Building a Community
Jan 1, 2025
Happy New Year everyone!!!
Welcome to the My Race Data community. The forum has been up for six months now and everything seems to be working very well. Thank you to everyone who has joined the team.
Our Purpose
We hope the My Race Data forum can be a place where motor sport enthusiasts can hang out with like minded individuals and enjoy participating. We also hope the My Race Data forum can become a community where people can teach, learn and share.
We all have our talents and gifts. Everyone has something to contribute. When we work together we can do great things.
How can I Help?
If you are reading this you are already helping. By participating you are helping build a community. Even if you are not comfortable expressing your opinion in a public forum you can still express your approval by giving a like. When someone posts in a topic at the bottom of their post you will see a little heart.
If you are a member, you can click the heart to give a like. Likes are a way of saying you like this person’s post. Only the person who wrote that post can see who liked their post. The rest of the community however will see the number of likes. (2 in the example above)
If you find something that you find offensive or inappropriate you can also flag the post
This feature is also anonymous to other community members. You can send a message to the forum moderators and suggest the post should be hidden or other actions taken. The forum guidelines.
Building Trust
By giving likes and participating we are building trust. Members who receive lots of likes obviously share a common opinion. If someone makes a suggestion and receives a lot of likes it is probably a good idea. If someone gives advise and receives a lot of likes it is probably good advice. By giving likes and participating you are building trust.
Just like in any community trust is earned and rewarded on the forum. The more you participate in the forum the more privileges you’ll earn. As you participate you will earn badges for doing various things.
This is a public forum available to anyone on the internet. There are bad actors on the internet so when you first sign up to be a member your abilities to create topics and post pictures and links is restricted. This helps control spam.
Earning Respect
As you spend time on the forum and begin to participate, the longer you’ve been around and how often you return counts toward building trust. At first you’ll be given badges for little things like giving a like or filling out your profile.
If you like it here eventually you begin to get badges for showing up a lot or starting a great topic. Everyone who visits will be able to see your track record. If you give a newbie some advise they will be able to see you’ve been around and know a thing or two.
The Rewards 
The greatest reward will be having somewhere to go when you need a solution or good advise from people you trust. Together we can make the internet (and the world) better.
As you earn trust you will be allowed to post more pictures, start a wiki, start polls, create calendars, post events, vote on things, create group chats and more. Eventually you may be chosen as a moderator. The community can grow and adapt as we try new things and have new ideas.
The Future
As we start the new year the team here has some really exciting stuff planned. We are working on creating the Crew Academy. Volunteers who lend a hand to a team can earn badges to show they’ve crewed for a team. Teams who have gotten help from a volunteer can confirm experience.
The race team uses all kinds of products and we are going to start a Product Review. We would also like to sell team swag like t-shirts and stickers and plan to create a Market Place. We may open these up to trusted team members
Team members would be able to post reviews of products and services or sell products and services to other members. Notice the word may. These features would depend on other members providing feed back. Fair practices would be rewarded and rip offs would be ban. This would be done in a fully transparent way open for the community to judge.
So remember…
Criticism isn’t innately negative. Criticize things and ideas not people. Temper your judgement with mercy.
Thank you for participating and good luck in the new year and beyond!