We bring you this month's second place site - SpeedCorp.

Spotlight

Built and maintained by John, this site was a favorite among our moderators and gained several first place votes. Around for a while, John's site continues to grow in popularity due to the excellent content and service...

UBBDEV: What is your background and how long have you been on the web?

John: Well, I suppose you aren't interested in a full life biography here so I will only go over the computer bit. I started out with a 386... it even had a math coprocessor. I only used this computer to play some dos games on and to use Windows 3.1 on. I got tired of the IBM bit and went for a Macintosh Quadra 650. The Mac was the first computer I used to access the internet... on AOL 1.0 :^)

After the Macintosh I bought a Gateway 266mhz p2 with 64mb pc100 ram, a 4 gig ata66 hd, and a 4x dvd player... that computer was heaven compared to the Macintosh Quadra! By then I was up to AOL 4.0 and it was getting old- fast. I got @home internet service, which totally kicks ass, and built my own computer: Athlon (classic) 700mhz, 10gig ata 66 hd, 256mb pc133 at 2-2-2, v3 3500 tv agp, SoundBlaster live, Sony cdrw, and a 52x cdrom. This machine has treated me very well, and it is now overclocked to 850mhz and water-cooled with a peltier setup. I am also building another computer, kt7 raid motherboard, 128mb pc133, no video card yet, 1ghz thunderbird, 30 gig ata 100 hd, 52x cdrom. This too will be water-cooled and overclocked to whatever I can get it to :^)

At the moment I am running a 5 computer LAN with cable access (a couple I didn't mention because I would only bore you with more specs). So, I have been on the internet for around 7 years now and I have garnered a lot of computer knowledge since my beginnings.

UBBDEV: How did you come up with the idea for Speedcorp?

John: Long, long story :^)

It started out here: www.angelfire.com/nt/rights and slowly progressed. Read up on that site and the newer version at speedcorp to learn about it, I really don't have the time (or the space for that matter) to type it all. I could write pages on what motivated me along the way.

UBBDEV: What was your reason for purchasing the ubb for your site?

John: Well, I needed to build a community! The site I work at (speedguide.net) and my friends site (coremeltdown.com) each have UBB's and spoke highly of the software. Then of course by the laws of human rationalization I decided that it was "the thing to have" and got one.

Hacking it has been fun, and so has watching the member numbers and post totals grow :^)

UBBDEV: What do you dislike most about the ubb?

John: Hrm...

1. Price (although I got it at the cheap price of $175, what is it about $200 now?)
2. Ugly control panel colors, IMO. I don't have time to change them, although I could if I really needed to.
3. They are starting to include our cool hacks in them so these dang newbies get them without doing any work! We have to keep coming up with bigger and better things to stay on top.
4. The search is very tedious, when searching all forums.
5. Deleting forums? What is up with this totally looked over feature? Last I heard Charles Capps was making a hack to be able to delete forums.

A cooler backend and more template features would be cool to have, but all in all ubb has been good to me.

UBBDEV: Name the modification to your ubb that you like the best...

John: Tough one!

I have always been fond of private messaging, but I also like the post formatting and spell check hack as well. Another favorite is the "who's online" hack, I love seeing who is at the boards all the time. We also can't forget about the member list either, it is very handy for both my members and me. I have no favorite hack really, they all seem to serve a specific important purpose. We all owe a big thanks to everyone who works to invent new hacks, and improve upon old ones.

UBBDEV: Are there any "tricks of the trade" you'd like to share that any ubb owner can use to improve the success of their site?

John: When you get a new member to you board- welcome them. I have instructed my entire team to welcome each person either through a PM or a reply to their first post. I think it is a courteous thing to do- just the way we do it at our site.

Do not spam other forums to try and get members to come to your forums. 99% of the time they will come over and post one message then never come back!

People most likely will not come to your site if all you have is a ubb. What is your ubb about? There are thousands of general discussion ubb's on the internet, why should people come to yours? Have content in your pages to attract links to your website so people come for the content, then sign up to chat about a specific subject.

UBBDEV:What are your future plans for your site?

John: Speedcorp definitely needs a new look, which we are working on now. The main thing I would want the most for the site would be a database driven site- mysql and php. I need to learn a bit more or get some help to do this though! (*hint, hint*)

Our site is growing exponentially, and our team is very knowledgeable. I expect big things to come from this site in the future, if we work to what we are capable of doing this site will be big time. We do have some big things in store, and some cool stuff we are going to release shortly but unfortunately I cannot disclose any information on that stuff yet :^(

In conclusion:

Thanks to the old ubbcodehacking.com, ubbhackers.com, and ubbdev.com for being there for people who want to hack their ubb, and thank you to ubbdev.com for this honor- from me and everyone who is a member of Speedcorp.net.