Welcome to NAS-ROW

javelinadave

Administrator
Staff member
Hi All,
- We will never, ever put advertisements or sponsorships on our site. This will forever be a non-commercial site for the benefit of the Land Rover community. We will never sell your personal data to anybody.

Coming up on 4 years and we continue to honor our promise:

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rocky

NAS-ROW Addict
Tech team will be ready shortly...
 

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chris snell

Administrator
Callsign: NW5W
Staff member
I've upgraded out site software to the latest version. It looks like they've made a few improvements to the message editor, among other things. Please let us know if you notice anything strange.

I'm still working on the new server. I spun one up at a new cloud provider that I've been testing. Not sure if this is going to be the one to go with but early indications are that the disk performance on the new server is much better. Probably won't make a huge difference for site performance (the site is already lightning-fast) but it will speed up slow things like backup routines.
 

Tbaumer

Technical Excellence Contributor
NAS-ROW has the potential to be the best Land Rover information site online.

As the archives fill up with valuable knowledge, a lot of which is available on other forums, what will make people want to come here? One thing that impressed me when I joined, is the friendly willingness to help, without the condescending/smug/superior comments that made me hesitate to post on other sites. It's not that I am thin skinned (I am not) or get offended easily (I do not), I'm just looking for answers & want to trust that the advise I am getting is honest experienced based knowledge (I also like a search function that actually works).
Setting some rules early & sticking to those rules, is key to forming a forum identity & keeping it true as it grows.
Chris Snell wrote in the first post of this Welcome to NAS-ROW thread -

- The site is not heavily moderated. We play by grown-up rules here. We don't have "mud pits" and we don't prohibit talk of politics, guns, etc. Say what you want; however, absuve behavior and illegal activity are not allowed.

NAS-ROW is supposed to be the answer to what goes on on Dsource. Without all the passive aggressive comments & non helpful commentary.
I do not think that the moderators should ban members, comments or content. I just think that members should put personal crap in DM's or text or call the person you have a problem with (meet behind the wood shed for all I care). I love clever/biting humor & can laugh at myself when I screw up. If it's all in good fun (like calling someone Richard) & there is a familiar comfort zone that two people have, fine, but I don't want people being banned or choosing to leave this site because of rude, confrontational or careless behavior. I would also hope that members aren't easily offended, aren't sensitive to normal witty comments & recognize when a line has been crossed.

Maybe I'm just new to these forums & this is how things are - People come & go, new ideas present themselves & the old guard will step aside. It just seems the world is edgy these days. I don't want that to creep in & wreck a good thing. I'm not your dad & I have only met a few of you in person, but when I got my 110 & joined this site you all became my NAS-ROW family.
 

chris snell

Administrator
Callsign: NW5W
Staff member
People will come and go. That's just social media (which we are, in a sense) and the Internet. We had two long-time users leave in the last month. One person left several forums for unknown reasons and the only reason that anyone saw it is that he publicly asked for his posts to be deleted--an odd request and strange that it would be made publicly. The other person left over a disagreement with the mod crew. This had been going back and forth for months in private messages, outside of public view.

There had also been multiple incidents of this person treating new users poorly. One of the incidents was so off-tone that we actually got PMs from multiple third parties complaining about how this guy was treating people. We read the thread and the mods all discussed it and we decided it was best to show this user the door.

We're not in the business of harsh moderation over tone and we never have been, but new users are the lifeblood of a forum and without them, this place withers. There's an invisible line between giving tough love and being a jerk and this guy crossed it with the new folks on several occasions. When taken in context with the long-running, unpleasant private discussion that we'd been having with this guy, we decided to act. Being a long-time user who has helped many folks with technical issues does not give you license to treat people poorly. Those that spent time on the other forum around 5-10 years ago remember when this stuff started happening and what it did to the place. We don't want that to happen here. We are not heavily moderated but that doesn't mean that we have no moderation. There is still a line in the sand out there and you quoted it: abusive behavior and illegal activity are not allowed.
 
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chris snell

Administrator
Callsign: NW5W
Staff member
One last thing: there will always be quarrels. Let's face it, we're all into Defenders. These are odd trucks that are generally uncomfortable to drive, boxy-looking, and expensive to outfit and maintain. This hobby is naturally self-selecting and tends to attract oddballs, misfits, and the strongly-opinionated. Any pirate ship full of people like us is going to have the occasional plank-walking.

I don't know if there is a Buck LeSabre forum but if there is, I'll bet the people there are really chill and the mods never have to ban anyone.
 

erover82

Well-known member
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This forum's friction is downright gentlemanly compared to the seedy dive bar that was Discoweb in its heyday (see exhibit 1, https://discoweb.org/index.php?threads/ban-this-flamer-d-chapman.44278/). Despite its rough tone, the signal to noise ratio was high. For every public saloon brawl, there was valuable debate and exploration of LR's more enthusiast oriented products of the time. As more topics were discussed to exhaustion, and the flow of appealing LR products waned, noise was nearly all that was left. Thankfully, the reigns were gifted to our benevolent dictator. While he may have spent to much time in the tech world hanging out with skinny jean soyboys, the changes imposed did serve to return some order to the forum. However, despite the narrow policy only barring "abusive behavior and illegal activity", in practice a more broad ad-hoc set of rules were enforced to tame the west. The site is more welcoming these days, and a slow trickle of technical discussion has returned. The site also doesn't crash for hours or days at a time like it used to, but I wonder if it served as a beneficial reset to the drunken benders and flying bar stools.

Considering the lessons learned, NASROW's goals of attracting the largest concentration of Defender enthusiasts, remaining welcoming to new members, and with minimal policing will be difficult to achieve in practice. A dinghy crewed by a collection of barbarous misfits is one thing, but a galleon of litigious barbarous misfits is another.

I'm considering started a build thread soon. Maybe then you can all flame me to get the COVID lockdown induced unrest out of your system.
 
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erover82

Well-known member
Is that the goal? I would aim for being the best.
We want to be the top result you get when you go looking for a "defender forum".
I do not believe you can climb and remain at the top without sizable membership. I also do not believe there is consensus to what "best" means. Was discoweb the best or worst? It depends if you came looking for a good time or a safe space.
 

chris snell

Administrator
Callsign: NW5W
Staff member
I can’t speak for the other guys, but my goal for this site was to be, first and foremost, useful and ad-free. I loved D90 back in the day and I wanted a site that was just like that place in the mid-2000s. I wanted to be able to find answers to my questions and not have my browser flooded with Walmart diaper ads and such. My original goal was to convince that D90 Source community to buy the site from the new owners and then run it as an ad-free non-profit and retain their existing mod team. When that proved untenable, Dave and I got in touch and decided to build a new site from scratch.

I don’t know if we ever intended it to be this way but NAS-ROW became very tech-centric, with the General forum taking a back seat to technical discussions. In the early days, I think that it was this way because the site was so new and didn’t have a long-time community. Now that we’ve been around for a while (five year birthday this year!), it’s probably inevitable that the General section gets busier. That’s okay with me; I enjoy the banter.

If this site becomes big, so be it, but it’s definitely not my personal goal for it. I’m just happy that it’s useful and non-commercial.
 

chris snell

Administrator
Callsign: NW5W
Staff member
So, we're coming up on the five year anniversary of NAS-ROW this fall. Crazy how time flies. The site has been getting busier and busier, which blows my mind. We never expected that we'd make it three months, but folks came and stuck around. We are rapidly approaching the point (maybe there already?) where every common Defender technical issue or project has already been discussed here. That means that new folks can find what they need here and don't have to search a bunch of sites. Incredible.

We have a favor to ask of y'all, especially the frequent posters. When you post up some technical write-up here and then copy-paste it on the "other" site (or vice-versa), the search engines ding us with a duplicate content penalty. To the eyes of their software, it looks like one site just copied content from the other. Since that other site has been around much longer, we're the one that gets dinged and our presence in search results suffers. They bury all NAS-ROW pages from the results when that happens.

We've said it a bunch in that past but y'all know that we're trying to build something special here: the only non-commercial, ad-free Defender site. To keep this thing growing, we need those engines to recognize us and that starts with exclusive content. So, if you like NAS-ROW and want it to stay busy, please help us out by posting your write-ups and for-sale ads only on this site. It would help the site out a lot.

At any given time, N-R gets about twice the active users of that site, so you'll get viewers. If we get to the point where this is the only place where most of y'all post your stuff, we will see many more visitors and your posts will do better because they're not being filled with ads for Walmart and Amazon affiliate links.

Thanks y'all.
 

chris snell

Administrator
Callsign: NW5W
Staff member
Ha!

Yes, indeed. When we launched NAS-ROW almost five years ago, we had a crappy, stand-in logo. We always wanted to do better and now we finally have a good one. We have this in a vector illustration, too, which means we can eventually make crisp-looking t-shirts, stickers, etc.

Enjoy!
 

chris snell

Administrator
Callsign: NW5W
Staff member
We updated the logo to a wide format rectangle and made it look better for mobile users. Let me know what you think.

Some of y’all have reached out to request stickers and t-shirts. That’s something that I want to get going, eventually, but we really need to set up a Wyoming LLC first, if we’re going to sell merch. Feels a little “commercial” for me and I’m not sure if merch sales fits in with the N-R ethos of totally non-commercial. But, it sure would be cool to have some shirts and stickers for everyone. Gotta think about that one.
 
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