) before regular Oppo business resumes.

Personally, I would start implementing features on the site so that there’s already something established in case the rug gets pulled out from under us, and start by granting authorship to those that already post here.

I f we have server costs to cover I’d be OK with a light ad-based model. Heck, I wouldn’t impose this on anyone else, but I’d throw in a token sum (like a monthly $1 donation or something) to supplement the ads because I like this place so damn much. I’d be surprised if there weren’t a few of us who’d do the same if it were kept at a minimal amount.

Anyway, the idea of a dedicated Oppo site is really cool, but my main point is keeping this nice community of regulars together and not have huge amounts of unknown dummies coming in... I don’t want another subreddit, basically. However, you’re the one who paid for the name so ultimately it’s your call.

Tekamul > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
10/29/2019 at 19:10

There will be 6 concurrent autoplay Marylin Manson videos as the header, and every article will be photoshopped CL ads.

So put me down as a ' yes’

Spanfeller is a twat > ttyymmnn
10/29/2019 at 19:12

when I had a wordpress site it cost like 5 bucks a month to maintain on Bluehost, and the url itself was 15 dollars a year or something akin to that.

Spanfeller is a twat > MoCamino
10/29/2019 at 19:12

Given our volume, it wouldn’t be very expensive

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Nibby
10/29/2019 at 19:13

Eh. You know. Busy. Pretty much worked myself sick in the last two weeks.

Nibby > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
10/29/2019 at 19:31

lame, get well soon! any halloween plans?

Jordan and the Slowrunner, Boomer Intensifies > gin-san - shitpost specialist
10/29/2019 at 19:32

TheTurbochargedSquirrel linked it in this thread.

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Nibby
10/29/2019 at 19:35

I have an exam. This semester was supposed to be the easy one.

Nibby > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
10/29/2019 at 19:43

examining halloween candy?

Brian, The Life of > ttyymmnn
10/29/2019 at 20:25

THAT should be your Kinja avatar

Brian, The Life of > gin-san - shitpost specialist
10/29/2019 at 20:32

Good thoughts. I’ve thought about an ad model to keep it free but I also wouldn’t want a lot of blinking nonsense distracting anyone from world-class shitposting and amatuer automobilia. I suppose I could just get started but I’ve never done this from scratch before so I’d need to do some learning about commu nity plugins and such. These are not my strengths haha.

ttyymmnn > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 21:15

You may be on to something....

BaconSandwich is tasty. > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 22:10

Oh man. I’m glad someone did it.

I’ve contemplated starting my own version of Oppo - partly as a programming experiment, but also partly in case Oppo does fold. But I imagine that would be a huge time-sink. And I’d be hated as much as the current Kinja devs are hated.

If you do need help, I might be able to help in some way.

Future Heap Owner > Spanfeller is a twat
10/29/2019 at 22:26

It’ll take a lot more than $5 to serve a million pages with Wordpress

Snuze: Needs another Swede > Jordan and the Slowrunner, Boomer Intensifies
10/29/2019 at 22:33

It exists and I am on it, but honestly I have no idea how discord works. I think Rallydarkstrike posted a link last night.

Spanfeller is a twat > Future Heap Owner
10/29/2019 at 22:43

I also saw that a site pulling 1M views a month with good ads could make around 60k a year

Future Heap Owner > Spanfeller is a twat
10/29/2019 at 22:52

That would definitely be enough.

Nick Has an Exocet > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 23:02

There’s been a good discussion in Discord. I’ve been actively investigating whether Wordpress can be a good replacement. I’m leaning towards yes. I set up a test server and started hacking together a theme that stays true to Oppo. Once I have a commenting system in place, I’ll ask for a few testers. There’s been some other ideas for features that would make things more engaging including the ability to embed the discord live chat into a page on Oppo. The idea there is that people have a more immediate place to shitpost, rather than doing it in the main blog. As I type this, there’s a discord discussion about moving shitposting out of the main feed.

All in all, I’m leaning towards Wordpress gets us 90% of the way there with the potential to add about 50% more awesome in the long run. I can easily host on my Godaddy account, but since it’s wordpress, it’s easily ported to any server. I have some webdev experience and am currently unemployed, so I don’t mind being the point on that. Hosting isn’t really that pricey and we can always drop a little gofundme if the costs get out of control.

If we decided to do ads, I’d really love to see those funds go into real life meetups, swag production, or an subsidizing an Oppo rally. Heck, it may also be a nice use of funds to run ads to grow the community a bit.

Discord link if you want to chat directly:

https://discord.gg/TasNm4c

If you want to see a very early wordpress test: http://drivinglane.com

Do we know who owns the Oppo logo and whether we can use it?

someassemblyrequired > Brian, The Life of
10/29/2019 at 23:47

Oppo has tons of page views, and as someone pointed out - it’s a highly desirable user demographic . I suspect advertisers would probably more than pay the way for the site, especially in the age of cheap hosting.

It would be nice when the time comes to have a highbrow section (or sections) and a generic shitposting area - sort of like Oppositeblog used to be. There’s some really great longform stuff on here, and it deserves to be showcased for a longer period of time.

Stef Schrader > MoCamino
10/30/2019 at 05:34

Yeah—I really like the unique blog-style setup a lot. So, maybe a group blog?

(Brings me back to my LiveJournal days, haha.)

ST80MND > Brian, The Life of
10/30/2019 at 08:55

With all this talk of fu*kery in the corporate towers of evil, it gives me hope that Oppo and it’s excellent community actually have an exit strategy. You sir , are a hero. And Clifford looks the business.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Spanfeller is a twat
10/30/2019 at 09:12

I’d rather go the donations/ GoFundMe route than ads.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Spanfeller is a twat
10/30/2019 at 09:13

OPPO scholarship fund for automotive tech schools?

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Brian, The Life of
10/30/2019 at 09:25

I think you’d have plenty of us willing to chip in to help keep it ad-free.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
10/30/2019 at 09:27

What he’s got set up should work well, assuming most participate - problem with a public Google doc is anyone can get in and steal our contact info...

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Nick Has an Exocet
10/30/2019 at 09:28

Thanks for all this! If it comes to it, I’d definitely be willing to chip in.

Brian, The Life of > Nick Has an Exocet
10/30/2019 at 10:35

My assumption is GMG owns it if anyone does ... but it’s just as likely that no one owns it.

Brian, The Life of > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com
10/30/2019 at 10:45

Oh I REALLY like this idea!

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Brian, The Life of
10/30/2019 at 10:57

As great at that would be, I think ad-free is probably the way to go. I really doubt that OPPO would get a million views a month outside of the G/O universe. There’s some weird SEO stuff they must do that ends up getting random OPPO articles into news aggregators where they’ll garner tens of thousands of views.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Brian, The Life of
10/30/2019 at 16:15

This is awesome! I had no idea! I wonder what Kinja-like, but-not-Kinja-that-actually-works system we could use...

CB > Brian, The Life of
10/30/2019 at 17:56

I would be good with going the donation route to keep it running. If we could have a main line where we could put up our bigger and longer form articles with some form of readability and then a second forum where we could do just shitposts and nonsense that is much more frequent, maybe we could keep up outside traffic enough to support ads.

ClassicDatsunDebate > Brian, The Life of
10/30/2019 at 18:55

Although I haven’t been very active over the many years, I would help support (throw money at ) this 110%. I like the comfort of having a shitposting platform at the ready...but mostly for commenting on other peoples shitposts.

Manwich - now Keto-Friendly > davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com
10/30/2019 at 19:06

Yeah I learned about that when I wrote about an old Ford F250 7.3 diesel that the owner left running and stinking up the area while he went into a McDonalds.

Apparently I’m a gay woman because I wrote that.

LOL

daender > TheTurbochargedSquirrel
10/30/2019 at 19:11

edit: derp, nvm!

dieseldub > Brian, The Life of
10/30/2019 at 20:47

I say keep it similar to what Oppo currently is. You can vet oppo authors as you see fit, but in general, just let things fly as they may with similar rules to what we have now.

Or, you could make it an entire automotive-centric social media site of sorts, or a blend of the two. Keep it in blog format but maybe add the ability to tag users, and said tagged users get notifications, that sort of thing.

PumpkinSpies > Brian, The Life of
10/30/2019 at 20:48

I believe someone at Groupthink had the same idea but I don’t remember who. Maybe we can xpost this there?

They were also kicking around a subreddit.

jminer > Brian, The Life of
10/30/2019 at 21:09

If you need any help with the setup - let me know. I’m no web developer but a systems engineer. I’d honestly lean towards a more traditional forum infrastructure, the commenting wouldn’t be as clean with the threading here but it would also make the site a bit easier to navigate and even curate.

If you need hand wonkothesanest@gmail.com is where to start contact at.

benjrblant > TheTurbochargedSquirrel
10/30/2019 at 23:07

edit: nvm.

Brian, The Life of > PumpkinSpies
10/31/2019 at 10:43

Feel free to share it ... I don’t think I have author rights on Groupthink

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Manwich - now Keto-Friendly
10/31/2019 at 11:57

60,000 views! Insane.

phenotyp > Nick Has an Exocet
11/04/2019 at 11:43

What if we don’t want to use Discord, FB, or Reddit?

phenotyp > Brian, The Life of
11/04/2019 at 11:51

I just signed up again.

Nick Has an Exocet > phenotyp
11/04/2019 at 20:58

If Discord is a boat, w e’re building an island. We’re hard at work putting together a new OppositeLock website that you will be able to post to just the same as here.