In The Beginning...

[Ultra]

Hello AutoPuzzlers,

I am working on creating a comprehensive article discussing the beginnings of and current status of this website.  I want it to include how members reacted to and felt about the site.  In order to do that, I need to get some feedback from you regarding what your initial impressions were of the site and how they changed as you became more familiar with it.

Also, specifically, Otto Puzzell and I founded the site.  I am hoping to get his take as to getting this idea started and launched.  His developmental work, especially programming and running the puzzles, is the glue that bound the site from idea to it's present reality.

I'll use all the feedback you guys give me in this thread in an article as good as I can write.  I promise you that.  It will make an excellent introduction for people as to what this place is and why it matters.

Please, reply with feedback below,

Charlie

Thanks again to each of you for your continued active participation here at AutoPuzzles

[Paul Jaray]

It's a strange coincidence that you are going to write it right now, I'll tell you why via PM.
I'll be glad to add my feedback.
I joined internet quite late...I thought I could keep using my parent's connection the few days I was back home.
In those days I used to download tons of pictures and pages (and intere websites) to update my collection.
But I was mainly interested in my books and magazines.
When I decided that I needed a connection to keep searching obscure cars, I found Autopuzzles.
It was 2007 and I thought I knew a lot about cars.
Each time I found a "Guess the car" game online, I thought it was pointless to join, they were all quite easy.
I joined AP (and Autopuzzles only) because I liked the formula: no time range, nationality or whatever filter...you can post a car out of the blue and someone will find it.
It became highly addictive...and I'm not kidding.
I start to use internet only for searching cars I had to identify for this place.
Once a car was identified, I had to look for more info about.
This led me to know hundreds of sites of really obscure,weird and unknown cars.
And each time it was worse...the more I was looking for the more I was discovering.
It became a mission...I had to solve each and every puzzle!
For me it was easy, I spent my previous years collecting pictures from the web and in 2008 (during a pleasant holiday in Afghanistan) I had 7 months to organize them properly, using tags in addition to my division in foders.
At that time there was no division in classes...you were a rookie or an expert.
That's why I collected so many points...the 99% of the pictures came from the web (today there is a relevant share of scanned pics from private collections) and I had them (well mostly at least) on my hd...and I could answer to each puzzle beside the Rookie section.
Now it's different, once you are a Pro there is much competition and during the years we had the pleasure to have some quite knowledgeable experts (in the real sense of the term).
I took a lot from this place, I'll be glad to give something back.
It was a nice idea but the way it was carried out and the website you built aroud make it extraordinary.
I can go on for hours but I think you got the point...

[Allemano]

just a few bumpy words..

With all its drawbacks* I have to admit I got addicted to AP from the first moment.
I was coming from Italiaspeed's 'mystery car competition'. A puzzle site which is long gone and was only about Italian related cars. 75america was one of my buddies back then. My interest in cars was huge, but my knowledge was underdeveloped. After the melt-down of Italiaspeed I was looking for something new on the internet. I don't know exactly what it was, but I stumbled on AP in 2008 while I was looking for some carrozzeria cars.

* too much 'wasted' spare time, missed meetings with friends or even worse girlfriends, loss of interest in all 'important' things in life etc...

After my mailadress was rejected three times I finally got access to AP and a whole new universe opened. I still can recall the thrill of the first days with all those fantastic new puzzles that collapsed on me. I esp. remember the puzzles of @re -- a master of preparing group puzzles who unfortunately has left the board meanwhile. Don't get me wrong I liked the puzzle of Otto, Paul, Ray, Quiller, etc. etc. as well!
I always prefered puzzles about 'real' cars, not too much of all those kit or backyard tinker stuff. (though there always have been some interisting puzzles on that field, too).


Later when I got the chance to set up own puzzles it became my favourite activity here. Who has replied? How many cars are still unsolved? Was Wendax here and has eaten all of them? (or in earlier times: Paul Jaray )

A real killjoy and like a bombshell GIS made it almost impossible for me to play like before. Nothing was and nothing will ever be like the day before GIS. That's why in my opinion the idea of AP died a little and am not as enthusiastic as before. Say as it is you can't completely trust anyone as there is no way to prove cheating until today.

Now I'm an 'old' and experienced member, but what can I say? One thing never changed: I still don't know more than 1% of new puzzles each day.   

There would be so much left to say, but finally I want thankfully appreciate the huge amount of work done by Ultra and Otto who always were the base of this project to work successful and smoothly.

Thank you so much!

[faksta]

This is an amazing idea, Ultra!

To add a little bit from myself, I was invited to AutoPuzzles by Arunas back in 2008. We've been both members of Ultimatecarpage forums by then and I was posting some USSR stuff on a rare occassion while Arunas was posting some massively unknown vehicles. We somehow started to communicate and he told me I should have checked this place where people have fun guessing cars. My first thought was something like: 'Why should I spend time for that?' But still I registered and went through the puzzles and I found out that the idea was bigger than just to play a game and the quality of puzzles was simply amazing, I didn't know most of the cars posted here despite I thought I knew so many. That made me stay and try to crack more of the puzzles.

Little by little the place started to expand and some really impressive features started to appear and some very experienced and interesting members started to pop up. It is notable how AutoPuzzles turned from a guessing game into encyclopedia first and then into what it is now - 'The Internet's Museum of Rare Cars'. And what is best of all is that it really is a museum of rare cars - try searching tons of rare vehicles in the web and the only place you would find some of them is here.

I'm happy that I'm a part of this project, even though I have not been very active lately, and I'm happy to have met people who inhabit this place.

[Carnut]

I'd never been involved in any of the the Internet "Guess that car" games, but I did like to answer the Mystery Car puzzle in Classic & Sports Car magazine every month (like some others on here too!) and it was when I was researching to find the names of some little Fiat fuoriserie cars that had featured that month (they were by Viotto if my memory serves me well) that I stumbled upon the AutoPuzzles site.  I think it took me straight to Paul Jaray's coachbuilding feature and for me it was like a little boy being propelled into a toy shop for the very first time! 

My main interest in cars had been the Italian Carrozzeria cars ever since I first discovered them way back in about 1959/60, and to see such an amount of information I never knew existed was an absolute revelation to me.  I registered immediately then started to look at what else was on site.  I found the Rookies section and couldn't believe how many of the cars I knew (or thought I knew..)  I must have picked up 4 or 5 points that very first day - actually I believe it was in one of Allemano's 'Almost Mint' puzzles, where there were some TVRs pictured - a marque I know more than a little about..!

Once registered I couldn't stop myself logging on several times a day.  It's disappeared now but it used to tell you at the top how many hours (eventually days, weeks and even months!) you had been logged on to AP since registering and the total rose alarmingly quickly!

What I especially liked is that there was always something new to see and read every time I logged on.  I liked the camaraderie and the site was completely devoid of the awful back-biting and nastiness you get on sites like PistonHeads (which I had resolved to leave behind because of it..) and I liked the fact there were like-minded people from so many countries around the world and national boundaries were meaningless!

But what struck me most of all was just how little I knew!  Once I got over my shock at that I started to look back at old puzzles and the amount of information which just isn't available anywhere else was utterly staggering and I was completely sucked in.

Now I visit no other sites to contribute, only to research, and spend hours on what my wife calls "That stupid Website"..

It has been life-changing and I couldn't even imagine what life would be like without it!

Thanks for changing my life Ultra (and Otto and everyone else involved!)

[nicanary]

No long-winded explanations fro me - I actually can't remember how I found the site in the first place. I think it was mentioned on another site and I visited to see for myself - I could answer one of the questions so I registered, and that was the start of the obsession. I am permanently logged-on, since on-one else has access to my laptop, so my "hours logged" figure is misleading. I work at night 5 times a week, as well as some afternoons, so can't always take advantage of my "locks".

Always a car-mad kid, and keenly interested in motor sport of the 50s/60s, I was amazed to find a community of like-minded folks who didn't object to my occasional "stupid" suggestion, or naivety. As Carnut says, there are some car forums out there who treat it like a minor war, and fools are not suffered gladly. I have a habit of using a scattergun approach, and answer puzzles I have no hope of solving, knowing that I might get lucky with one or two. Nobody had laughed at me, nor asked me to refrain - thank you.

I am concerned that, as the years pass, we will rely more and more on one-offs and homebuilt specials, and these will prove unsolvable. Today's cars are just so boring (I drive a Golf, if you're interested), and I have no interest in them - will they be suitable candidates for future puzzles?  And then there's the huge problem of attracting more Rookies who will last the course - so many seem to register and disappear after finding they can't hack it. Without them, the forum could implode, with nothing left but Pros.

While I'm passing opinions, is there anything we can do about the Search facility? Just about all my puzzles have been reposts, even though I tried several combinations of words when checking. It appears that it is not sufficiently sophisticated to "spot" the intention, so to speak. When I reach Pro level, later this summer I'd guess, all I'll have left is setting puzzles - the Pro questions are way beyond my ability !

By the way, I'm stunned that members have an archive of images, and web pages. Blimey, where do you get the time for that? All my answers, I absolutely promise, are from my head, and my knowledge of where to look. I have Georgano, and that's about it. (And it usually doesn't have a photo of the really obscure marques!)

My daily routine - check e-mails, check e-bay for items I collect (race programmes), go to the "quick-glance" forums (ten-tenths, nostalgia forum, pistonheads, motor sport magazine) and then endless hours on AP. You've wrecked my life.

[Allan L]

I seem to have registered late in 2006 and it doesn't seem that long ago. Quite a lot of the members who were active then have dropped out but happily for us Ultra and Karn Utz are still with it, even if a name has changed meanwhile. It was Karn who popped up on another forum which drew my attention to this place, and belated thanks for that.

Like most of us who've been around for a while I expect, my normal research tools are books and magazines and when I started I still had access to a library which had runs of magazines from the beginning of motoring onwards. Even now that the internet is so useful, one still has to start with a name and then try to be sure the result is actually correct. The bane of my life is that Google shows any image found on a site that has included the keyword you search for.
e.g. search for Marendaz Special and amongst the many images is:


However GSI is supposed to get to the exact image, but of course can only work if the image is on the net elsewhere. Such puzzles as I post have usually been from my own photos, so I hope those that answer them can't cheat.

As has been mentioned above, it's a great time sponge and there are many interesting people here.

[grobmotorix]

In my case it started all in the very early 1980s, when I´ve started collecting car sales literature at an age of 10.

There was no internet and I began to learn more about the history of the automobile by reading books.

And I´ve always bought the popular german vintage car magazine "Oldtimer-Markt",
where every month there were and are mystery car and bike photos, placed by readers there to help identify their vehicles.
Every month I´ve tried to find out what it was and sometimes I was able to help.

And then came the internet!
In those days nobody really would have been able to imagine how huge the mass of available information on every topic would develop...
From ca. 1997 on I´ve used it mainly to collect photos and to build up my own HDD collection.

There were many other forums, where I´ve found car puzzles to solve - but after a while all of them turned out to be too easy, really.
And it always was just one thread without a good search engine.

Then in March 2007 I´ve found autopuzzles.com by chance and instantly got addict...

I think I´ve answered around 50 puzzles the first day and instantly got an expert -
From that very day on I knew where I´d spent much time in future...

A real cut at autopuzzles came with the photo search engines from Google and Bing - points were easy for cheaters now.

And I switched over mostly to scans from old boks and magazines when I post a new puzzle to ensure it can´t be found with just one click.
Points are harder to get today - but that never was my interest.

I really enjoy this huge brain-drain to collect any information about all those incredible cars of the world.
Autopuzzles is an amazing encyclopedia project with so many cool contributers from all over the globe.

My only wish for the future:

try to intregrate the puzzle photos into the search engine´s results.
This would make many searches much easier.

AND THANK YOU ALL FOR KEEPING MY FAVOURITE WASTE OF TIME SO DAMN ATTRACTIVE OVER ALL THE YEARS!

It has helped me to categorize my HDD photo archive and to hugely broaden my
automotive knowledge as can be seen at this screenshot of my car photo file index:

[Otto Puzzell]

Interesting topic - let me stew on it, and I'll post later. I haven't had my coffee yet.

Maybe a travel day again tomorrow, so it might not get done until Saturday. 

[Otto Puzzell]

Here are some recollections and impressions:

The concept

After joining a couple of long-gone boards, and seeing them grow, become flame-war battlegrounds and/or tools of commerce that devalued their members, only to fade away, Ultra (Charlie) had an idea to leverage one of the more popular discussion areas from those now departed boards (Name That Car puzzles) into the central them of a stand-alone board. Great idea, but much work would be required.

The execution

The bulk of the work in getting the AutoPuzzles site off the ground (selecting and configuring the forum software, securing a hosting company, and more) was Ultra's (Charlie's) doing. He did this while running a successful restaurant, started a recording studio, and likely juggled some other endevours he hasn't shared. I don't know how he managed all that. I churned out a amateurish 'front page' that highlighted feature puzzles, articles and photos. It's gone through a couple of updates, evolving from the general appearance you see here, from the November 2006 period:

http://web.archive.org/web/20061106130153/http://www.autopuzzles.com/

I suspect another revision to the look and feel of the Front Page is in order, so that it regains its visual similarity to the forum pages.

While I posted a lot of (most of) the puzzles at the beginning, within a year we had picked up some additional members who became active posters, including Arthur Dent and Stepehn M, both of whom have, sadly, become infrequent visitors. I did some recruiting, of a sort in '06 and '07, by joining and participating in some Name That Car sections of other boards, and suggesting, within those discussions, that there was something special here at AutoPuzzles, for NTC aficionados.

Getting Rolling

In 2007, power posters GREYWOLF, Tifosi and @re became very active, and we got our first look at Paul Jaray, who wielding a fantastic memory and an impressive catalogue of reference materials, far outstripped anyone on the board. Unlike some of the other early very active posters, I'm pleased that PJ still visits regularly. 

Personal perspective.

I've made some great acquaintances in the time this sites been active, to which I owe Charlie a debt of gratitude. I regret that I've alienated some people with whom I once enjoyed a good rapport. I hope I've learned from my folly, and hope I will not go down that path again. Like others, I've found the appearance of GSI to be damaging and damnable, as I succumbed to its temptation early. I suppose my public coming out on that subject brought to the forefront something that some others were already doing, and at least alerted many to something that they might not have known about. I'm pleased as punch that those members who posses libraries of printed material from which to pull puzzles, have been keeping the boards vital and active with material that thwarts such cheating.

What's next?

I have no idea! I'm not good at prognostication. While I expected the AP site would be a going thing, way back in '06, I wasn't sure it would grow to its current size and scope. 1,200 members is a good number. Add to that the thwarted spammers who have come and gone, and that number would surely swell to 5 digits. I'm happy that so many legitimate car fans have found this a good place to hang out, to swap knowledge and photos, and begin virtual friendships.

Onward, and upward!

[Otto Puzzell]

In 2007, power posters GREYWOLF, Tifosi and @re became very active, and we got our first look at Paul Jaray, who wielding a fantastic memory and an impressive catalogue of reference materials, far outstripped anyone on the board. Unlike some of the other early very active posters, I'm pleased that PJ still visits regularly. 

Re-reading that, I think I should have said: I'm pleased that PJ still visits regularly, it's a shame many others have moved on, or visit infrequently. I believe all of the early posters, and all of them since, are pleased that PJ still frequents AP. 

[Carnut]

Re-reading that, I think I should have said: I'm pleased that PJ still visits regularly, it's a shame many others have moved on, or visit infrequently. I believe all of the early posters, and all of them since, are pleased that PJ still frequents AP. 

100% endorsed by me.
I'm bewildered that some of the early visitors like @re, whose fantastic puzzles I stumble upon almost daily and who seemed to love the site, have now left it behind.  Why that is I just don't understand.  There is no better site that they might have gone to.

[Otto Puzzell]

Perhaps their spouses are not as tolerant of "that damned site". 

[Allemano]

I'm bewildered that some of the early visitors like @re, whose fantastic puzzles I stumble upon almost daily and who seemed to love the site, have now left it behind.  Why that is I just don't understand.

He explained in one of his last posts. Have to check in which it exactly was.

[Carnut]

I'm bewildered that some of the early visitors like @re, whose fantastic puzzles I stumble upon almost daily and who seemed to love the site, have now left it behind.  Why that is I just don't understand.

He explained in one of his last posts. Have to check in which it exactly was.

I do recall upsetting him a bit by suggesting there was a bit of a hint of cliqueiness, which I regret, but I don't see that as a reason for a grown-up throwing the towel in...