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.

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!

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!

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!

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!

Hello Fellow Opponauts!

We find ourselves in an unpleasant place this week, our former home is dying, we’re building a new home though. This one will be owned by, developed by, curated by and is for Opponauts.

What you are looking at today is the first generation of hopefully something that will become grand. The current working title is The Hyphen. This is a nickname, but it stuck. In the current form it is a fairly modern forum which helps us emulate a lot of Kinja functionality while adding some nice features as well. This platform will continue to grow and evolve as it is in the early stages of life now, but the community will survive. I want to thank you for patience and understanding too, it has not always been smooth in this first week of operation but we’re getting there.

This is what I want to talk to you about Oppo, the vision we have at the Hyphen for what Oppo can be, should be.
First and foremost Oppositelock will always be about the community, talking to each other, educating, sharing, helping and yes shitposting. Some of the deepest conversations I’ve had have been right here with strangers on the internet, yet is always felt like so much more.

Secondly, at some point we’ll have to figure out a way to pay for this thing. Soon(ish) a donation funding source will be setup to cover costs, fund future growth and give a few leftover sheckels to those putting their blood sweat and tears into building this thing to buy beer and pizza (or their chosen vice). There will also be a merch store once we figure out how to build the damn thing. I’m extremely grateful for anything anyone can contribute to help us build this.

Our costs are manageable right now so if you can’t afford to give please do not, there is no need to strain yourself to do this. If you want to help oppo in another way you can make content, engage on the forum, recruit friends and so on – these are all extremely valuable things to do. Or if you have technical expertise in web development or graphic design and want to help, email me at oppo@opposite-lock.com, I’ll be putting together a roster of folks and reaching out when something is needed.

Third I would love Oppo to also be a destination, with a frontpage showcasing the very best of oppo. Things like This day in aviation history, Flightline, The Jeep Experience and so many others I can’t even count them. This vision is at least months away, but it’s been in the back of our minds since we started building this thing. I’d also love to see ad/merch revenue sharing with authors as well when we can manage it.

This is a bit of a fantasy, but I think it is possible. It’ll take all of us but it will be a hell of a thing if we can pull it off.
In the coming days we’ll also put together an ‘Owners Manual’ of sorts. Kind of a guiding rules of keeping Oppo awesome so stay tuned.

Lastly, but not least I would like to call out a few Opponauts in particular that have helped make this a reality. Some of which are right in front helping people in the forum every day and others behind the scenes but this wouldn’t be possible without all of them. In no particular order they are RallyDarkStrike, NickHasAnExocet, Jb boin and Rusty Vandura. There are countless more who have contributed but then I’d just be naming all the members, but we couldn’t do any of it without all of you.

Thank you Oppo – it has been an amazing ride and you’ve all been so embracing of the new platform. I’m truly touched and I hope we don’t disappoint you.

-jminer

Here are a couple tidbits from our hyphen performance and usage I thought I'd share!

First we've steadily climbed in the search engine results rankings and while it wanders a bit due to algorithmic gremlins the Hyphen is usually in the top 3 results for both 'Oppositelock' and 'Opposite Lock' in Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo! The site is usually right under Kinja Oppo.

Each engine grabs a different bit of text to display under it, have to figure out where that's coming from.

In addition here's the last week's traffic data from the internal engine.

I did setup Google Analytics almost 2 weeks ago so it's still gathering data and putting together trends but here are a few snippits worth sharing. Caveats both this is new data so ignore any percentage growth displayed in the screenshots and anyone that blocks google tracking data (no objection to this process) won't be fully counted. Also a note that it counts devices as users as it's not aware of our logins. So me connecting to the Hyphen on my phone, ipad and desktop is 3 users/sessions.

Device breakdown:

This is about the 50/50 split I was expecting.

Location Breakdown:

Only showing the top 10 countries above, we've registered users from 29 countries so far.

OS Breakdown:

As this engine runs and generates more data I'll continue to share things I find interesting. It has also been years since I've managed a google analytics account so I'll find more things to share as I become more familiar with it.

Thanks for coming along with my boring-assed display of data!

Tonight I wrote the largest personal check of my life - I paid a landlord first months rent + deposit which was a larger amount than the down payment we bought our house in Missouri with 11 years ago. Hell it was larger than the purchase price of my previous daily driver 12 Focus.

The Bay Area is fairly nuts with it's rental prices, that's not news but I found a place! After weeks of going to 5-10 places and touring, talking with agents and countless hours browsing listings I have a signed lease! Timing wise we're actually relatively lucky, a year ago houses would get into bidding wars for rent and would have signed leases within days of being listed. The market has cooled since then, but it is still crazy.

It falls in our budget and meets our requirements of garage, 3 bedroom and not tiny. It's not large, but it'll do! The rent is 3x what our mortgage in Missouri is, but it's also worth 5x what our house in Missouri is if we were to buy.

We now have a Pleasanton California mailing address. Now I get to call utility companies and such to get stuff in our name and my wife gets to call movers.

Next we have to sell our house in Missouri which I'm not looking forward to, but will be glad to finally close that chapter.

@bobloblaw awesome! It looks so good.

@ita97 well done! I'm just learning how to setup a bike to fit well, but it is rewarding to understand what both me and the bike likes.

Parts and accessories are still impossible to find so nice work finding shoes! We'd been talking about upgrading my wife's bike but when I was in REI this weekend grabbing tubes they had like 6 bikes.

@essextee I love it

@cb Reel Big Fish - We're not happy 'til you're not happy.

Not super uplifting, but the brassy music filled with frustration works for me!

@vincentmalamute I hate how complicated oil changes ok Toyotas have become, my wife's RAV4 is similar and it makes the oil change on my cartridge filter TDI look straightforward.

@spacekraken wow that's a lot of light!

Like you I've really come to enjoy riding at night.

@wrong-wheel-drive It is expensive, but it is a 3 bedroom house with a 2 car garage and central A/C. Yeah it’s 3x what my mortgage was in Missouri, but I had to live in Missouri for housing to be that cheap...

@hfv I’d take the soul! The interior layout of Minis drive me nuts, and love the way the soul looks.

Also you can cheat and copy the markup code by using the quote function on a post. That’ll let you see the formatting code for various bits.

@way2blu Looks like an absolute blast. I do love that car of yours!

@dusty-ventures Good luck! The 100 acre wood is in such a pretty part of Missouri. Enjoy it, there’s a ton of great driving roads down there too.

I haven’t been to watch it in years (and now live too far away) but have spent more time than I can recall down in that part of the state and bombing down those gravel roads.