It's hard to believe it, but it was only 2 months ago that we were scrambling for a home as our long-time Kinja home was being shuttered with little notice.

Late Friday night the 6th as we'd had a couple days to ponder our own demise life rafts were popping up everywhere and rats were fleeing the burning ship. None of the homes quite spoke to me as none of them felt like Oppo to me.

I was particularly vulnerable to this loss as I was 2,100 miles away from my wife at the time, alone in a studio hotel room in San Jose starting a new job and looking for a house. This left me with a lot of spare time, and frankly I'd been drinking too that Friday night.

After seeing many comments from other folks felling the loss as hard as I was and also afraid that this would mean the death of Oppo I resolved to put my energy into something productive. I'd build a forum!

I knew the old standby PHPBB wouldn't work for most of the youths on Oppo, they all thought Forums were old and stodgy and wouldn't be swayed. Thus my research started - there had to be an option, something open source I could spin up that had a more modern feel to it. Wordpress didn't do it, ultimately very customizable but not designed for hundreds of authors! Especially in the short term I needed something that would allow users to flock to it en-masse.

After hours of drinking, chatting with folks on discord, eating pizza and researching I thought I found something. NodeBB. It was a fairly modern platform written in NodeJS that looked good, was open source and kept reasonably up to date by the devs.

Now it was time to log into my AWS account and spin up an instance to play with and buy a domain name to point at it. Opposite-lock.com was available so I bought it intending it as a temporary home for testing (we may still move to the non-hyphenated domain, still TBD).

After many hours alternating between putty, the admin panel here and drinking (plus some more pizza) I had something vaguely usable. This was now the waning hours hours of the 6th but had made a basic and useful shell. The first post on the Hyphen was fittingly about motorcycles. No actual content, just a picture to test upload and basic content.

More tinkering was done and then I made a brief intro post about the Forum and tossed a link in Discord for folks to check it out.

My intent was to get some feedback from folks, improve and see how it went. Feedback was fast and excellent. Folks both encouraging me and pointing out things that needed fixed. It quickly started to gain far more traction than I was expecting as folks were posting about it on Kinja Oppo and such.

Folks like @RallyDarkstrike @MM54 @nickhasanexocet and @Jb-boin came on early providing feedback, fixes and in-depth testing. I also want to thank @Curators they all came on early and expressed a desire to help in one way or another and thus the group was formed. This thing has grown far past what I had dreamed, it seems to be the home of Oppo right now.

The last two months have been incredible, the outpouring of support from everyone has just blown me away. Folks volunteering their time, love, content, talent and money. The was we've pulled together has blown me away.

We've consistently grown even past where I thought we'd be stuck for a while. As of today we have 623 users and are registering over 1.1 million page views a month!

Here's a snapshot of traffic since the beginning.

That huge spike was the actual death of Oppo. Nearly crashed the server...

Thanks for reading this, I wanted to put this all down as a post both the celebrate us making it 2 months and to make a sort of record of it's beginnings instead of it just existing in comments on dead Oppo and in discord history.

As always - thanks for being a part of Oppo and if you have any questions, concerns or thoughts about things feel free to reach out to me at oppo@opposite-lock.com

I just want to say a big and hearty thank you to all opponauts! Not only have you embraced this new platform, so many have opened their wallets and donated.

As of right now 64 oppos have contributed to this site and we're in good shape for a while with running costs covered for at least 9 months and probably longer (depending on how big we grow). I knew oppo was an awesome community and you have all just floored me.

That is all - just thank you!

@Jb-boin figured this out in our dev environment late last week but I didn't have a chance to make the same change in Prod until tonight.

The uploading of gifs should now work like images do, as well as some changes to the backend on images which should make them a bit more smooth. Basically copy and paste a gif into a reply or topic and it should just work (it also works as an upload in the thumbnail).

Note: Leaving this post pinned for a day(ish) to let this info circulate amongst everyone since it is a change in operations.

It's been not quite two months since our last update on traffic to the hyphen and I actually thought about it this time and waited until the end of the month to give (almost) complete figures for 2 months.

As usual here's the built-in analytics engine snapshot.

This give us important data like users, posts and topics that we don't get through Google, but the page views number is elevated as it does track bots.

All our metrics are +/- a few percent from each other compared to last month except for new users which is down by a bit more but we're still picking up a few new users a week.

Now onto google analytic numbers (these are March 1st through April 30th).

We're holding pretty steady at ~800k page views per month with a very low bounce rate as we have a very engaged audience.

Now onto the bit where I grab random bits of data out of the google analytics and search results that I find interesting!

Note: the below numbers should all be taken with a grain of salt since they're impacted by things like ad blockers, vpns and other factors

Country of origin

The Brazil number has shown reliably high in the rankings which surprises me that it's above Austrailia and the UK. I know we have a couple users from Brazil but didn't think it was that many. IF you're from Brazil let us know, I'd love to know more!

OS/Device Breakdown

Overall breakdown is about what I'd expect outside of linux being a bit high, but we do have a good deal of nerds here (Nerds rule!).

Browser breakdown

Desktop/Mobile/Tablet split

It's been interesting to watch this swing from favoring desktop to favoring mobile as we've all started to spend a little less time locked in our houses.

Top Devices

No surprise that iPhone and Pixel devices are most of our top 10.

iOS/Android split

We swing a little over half iOS for our mobile users, which actually surprises me a little. It's about the % different I would expect, just thought it would be flipped the other way. Although I expect ipads throw this number off a bit.

User Acquisition

This data is a lot less detailed than I'd like it to be, but here's how our users (mostly) find their way to us.

Search Console tidbits

This has gotten less interesting but here is data from the last 90 days for our Google Search engine results.

It's always interesting to see well written reviews or breaking news end up here with people seeing our page in their google results and then viewing the article.

Google News Google Discover hasn't decided to present any of our articles since the last post so I won't post any of that.

All-in-all I'm still absolutely ecstatic with how the community, @Curators and site infrastructure has been performing. Keep being awesome oppo!

PS - we do have some big improvements to the site coming in the next month or so that we've been working very hard on, I'm very excited about what's coming.

Hi Oppo!

Maintenance tonight has gone well and we're running the latest version of NodeBB (1.16.1) and a new theme which gives us a lot of functionality. Here are the key new features and differences.

New Features:

• Chat interface works on mobile now
  -When you get a chat from another user (or group chat) you'll get a notification on mobile on the chat icon in the upper right. Tap it to view and reply.

• Threaded Replies
  -I've removed the quick reply box to help facilitate this. Tap reply to an original post or a comment to allow them to be grouped/collapsed/expanded. It's not a perfect feature but also helps keep track of which comment someone is replying to.

• New Topic Thumbail Engine
  -There is a new icon for uploading a thumbnail (shown below) and it also allows you to upload multiples, but there is no use for the second so only upload the first one. There will be future enhancements around this to come.
  
  -The thumbnails on the main page are a bit small, we're still experimenting with tweaks on things that look good on both desktop and mobile

• On Mobile there are now two panes
  -Swipe right to see categories, profile settings and notifications
  -Swipe left to see chat

• Many more skins
  -When you open your profile there are many more skins/color schemes you can choose from. Experiment and see what you like.
  -Some things won't work in some skins or better in others. Just bear that in mind when setting one. We did most of our testing on the default skin, as you folks that like dark mode are monsters.

• Google Analytics Enabled
  -I've enabled google analytics on the site to track which platform folks are using, where they are coming from and where they are spending time. Feel free to continue to use any blocking bits on this if you do on other sites, it is not being used for advertising only to track usage as the built-in analytics are pretty poor and I want to try to make this place better and more information helps!

Fixes:

• Notifications work better on the home page
  -if you loaded the home page you wouldn't see the notification count before
  -'see all notifications' now actually shows you all notifications instead of only the last 50(or however many it was)

• Stability upgrades and probably more I'm not remembering.

Other than the changes above and the new look 99% of things work the same as before just looking a little different.

Thanks for the patience as we evolve here - I'll keep this pinned for at least a few days and update it as I remember or notice new things.

Also big thanks to @Jb-boin who put in a bunch of time creating a bunch custom CSS to make this theme look good!

When you click the thumbnail here:

It will take you to the post instead of the author, same goes for clicking a user's avatar.

If you want to go to the user click their name in the topic and you'll be able to go there.

Thanks @Jb-boin for developing this one!

We're a bit overdue for one of these, but here are a few snippets on our traffic over the last month.

We'll start with the built-in analytics engine

It does not filter out bots and spiders from the total numbers there but does give us things like users, topics, comments and growth in those metrics.

Also our page views have essentially doubled since the end of the 2020!

Now onto some Google Analytics Stats.

Google Analytics was integrated into the site mid-January so now we finally have a full month's worth of data. It's still safe to pretty much ignore the 'new users' or 'growth' numbers since it's only been gathering data for 6 weeks. Google also does filter out spiders and bots, so this is a truer page view count.

February 2021 snapshot data:

We're pulling almost 800k page views a month!!!

I turn off all the creepy data gathering like age, race, socio-economic data, other interests and so on. But here's the platform split:

My favorite bit of data recently has been from the 'Search Console' though which reports where Oppo came up in search results and how many people clicked on it. While there are some obvious results like 'Opposite lock' that lead to us, there are others:

My favorite is this one though:

13 people that searched for 'Rebel 1100' saw the post I wrote here in their results and 1 actually clicked on it!

Also our Google News mentions are fun to look at.

While we've had a handful of posts appear in people's Google News feed only 1 has ever been clicked on.

Google Discover is new to this console as it is a fairly new product (at least I think).

We had one awesome post by @i86hotdogs on a frozen as hell Lake Erie show up in there and get a ton of clicks.

I have zero idea how things show up in these platforms now, but will do some reading. Basically it's all just black magic right now where things show up and when.

These numbers also show just how prevalent our awesome and large lurker community is. They appear in the wild occasionally and post or reach out (like to @sony1492 and his post about his Locost but they are always here and it's a solid testament to the quality and variety of content that gets churned out regularly. Also if you're a lurker, feel free to post as much as you want or keep lurking. We're glad you are here!

At any rate our growth has been solid and steady these last 4 months (hard to believe that's only how old this place is). Everyone here continues to impress me with content, interactions and advice. The @Curators have been amazing to work with as have @nickhasanexocet and @Jb-boin helping build things behind the scenes.

We've got some more big things planned in the next couple months so just keep on making this place awesome, and invite your friends!

Our big boost from yesterday and actual death of Kinja Oppo has mostly stayed with spikes in traffic around lunch time and so on. I kind of nerd out over this stuff, but if you're bored with it let me know and I'll stop posting these

We're north of 460 users and still growing with over 100 users logged in right now!

Keep it up oppo - this is awesome!

Some of you have asked for this since the beginning of the Hyphen so now the @Curators are finally ready to introduce the Oppo Merch Store!

If you click in the 'Merch' tab up top, the Merch section on the left mobile menu or go to oppomerch.com you will find yourself on the first generation Oppo merch page.

As of now there are only a couple things there right now, these were what we could get up easily but are working on more.

These are all fulfill-on-demand purchases from the vendor we are using so as of now there isn't any overhead for us to handle. This means less $ from the purchase goes to fund the site and dev, but as I'm sure many of you know handling production, inventory, shipping, payments and so on is a huge amount of work. If this takes off we may move to a more handled-by-us model but that'll wait and see. I expect to see some one-off stuff or limited batch items end up in Shoppo at some point too.

I'm not the expert here, that's @derpwagon who is hosting and managing the store side of all this (and will hopefully correct anything I've mis-stated or replace this post with one having more detail).

Thanks for still being here Oppo. This has been a monumental undertaking but it has also blossomed into an awesome place and we couldn't do any of this without all of you!!!

We're selling our house in Missouri and the listing only went live on Monday afternoon but as of about an hours ago it's under contract! The housing market is nutso now.

To be fair it's a fairly special house, large garage, 2 wooded acres, finished basement and in a quiet neighborhood. We were the first people to see it 11 years ago and made an offer on it that afternoon. The house needs some cosmetic work and a few minor repairs, but the buyer is a contractor so it works for them.

It's selling for asking price with zero concessions from us. Still contingent on inspection and appraisal, but fingers crossed for no problems there. Hopefully we close in a little less than a month!

@dr-zoidberg

Have fun though! Are those Orcas, so cool!

@shoop I love the white wagon wheels, they look so good!

@highlander normally I'd go for the Lincoln but that Olds is stunning!

@someoneatacura everything seems to be kept reasonable, not overly political and talking health related.

Hopefully everybody keeps a cool head and it doesn't require any action from us.

@snakesm13 I love this!

@ttyymmnn I think I see a 97+ F150 there so yeah, late 90s.

That is quite a fetching tower, but as a stand alone it looks awkward.

@wrong-wheel-drive wow that is surprising. I do know one of my neighbors just spent last week in Tahoe so it definitely is a popular place to head from the Bay area.

@wrong-wheel-drive Man that looks amazing! We’ve been wanting to get up to the Tahoe area for a few days too and this just cements that as a thing we have to do.

@i86hotdogs shit that's rotten. It sounds like you might be nearing an ultimatum point of 'finish moving me to the new position or I quit' which would hopefully kick them into gear.

@derp wow that is definitely a shit day. Hope it gets better tomorrow.

I've had my car broken into a couple times too and gotten the exact same response from the cops every time. They'll write up a report for you to file an insurance claim but that's it.