#Housekeeping

It is very simple: Stay civil.

Commenters can say anything on TTAC, as long as it is said in a civilized way. It’s not what one says on TTAC that can attract a ban, only how comments are made. Rudeness, bullying, name calling can quickly lead to a permanent bannage.

Trolls ‘R’ Us

The campaign for TTAC’s Top Troll goes into its final stretch. Nominations for the TTAC Top Troll Poll have been made. Some folks received multiple nominations, but we will not declare a winner just yet. The Top Troll will be decided by popular vote. Tomorrow, Friday, we go to the Top Troll Polls. But first, we need your help.

Andrew Lok, a.k.a. contestant #28, won the Thursday round of the TTAC Future Writers Week by a wide margin. His epos on stolen GPS machines, and his pilgrimage to the Valhalla of Speed, the Nürburgring der Niebelongen, received 45 percent of all votes on Thursday. In the following week, when the full results of TTAC’s Future Writers Week were published, Lok was gone.

TTAC’s Managing Editor Derek Kreindler shocked me with the news that he will undergo a life-threatening operation on Monday: His tonsils will be removed. Should his doctor not know what he is doing, now he does.

Derek had even more shocking news for me: He will be out all week, nursing his removed tonsils with the vanilla ice cream they had promised me when my tonsils came out at age five. They never gave me the ice cream, but leaving me alone at the helm of TTAC, Derek gives me a big problem. You, Future Writers, can help:

You noticed that I needed to catch my breath a bit from TTAC’s Future Writers Week. The results still have me breathless. At the start, I thought with seven a day, I probably have enough until Friday. Was I ever wrong.

Friday – thank God – was a great day in TTAC’s Future Writers Week. It definitely was a lot better than Dud-Tuesday. The readers loved what the Friday round of writers wrote. The winners were separated by just a few votes, always a good sign of an exciting race. My favorite came in 4th, which again proves that my tastes are totally removed from the mainstream. And the winners are:

This is day five of TTAC’s Future Writers Week. We have three new winners. We have seven new contestants. And I have a huge problem.

The Wednesday installment of TTAC’s Future Writers Week, where YOU decide who will write for you, ended better than the round the day before. This time, you voted for three serviceable writers, and they are:

The Tuesday round of TTAC’s Future Writers Week ends with no new writers selected. That round definitely did not trigger mass excitement among our judges. Some even wanted to be able to assign demerits. Contestants 13 and 14 were the only halfway real entries in what otherwise was email snippets and proposals nobody wanted. Getting the most votes (from a definitely apathetic panel of judges) while running virtually unopposed does not constitute a win.

The winners are Michael Trainor, George William Herbert, and Grant Tillery. TTAC congratulates thee. You shall drop the masks of your screen names, and step out into the harsh lights of the public, and the etching-strength vitriol of TTAC’s feared commentariat.

Previously known as Contestants 4, 7, and 1, the three garnered the lion’s share of the votes in the Monday round of TTAC’s Future Writers Week, where, in true interactive fashion, you decide who will write for you in the future, and whom you will criticize for the biased and one-sided reporting, especially on a slow news-day. It is in your hands, and it will be so for the rest of the week. Remember: Today is another day of the battle of the writers, and another day where you decide the outcome.

Somewhere above the 70th parallel

January is upon us, and with it the seasonal rise in traffic at big car sites such as TTAC. Over the past days, the load on our servers was unseasonably and unreasonably high. My unconfirmed hunch is that it is all the future authors checking their standings. We’ll never know. To address the problem, and hopefully to increase your class-leading browsing experience, the TTAC Geek Squad, billeted in an abandoned NORAD bunker in the darker reaches of Canada, decided to move TTAC to another server.

It’s TTAC Future Writers Week where YOU decide who will write at TTAC in the future. This could be their first (or last) step on the way to their eventual Pulitzer or Wurlitzer Prize. Please choose wisely, carefully, and fairly. It’s your, the future of several nations, and most of all, the auto industry that is at stake.

The echo to Writers Wanted was is phenomenal. 22 applications poured in so far, and they still keep coming. I quickly looked over them. Some are good, real good. Some are real funny. Some are funny, even if they are not trying to be funny. YOU will decide who makes the grade.