Hooniverse Forum is Now in Session!

The Whing Party

Hooniverse is nothing without it’s loyal community of readers. Every week (except one) you blow us away on the Mystery Car and write the second half of my Wrenching Tips articles in the comments. You blow our minds with comments like this, but there’s only so much we can do within the confines of a blog format.  It’s too one-way and too fleeting.

Point your browser to forum.hooniverse.info to see our solution.

We had a bit of internal debate as to whether to get into the whole bulletin board/forum thing, given that it’s more 2002 than 2012. You may have also heard of such places as The Car Lounge, H.A.M.B. or Garage Journal. But then again, it’s not like we’re the only car blog around, and Hooniverse readers aren’t exactly known for their aversion to older technology. The biggest reason, though, was to give you an opportunity to start your own topics and have your own discussions. We see the stuff you’re up to in the comments, and hate it when random cool links or interesting questions get buried.

Just like Hooniverse The Blog, we’re totally making this up as we go. We’ve set up some basic forum categories that we think match what you’d like to see, without breaking it up too much:

The Driveway

…is about what it sounds like. Before I skipped town, Jeff and I spent waaay too much time standing around in my driveway, shooting the shit about cars. That’s the goal here. General purpose car related stuff. Videos, ridiculous eBay listings, “what should I buy”, etc…

The Garage

This is our more “hands-on” section, akin to what you’ll do or see once you step inside. We’ve broken it up into three sub-forums:

“Help!” is the place to ask for just that. Our readers span from professional mechanics to total newbs, but you’ve all demonstrated an ability for intelligent discourse. Hopefully this is a place to make the most of that. You’re unlikely to get the model-specific knowledge you’ll find on a brand/model/hobby-specific board, but sometimes a broader perspective can be of use.

“Show and Tell” is the inverse of “Help!”. Show us what you’ve done, what you’re proud of, or just the incremental progress (or lack thereof) on what you’re working on.

“Actual Garages” is so obvious and uncreative I can’t think of a witty description. It’s sort of a catch-all for the architecture/carpentry/interior design (really, our perverted take on it) that goes into getting the most of your allotted space.

The Swap Meet

Who better to conduct business with than your fellow hoons? We’re keeping it simple for now with just “For Sale” and “Wanted”. Your own cars/bikes/parts/tools for sale is fine, but no commercial listings, mmmkay?

The Sandbox

Not for pooping. This is the place to do things like test image or youtube embeds, formatting or the like. If you need to see how something in bbcode works, this is the place to do it. Posts are scrubbed after 7 days, so don’t use it as backup storage for your master’s thesis…or your “photography collections”. We’ll delete that stuff on sight, and might just take your account with it.

But What About…

Off topic? We’re skipping it for now. We’re here to talk about cars. We might debate our differences, but we know we’re all part of the same brotherhood. Off-topic forums tend to be a cesspool of the things that divide us or distractions that we don’t really need. We’re not going to police it or anything, but in the spirit of the site we’d prefer you keep that stuff our of your signatures as well. Similarly, no non-car stuff in the Swap Meet. For the time being this all just too much extra BS for us to deal with.

Rules? The basics are posted in each forum, but on the whole, the Golden Rule applies. Behave yourselves, keep it SFW, show some respect and don’t ruin it. We run this stuff in our spare time, and would prefer to spend it being productive, not babysitting or performing internet janitorial work.

Hooniverse sysadminBugs or Suggestions? How dare you impugn the quality of our free open source BBS implemented in the middle of the night by a guy with no software training at all? Surely there’s no possible−what’s that? Everything’s down again?−yeah, nevermind. There’s a very high probability something (or everything) will break as we launch this. Let us know if something’s broken, but also be patient with our responses. The “report post” button seems to be working, so use it if necessary. Feel free to suggest tweaks or new sub-forums in “The Driveway” or email the tips line. We’re open to making more sub-forums if there’s enough demand for them.

So yeah, that’s it. We’ve got a forum and really have no idea if it’ll will take off or not. Do please put it to use as it suits you or let us know if it doesn’t. 

forum.hooniverse.info – one last time to make it obvious.

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