My interest is basically dead for t675.net

Well folks, my as the title said, my interest in maintaining this site is dying if not already dead.

I love you guys like family, but this just isn't all that fun anymore since I sold it to verticalscope. We do the job of maintaining the place, while they don't give back anything more than an IP address for which this site runs at. All of which cost me nothing more than $100 a month. So my ability to care for preserving the profit of the site owners and advertisers against people peddling their wares just no longer concerns me.

I used to use what little profit I did make to negotiate deals with places like Sportbike track gear into selling gear to me at cost, to then give away in the raffles. I just enjoyed doing what good I could for the 675 community. But that is long gone now, and since verticalscope is a real company and they have a bigger need for profit than I did.

And it shows by their simple lack of commitment to upgrading the software of this site. I personally used to keep the site' software updated and tried to keep things moving forward, by coming up with new pages and different looks. But now it's just stagnating due to verticalscope's unwillingness to upgrade supposedly because a competitor of theirs acquiring the vbulletin software we run and they don't want to renew or upgrade. I was told they have some ultra fantastics smart guy who is the CTO, but in reality nothing is more frustrating as a being a top level IT Architect, consulting to the highest CIO's, VP's and CTO's for the Govt and fortune 500 to have to deal with this crap. They even tout on their main page how wonderful they are at maintaining uptime. We call this the "NINES", and they claim 3 nines meaning 99.9% uptime, where the sites are only "DOWN" less than 9 hours a year. With my meager $100 a month server I used to run this place on, I was providing better than 3 nines. So REAL Web and IT shops pride themselves on this number and strive for at least 4 if not 5 nines (99.99 or 99.999%). This would be less than 53 minutes or less than 6 minutes a year of downtime respectively. And most real IT shops spend accordingly to make it happen of which many of mine are running far larger, radically more complex environments than these simple websites and we achieve 5 nines with 80-90% of the agencies and achieve 6 nines on some. So this is purely a financial decision, and enough to frustrate me to the point of not caring.

So while Stew and Yung are great guys, they are probably hog tied on what their allowed to do. So I will ask them if they can fix the logins for jstu202 and shalihe74 as I can not find why the logins don't work. I will then turn over daily operations to them over the next month or so and stay as admin for a bit to help, but just fade to the back over time.

In the meantime, I am turning back off the user moderation function, as I just don't have the time or interest to babysit each registration anymore.

Sorry for being so long-winded... had a lot on my chest that needed to be said.

See you guys at the track days sometime!
Heath