Thanx for those who voted. You can vote once per day, and the friends of the Top Five are doing it. Please help keep the Texas Whale in First.

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The MoparStyle Racing Team will be repainting each of the four NSS cars over the next four years — and this is as good of a time as any to consider a team theme. In 2013, well be stripping the black Coronet, having the drive train freshened, some body work performed, and the car completely repainted before reassembly. In 2014, we’ll be doing the same for the Vitamin C — to make ready for Hope to start racing it. In 2015, it will be the wagon’s turn, and the Big Red Red’s turn will come in 2016.

A couple of the things that are important to consider is:

• three of the cars have black interiors and the 4th light gray
• since the windows down roll down, black can’t be the main color
• I intend to keep the flag graphics on my wagon’s roof
• the scheme should be flashy — yet nostalgic
• don’t worry about the graphics — just looking for the scheme

If you’d like to play, CLICK HERE for a full page graphic that you can right-click, save on your computer and either print to color by hand, or modify in a graphics application. The email to me at the address on the graphic.

There’s no prize — but if we select your submission, we’ll credit you on our sites. We will also be posting the submissions on the forums at NSSRacing.com/forums.

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First a little history:

I (BK, Old Hippie, The Whale) currently administer three boards. The first of these boards is www.MoparStyle.com/forums, which I created with Vbulletin 1.0 twelve years ago. It is also the most complicated of the boards because if has a lot of features like the Member’s Garage, Free Classified Ads, and MoparWiki that share its database.

The second board I created was www.OldHippie.com/forums, which I created ten years ago. It is a board with many forums to cover virtually every topic of interest. It was originally created to primarily discuss other than Mopar (Brand X) cars — but evolved into a political forum. Recently a big push has been made to increase the non-political posts, and has become a better board because of that push.

The third board created was www.NssRacing.com/forums. That board was for NSS Racers to get together to share news and event information. For a little while it was on MoparStyle — but the non-Mopar drivers were put off by that. It was moved to Old Hippie — but the politics turned off many of the racers who couldn’t avoid those posts. At the same time, Vbulletin had stopped supporting version 3 and had released a major rewrite – Version 4. MoparStyle and Old Hippie were both on Version 3, and I created NSS Racing using version 4 before attempting to upgrade the other two forums — as the Internet was littered with pissed off administrators that had hosed their boards performing the upgrade.

Last month hackers started to really exploit a bug in VB3, and it was strongly suggested that everyone upgrade to Version 5 (in Beta Testing) or Version 4 — the current stable version. I selected to do Old Hippie first as it had fewer members and features. That upgrade (I paid for Version 5 and will upgrade to that in the future when it comes out of Beta) to Version 4, while time consuming, went very well and I think the new software is the best Vbulletin yet.

Now it is time to do MoparStyle. What really complicates this is the MoparWiki.

MoparWiki was set up to use the MoparStyle member’s database — as it was my original hope that many of the members would collaborate on putting it together — and this allowed them to do so without registering for another Internet site. I’ve been able to figure out how to interface the Member’s Garage and the Free Classified ad site (although there’s a little issue I’ll discuss later) with the new version — there’s no way to have the MoparWiki and MoparStyle interface.

That doesn’t really concern me, as the collaboration from the MoparStyle members has been far less than stellar. I’m personally responsible for 99% of the context on that site. However, I don’t want to lose all of the work I’ve put into the MoparWiki — and I am still convinced that it is a great idea that has just failed to gain any help from others. It gets a lot of hits from visitors interested in the topics — just no real help improving the context. The problem is that I have to separate the two databases before I can do anything else. Currently MoparWiki.com reroutes to MoparStyle.com/wiki. What I need to do is make them separate domains, somehow make a copy of the wiki on the MoparWiki domain, make it use its own database, and then upgrade the Wiki software from version 1.13 to 1.20. This quite frankly is beyond my pay-grade — and I’ve been getting quotes from professional php/mysql programmers to do that part for me. Once that is done — then I can proceed with time consuming Vbulletin upgrade — and then deal with all of the software that interfaces and the features of the current version of Vbulletin that won’t work with VB4.

I’m hoping that I can get a programmer to separate the forum from the wiki in the next week, and I’ll start fixing and upgrading the wiki, the following week, and upgrade the board the week after that.

There are a couple of points to this long dissertation:

1. The first is that people hate change. When I upgraded from VB1 to VB2 in 2003, everyone freaked. When I upgraded from VB2 to VB3 in 2006 — everyone freaked. Because of this, the interface with MoparWiki issue, and the great expense and labor — I’ve hesitate upgrading for a couple of years now. So long that not only is VB3 a hacker’s highway now — but that VB5 will be released soon. We have to suck it up if MoparStyle is to continue. I have to suck it up with the money and labor — and members have to suck it up for the change they so much hate. There is no other option as we’re playing Russian Roulette — just waiting for a hacker to blow up the board. Frankly — the change is better, there are more benefits, and the changes don’t require you to be a rocket scientist. You can visit my other two boards and get a little idea of some of the changes — but you really have to be a registered member and post to see the majority of them.
2. This is time consuming. MoparStyle will require over 150 hours of my time to complete. That means a couple of weeks to get 90% of it done — and another couple of weeks to finish the last non-critical 10% tweaking. Not all of the features available in VB3 are available in VB4 — but there are others in VB4 that weren’t available in VB3. The biggest bitch at Old Hippie is there is no longer a Thanks button. I’ve heard the digs over and over again — “I’d thank you but my Thanks’ button is Gone!” You will have to deal with it. Maybe someday when I have a bunch of time — I’ll take a stab at writing that feature.
3. This is expensive. About 95% of the expenses that it costs to run this site (on a dedicated server) comes out of my pocket personally, and 5% from donations and premium memberships. It is more money than most of you can imagine. The costs for this upgrade is a couple of thousand bucks in VB License fee, updated addons (like the newsletter) and the professional help I’m going to need to save MoparWiki (which I realize few care about). For ten years now — I’ve not actively solicited (I don’t recall even mentioning it since 2003) money for the expenses from members — and have just ate the expenses. I’d like to tell you that I have a ton of paid advertisers — but I don’t. Most just help with some parts for my racing — and I give them the banner exposure for it. If 200 members were to put $10 each in the tip can — I still wouldn’t break even for this conversion — but I mention it just in case a couple of y’all want to help with the conversion expenses.
4. Finally, I mentioned earlier that the Free Classifieds does work in the upgrade but there is an issue. That issue is the categories and sub categories look funky. I’m not sure if I can buy the latest version of the Classified software to fix that or not — but right now throwing another couple hundred per site isn’t in the plan. Maybe a few months down the road I’ll pony up.

So that’s the deal. Over the next month you will see some majors changes. The security of the site dictates it to me — but I feel that the added features to the members are well worth it. For a few hours the site will be completely down — but I’ll give some warning as we get close to that day. If you Database error messages — you can bet I’ve started the conversion. Just give it a few hours. Not everything will work right away as I need to tackle a lot of time consuming issues one at a time — but it will get done as quickly as I can do it. Some things that have changed for members posting or their UserCP might require a little extra thinking the first couple of times — but you will get used to it, and ultimately like it.

That is all.

Thank You for your understanding.

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Little History on The Wally

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Dave and Dallas Schultz traveled to the PRI Show at the Orlando Convention center earlier in this week. At the show they looked at parts and equipment to enhance their racing, speak with some current and potential product sponsors (hopefully some news to announce in the next couple of weeks with regards to a couple of new product sponsors) and attend the NMCA Awards Ceremony — where Dave received his fifth in a row Top 10 Jacket (he missed the Championship by 1 round this year) and Dallas his 4th in five years (he took a year off a few years back).

A very big and pleasant surprise to Dave was that NMCA Drag Racers voted him as the 2012 Ambassador of the Year, and he received the above pictured award. Last year Dallas had received the Crew Member of the Year — as voted by the NMCA racers. Both awards are very much coveted, and as important to the drivers as a Wally — as they only receive them through the votes of the others who race in NMCA.

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