[KerryF]

Originally Posted by SamirDarji

I think if you open the door for tirerack, others will want the same and turn the product into an affiliate network that you guys can't make money from.

It's been a while since styckyd has been released. It needs to have mass acceptance by the users. Unfortunately, I don't know any definitive way to make this happen.

Hi Samir,

It's only been two weeks! We have a long way to go! Rome definitely wasn't built in a day, our little site has a long way to go and there are still many more things to do.

We already have a built-in way for the forum admins like yourself to add other supporting vendors to the system so not only the Tire Rack will benefit. They're just the easiest because they already have systems in place to make this happen. We hope that this will add value to the forums and their supporting vendors. Whether or not we make money from this effort is not very relevant to us. Our goal is to help people buy and sell auto parts and we want to earn our keep by providing that service. These are ancillary services that add value in many ways and they're relatively easy for us to provide. If our service helps the forums it's a win for us, too:

1) It provides more reasons for you to want to work with us. If we're helping you, why wouldn't you want to work with us?
2) This is new territory. I could be wrong, but I've been involved in forums for a long time and I haven't seen anything like this before. This allows us to learn more about what works and what doesn't - and keep making it better.
3) If everyone finds the system useful and uses the forensics system then that also adds value to the classifieds system (The product database is the same). So the better we make Forensics, in turn the better Classifieds becomes.

We need a critical mass of users that breaches a certain threshold, but not everyone needs to be on board all at once and we don't expect that either. We'll get them in time by offering a better service. We truly believe that we'll be able to succeed in that. The users that have seen it so far really like it, but it does need more people involved to be really useful and that's why we're looking for forum admins to work together with us. We just need to start the conversation.

We're talking with some and are learning more about what we need to do. We're working on better integration with the vBulletin login right now by popular request. We'll have it done in the very near future. What else do we need to do to get more forums to try it out? The more forums that use it, the better we can make it for everyone.