Welcome to what I hope will be a weekly update on what we’re up to at KartPulse.
Our mission is to build an online resource that will sustain the future of the sport and make it more enjoyable for racers.
If you’re interested in joining the team to help move the project and sport forward, drop me a message. All you need is a willingness to chip in we’ll figure out a way that you can contribute and have some fun doing it.
Here’s what we got up to this week (October 16th - 23rd)
Kartpulse Now Has (Awesome) Forums!
Since KartPulse started in 2013, people have asked over and over for forums on the site. We declined for a number of reasons. Primarily being that it takes a HUGE commitment to make a successful forum happen against the backdrop of modern social media. The internet is littered with graveyards where someone kicked off a forum but didnt have a plan or strategy and simply gave up. Today it takes a team effort that requires resources, a strategy and a plan for it to stand a chance. We care about karting too much to half ass it.
Lately the interest in forums from our fans gained critical mass, so we began consulting with firms that deal in managing thriving, vibrant online communities to see how we can come up with a plan to give karting the forums and online community it needs and deserves.
So today we’re making a commitment to manage, cultivate and develop these forums for you along with the main kartpulse.com website
We really love the look, feel and ease of use of these forums and hope you do too.
Forum\Community Updates
- Began reaching out to founder members.
- Did a a small social media drive to gauge interest (which I’m very pleased with)
- Kicked off some opening discussions.
- Allow PDF attachments to posts
- Enabled social signup and logins for Twitter, Facebook and Google.
Up Next For Forums\Community
- Wrap up community guidelines
- Make the welcome message more specific to kart racers and shorten it.
- Put together a quick tips topic for the forums
- Continue to build our community… Invite folks individually to join in the discussion on the forums, kick off some topics.
Directory Updates
- Added Allegany Motor Speedway to track the directory. Also filed a correction for their google maps marker position as it was was three miles away from the track!
New Member Shoutouts
Well since it’s the first week (actually it’s not even quite a week yet) so we can get everybody in…
@DavinRS
@Peter_Zambos
@Easy22
@ohsh
@Sam_Stone
@The_Karting_Channel
@burke166
@Aaron_Hachmeister_13
@Richard_Farley
@SneakyJim
@Jason_Paix
@Norcal_Karters
@Volxvagen
@stupidkartr26
@fluque
@Guinndinni
@reddogg55x
Welcome guys! We hope to make this a great place for karting discussion.
Nerdy Web\Tech Stuff
- Migrated our socialengine install which runs everything except forums at www.kartpulse.com to a new server. Reduced our monthly bill by half and gained a little speed. Managed that transition with practically zero downtime too.
- Deployed an additional VPS which is running centos\docker\discourse for our at forums.kartpulse.com
Up next For Nerdy Web\Tech Stuff
Basically devop and analytics items
- Configure cloudflare for message bus passthrough.
- Setup forums subdomain in Google Search Console.
- Investigate setting up SSO between Socialengine install (PHP/Zend and Discourse (Ruby).
Currently the logins/auth are different for the forums and the main site that contains the social network. Not happy with that but it’s a (temporary) concession had to make. - Setup Amazon S3 for object storage.
- Move from SMTP auth to API auth for mailing server.
- Other stuff I’m forgetting.
Questions? Something in particular you’d like to see in these updates? Let me know.
You can see some of what we have completed and what’s in the pipeline for consideration for the forums here