Announcement - SuperMotors.net Ownership Change

Hi Everyone,

After 5-1/2 years of operating SuperMotors.net (launched in May 2004) and nearly 12 years of operating SuperFord.org (launched in '98 and converted to SuperMotors.net in May '04), it's time for me to move on and I'm excited to announce a new owner of SuperMotors.net effective today.

New Owner
SuperMotors.net is now owned and operated by Dana Nevins. Dana is heavily involved in the aftermarket automotive community and already operates other enthusiast sites (FordFZone.com and BroncoZone.com). I'm confident Dana will give the site the attention it deserves and introduce new and better features for all users.

Why the ownership change?
I shared equal ownership of the site with two long-time friends and auto enthusiasts, Kirk and Elliot. Four years ago (2006) I relocated from Minnesota to North Carolina for my professional career, and that began the decline of new development and time the three of us were able to collectively dedicate to the site.

Because the three of us were no longer able to meet in person, and as our professional careers became more and more time-consuming, we reached the conclusion that we were not doing the site and the members any favors by not continuing to improve and grow the site. At that point we thought it would be best to find someone that could take over ownership of the site and take it to the next level we had always hoped to take it to, but no longer had the time for.

Will anything change?
All existing services and paid membership subscriptions will remain as-is. I am still confidently keeping all of my vehicle registry entries, photos, sounds, and videos on SuperMotors.net. Dana will add his comments on any improvements and new features he has planned.

Thank you
Over the past couple of years I have been less involved in forum discussions and the automotive community, so for those of you I did correspond with via email, in forums, or otherwise, I wanted to thank you for using the site and look forward to your continued use of the site under Dana's ownership.

Thanks for the introduction Eric. First of all I want to tell everyone how exciting it is to be able to take the reigns of such an amazing and unique site, there literally isn't anything else out there like SuperMotors.net that I know of. My number one goal will be to uphold the high level of excellence that Eric and the team maintained both with the upkeep and the advertisers chosen to sponsor the site.

Introduction
Many of you probably know me already from BroncoZone.com or FordFZone.com. Many of you may also know that I have owned a Ford Bronco or Pickup of one form or another since I have been able to drive. I have actually owned over 30 motorized vehicles in my life, ranging from a 67 Plymouth Barracuda to a 14' Cobra Baja 125HP Merc. Needless to say I am a die hard gear head and I will be more focused on making this site rock rather than figuring out how to saturate it with meaningless ads.

Hosting
The first order of business will be to move it over to our server farm at American Internet Services which is one of the most successful collocation company in Southern California. We will focus every resource we have on making this as smooth as possible. Once this is completed in the coming months there should be an immediate improvement in the reliability and response times. Stay tuned for a specific date for this to take place.

Sponsors
As all of you know we can't run this site for free but we also don't need to plaster the site with ads in every possible location. Our primary focus on this front will be to find advertisers that are meaningful and useful. We also want to start getting more dynamic ads with real time product feeds or exclusive vehicle specific specials. We know that you would rather see revolutionary new products that fit YOUR vehicle rather than generic ads. Of course its going to take us some time to recruit more of these high value sponsors so bear with us.

Site Features
We have a HUGE list of new features we want to introduce to the site ranging from vehicle classifieds to content contests but before we announce anything concrete I would LOVE to hear what you want to see us implement. I want to reiterate that our number one primary focus will be on developing the site with fresh new features so its important for us to spend our time on features that everyone agrees on. Please feel free to give you feedback, questions, comments, excitement, etc...

Thanks,

Dana

Hey Dana and welcome. I'll be the first to welcome you.




My only concern is your short time having been here. I notice you literally just signed up. I hope you'll take some time to get a feel for this community and the features offered and how everyone utilizes them before making changes.

Eric, I know we'll miss having you around to help out here. You've been pretty good about always responding and trying to implements upgrades and feature requests. Goodluck in the future

Not to worry, I have actually been working with Eric for 5 years now on everything from SuperMotors.net related stuff to other industries as well. I actually started the forum BroncoZone.com 7 years ago and I don't think anyone has ever had a negative thing to say about how I run things over there. It's funny I never signed up because being a hosting provider myself I always had a place to store my photos and videos, but when I started talking to Eric about taking over SuperMotors.net I realized its SO much more than that!

It is critical for me that nothing changes around here unless its to the advantage of its members and most likely not without getting feedback first. My first order of business is moving the site to faster and more reliable hosting as soon as I have a handle on the code base and how everything works around here... like you said getting a feel for the community and everyone who makes this site what it is.

Most importantly thanks for giving me your feedback and welcome everyone else to do the same.

Thanks,

Dana

Congrats Dana and thanks for taking the helm here. I am looking forward to a good site getting even greater. The possibilities are unlimited. Hope we get more members too!


Wayne T

I came over to the forums today to comment on recent outages, and find this.

Welcome Dana, hopefully your servers will be as reliable.

Thanks Eric for hosting our pictures from Ranchero.us for all these years and good luck with where ever your life is going to take you.

Welcome Dana you have some big shoes to fill.

Brand new member here. I didn't even visit this site until today. Welcome Dana! I hope that the membership has the answers to my myriad of questions concerning Panther platform vehicles. I'll try my best to research the forum archives first but i always enjoy a little "fresh" advice.

Hi Dana and Welcome!

I've been using SuperMotors for some time now. Not as long as others but long enough that I remember SuperFord.org. This site has allot of archived and very useful data including member profiles and archived websites on the servers. I hope all of this is preserved in the transition. I'm actually very happy to see this site in new hands as I was starting to become worried and considering approaching Eric myself.

I have two complaints and two requests I'd love to see addressed.
#1 is site reliability. This site goes down more then $1 ho... well you get the idea. At one time it seemed nightly and gave me the impression it was intentional to save bandwidth. Are the new servers going to have the site and remote images available 24/365 now?

#2 Multiple uploads for basic / free accounts. You used to be able to upload at least five files, and even before that, click a link to add even more upload fields. I payed for a supermotors membership before and loved the folder upload. One pic at a time is a complete waste of time now. I upload 10 images and it takes me ten minutes! Other sites like photobucket don't have this limitation, nor water marks on free accounts. I don't mind the water marks one bit actually, like to advertise for the site. But one upload on free accounts doesn't make sense, nor give a new user time (because they get too discourage at the single upload) to try out the other features and content to see if they want to pay.

#3 Is a feature request. We use to have the last 5-10 referrals per picture listed. This was really cool feature to find new places that like your vehicle or maybe your write up. Bring that feature back please?

#4 Please add more picture formats like png. JPG only??? Oh and gifs is anyone still uses 256 colors...

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I look forward to your reply and SuperMotors growing!

Cheers!

Great idea, its like your a mind reader

We have our own 54U rack of servers at one of the best colo companies in the entire country, with 100Mbps of our own multi-homed premium bandwidth... as a matter of fact I am spending today watching football and provisioning the new web server for Super Motors! In the end SM will be spread out on multiple powerful dedicated servers with multiple years of anticipated capacity, so this should resolve issue #1.

Regarding #2, once we get things transferred over the first thing I am going to provide all features to every user. The paid membership will probably evolve into more of a donation to show support for the site and the user will get in return an ad-free site to enjoy when logged in.

I am not as familiar with #3 but it sounds like a good idea, we will look into this.

#4 for sure, we will open this up to every format we can.

We would love to hear even more ideas, my goal is to really liven things up around here!

Thanks,

Dana