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Leave your comments, criticisms, suggestions, praise and other feedback here. Thank you in advance.
Youtube videos:
I wish Scotty could make his video titles more descriptive for easier search instead of "You are stupid if you do this; Pray if you see that, etc."
Words in titles have the highest relevancy weights for the most search engines.
Example: "Here's How a Real Mechanic Checks a Used Car Before Buying". It is an ok title. It could be a great title if it read as "How to do relative compression and inductive fuel tests"
This website:
1. Sort posts by most upvoted / most viewed.
2. Show 5 recent replies and hide the rest in the recent posts via front-end (see, for example, long Official Funny Car Topic) on the page https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/recent/
3. Let upvote/downvote comments. See the family of stackoverflow as a great example.
@johnnyremlik Agree, and lighten up on the clickbait titles - these "RIP", "Crap your pants" titles don't fit videos with serious, accurate content.
After a large amount of responses have been submitted on a specific question, you need to scroll down and it doesn't automatically take you like when there are lower responses. This should be something looked into imo because it gets annoying sometimes. Also I am not entirely sure but after 5 minutes or so members who are not a moderator can not edit/delete their answers. Could this not be made longer? Like 10 15 minutes?
when you open a question, just click the "Last Post" link in the top left (red bar).
or click in the sort box where it says "most voted" and change it to "Newest"
1) Helpful: I love how everyone is so helpful on the forum. Whether it is something simple, or something more complicated, we are all coming from different places and experiences levels. So a big thank you to everyone who has helped me and countless other people with their vehicle repairs, vehicle maintenance, vehicle buying, etc...
2) While it would be nice to "clean things up" a bit and have categories and such, I do appreciate how the community is making the best out of how things are set up. We are all figuring this out as we go along.
3) Personal: I appreciate how we can ask our personal questions, and most of the time, get a personalized response. I get it though, sometimes, this leads to repetitive questions, and repetitive answers. I don't quite know how to solve that problem.
I like the concept of people helping people through their experience's and knowledge of car's. That is what attracted me to this forum. I have been watching scotty videos for 6 months and did not join the forum because i am not a real talkative guy. But I just joined about 3 weeks ago and wanted to give my positive feedback on your social network.
Well, I don't claim to be one of the "smarter people", but I think that you could start with these three buckets:
1. Troubleshooting & Repair
2. What to Buy (or Keep)
3. Tools, Parts & Accessories
One of the advantages of breaking up into categories would be that you could put up more problem-specific FAQs ahat nd such, pin up things like "Evaluating a Used Car" or "Picking a Scan Tool" "Scotty's Top Ten Repair Videos"
What do y'all think? Here is a forum I use for my 2 wheel info/discussion https://advrider.com/f/
I like G.T.’s suggestions above, and then for Car Problems have it organized by Manufacturer - if possible. So, all Audi problems under Audi, GM under GM, etc.
This would likely require a LOT of work. But I'd like to state that it would be AWESOME if we could somehow implement it.
Should be fairly east, just put a drop down menu in with as many car manufacturers as you can think of. That would be the hard part.
Here's a couple web sites I've found useful
https://www.carcomplaints.com/ Model and year specific problem info from real people – and inks to all recalls and TSBs
https://www.toyota.com/owners/ You can get owner's manuals, recall and TSB info for free
http://www.autoshop101.com/asetest/ Good technical articles, basic ASE level instruction
https://repairpal.com/obd-II-code-chart Pretty good info on those OBD-II codes
You already have toyotanation,com listed, but let me second that as a good resource.
carcomplaints and repairpal are already on the car buying page. I'll think about a place to put the others. Or maybe you could write up a page with links to all the manufacturer websites for owners.
You know, I'll put the manufacturer li9st on my to day. For other user groups, I would, but I don't know if I'd feel that comfortable "recommending" sites that I haven't used - maybe I could do a list, and ask people for up/down votes/feedback? Let me know what you think about that.
sounds good on manufacturers. Don't worry about the user groups. Lets just wait and see what people suggest down below.
Maybe we should ask Scotty to do a "How to Google" video?
I know. I often end up googling answers for people.
Unfortunately, I suspect the problem isn't that they don't know how.
From my POV, I do both. I google, then ask. I ask, then google. Sometimes I don't know how to phrase things correctly, and talking it out helps me find the right words to do further research. And sometimes, the resources on google just doesn't match up to my needs.
But at least you looked first. The majority of questions can be answered , or at least started, with a quick search.
Maybe have some kind of emblem or designation for those members who are professional mechanics (versus DIYer or shade tree mechanic). Most times when advice/recommendation is given the OP does not know where that knowledge is coming from. Just a thought.
are you volunteering to do the background checks? 😉
@carkillerapp @wok @scottykilmer
this is probably why the forum gets so many duplicate posts
https://wpforo.com/community/how-to-and-troubleshooting-2/slow-automatic-refresh-after-add-reply/
Hey y'all, sorry to drop in here with the downer kind of IT perspective but we ought to talk to the higher ups about including some kind of bridge warning page that appears before linked posts to some kind of outside websites. It doesn't take much more than a few links and a couple lines of personal info entered to really ruin someones next couple of months over an identity theft problem. In day-to-day interactions I will refer to scotty's vids on YT as the layman's guide for getting into DIY auto repair. These same sort of people would likely fall into phishing schemes and we should do our part in protecting people from falling into those sort of things if we can.
I suggest an item added to the FAQ that tells how people can get their cars featured in a Scotty video or how to hire Scotty to fix their car.
done
I think the forum should be divided into sections. What those section should be? I’ll leave that to smarter people to decide.
Wrote a short article based on my rust quick-fixing experience
https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/qa/my-ultimate-quickfix-for-rust-short-article/#post-74138
I really like Scotty's forum but if I could change some things I'd change the "Submit A Question" user interface.
I'd have those drop down boxes in it like the auto parts websites have where they require the Year, Make, Model, and Engine.
Maybe even add a box for "General Question" if somebody wants to know which brand of oil we prefer.
Maybe automatically insert that info at the end of their question.
I'm not a website guy but if the guys who design the auto parts websites can do it, I don't see why our guy can't.
Also, the rating system is "wonky". I just got elevated from "5 stars" to "Honorable Member" simply based on my amount of posts. I'm "batting" maybe 3 stars
you are an invaluable member here, Jack. No matter what the rating system says. Your diagnostic knowledge is unparalleled. Thank you for all your hard work. 🙂
+1 Joe. Thank you for your extremely detailed diagnosis & efforts to help others.
Encourage users to write descriptive specific questions. The great exemplary website is the stackoverflow family.
Discourage short non-informative titles such as "Need help!!!", "I am bamboozled!" and so on.
It’s already under FAQ —> “How do I get the best answers to my questions?” #5-7
https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/qa/read-this-first/
From my personal experience, people don't read FAQs. When you create a question, the website could show dynamically some tips as to how to be specific (like stackoverflow).
In my experience, people don't read, period. We could have a colorful banner filling half the screen , flashing the instructions "POST YOUR VEHICLE INFO", and people still won't do it.
How someone can do something about this.
This kind of thing has been reported and discussed here quite a few times. It's been going on for quite some time and unfortunately is getting worse with the proliferation of AI. Even more unfortunately there's not much that can be done about it.
I suggest forum gets more organized since people ask same/similar questions.
Something like I suggested when this website was launched
https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/qa/suggestion-for-admins/
I would like to see an official thread where people can put verified pictures of their rides.
It would be quite nice to see picture's of everyone's Toyotas...
Thanks for doing that! It is so cool to see everybody's rides!
Great job, Mountain Man Joe. One suggestion - maybe there's some place to do a FAQ answer/suggestion that people take advantage of the many online user groups specific to particular makes and models, especially if it's something like rare models or engine swaps or such. I've gotten a lot of good info from toyotanation.com, and the sites for my Suzuki bike.
Maybe people could nominate and you could publish "Model-specific links" or "Useful links".
Keep up the good work.
Done. I will accept link submissions from comments right here on Glen's suggestion.
https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/qa/community/
(vetted sites only please)
A link has been added to the "Read this first" topic.
Inthrustwetrust and Kerem came up with the Master thread, right now we have Toyota & Hyundai
https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/qa/hyundai-problems-master-thread-on-scottykilmer-com/#post-89377
https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/qa/engine-problems-with-each-make/#post-89827
I also want to add that after going on some other car forums, this one's one main page for asking and answering questions interface is much simpler. Sure people often use the comment instead of answer box and often don't know of the FAQ or Search bar (which honestly could be placed in a more prominent place if @carkillerapp is listening) but when going on other forums I was confused at where to start. Where to ask questions, how to use them... The software here could be better, but when people come here for car questions they don't need the perfect interface, they just need it to be simple to be able to ask their question. High praise in that regard.
It seems to me that there is a dual track that the site is attempting to bridge. On the one hand, there's the near instant interactivity that recalls the early, dial-up days of BBSs. IHMO, there's a great deal of emotion (anxiety, excitement, joy, fear, etc). Perhaps that's typical of collective help sites.
On the other hand, there's a database of resources: Some of them flat-file in nature, linked either to external links or gleaned from prior interactive replies. As it is, on this site, they're relatively conflated, organizationally, so that often the resources are marginalized in favor of more immediate interactivity. That's inherently more gratifying to many.
Combine that, as mountainmanjoe has observed, that many who use the site do not seem to have the digital literacy to even think about how to do a search on Google, Bing or YouTube, it creates a bit of a dilemma.
Having said that, there's also a potential opportunity to teach folks how to think about such things.
Basically, I'm suggesting visually and organizationally splitting (and developing) the interactive resource and the comprehensive flat-file informational resource. (See agcoauto.com as one example of a flat-file informational resource, sans videos). There would be links and referrals between the two. And, to construct, host and maintain this kind of site would be potentially costly.
What's clear to me is that a list of external links isn't going to catch the attention (and it hasn't) of a majority of site visitors to carkiller.com
Submitted.
I would say the social gratification is the main motive force behind the success of this website.
People find different types of responses gratifying, based on their needs engine, so to speak. There's a lot to unpack underneath that one term.
Wrote a quick and easy faded headlights restoration process description
https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/qa/easy-faded-headlights-restoration-procedure/#post-93307
I want Scotty/WWW.carkiller.com to have a setting on the Web Site where users can get an email notification when someone responds to a forum post that the user originated.
You already get a notification in upper right where the Bell icon is. I see every last notification (likes, replies) with no issues. You just have to be logged in, which is not a big deal.
we tried email at the beginning and it brought down the server
Below is recommendation for mechanic in Ballard, Seattle area WA State.
https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/qa/mechanic-recommendation-for-ballard-area-wa/#post-203066
Added. Thank you.
You guys should also support cubeupload as well. However, they do have frequent outages. {black}:screaming: {black}:screaming: {black}:screaming: But, it might work, after all, it works! And it is free! {blackemo}:party: {blackemo}:party: {blackemo}:party: {blackemo}:party: {blackemo}:party: {blackemo}:party: {blackemo}:party:
I have no idea what this is. Could you please elaborate?
Looks like it's some kind of fireworks company? Free fireworks! All right!!
Perhaps free malware?
its cubeupload.com okayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy and please do not assume it is malware. I use it (sometimes...)
Feedback rejected for insufficient information.
{black}:idontknow:
Can we please get a page where we can post links to OEM parts from various car manufacturers? I see all the time people asking where to source OEM parts for their vehicles recently.
@fishingandcarsenthusiast123 I don't know, can we? I hereby pronounce thee director of the OEM parts supplier directory. You may begin. (just use a standard new topic page)
Done. I also suggest posting this in the FAQ:
https://carkiller.com/scottykilmer/qa/oem-parts-online-store-directory-by-manufacturer/#post-326881
@fishingandcarsenthusiast123 nicely done. Thanks. link added to FAQ.
@fishingandcarsenthusiast123 in the future, please clean up all the tracking junk out the URL. Thanks.
@fishingandcarsenthusiast123 Definitely a good idea! I added a few that might be useful as a response there, though if better in your original post (or not appropriate) that can obviously be changed.