The Petrol Club is a new, lightweight online community site for people who are into exhaust fumes, senseless pollution, motorsports gear, deforestation, and other forms of environmental desecration. Meet other exhaust gas enthusiasts, get to know each other, swap stories and links, or even arrange meet-ups.
I'm neither trying to revive my previous community site, the Exhaust Gas Circle, nor to replace the discussion boards at Abgase.club. I simply hope for it to be a way for friends of recreational pollution to meet each other and stay in touch in a more shared way than private e-mail threads.
I had to shut down the Exhaust Gas Circle because of how much work it was to moderate the site. To try and keep that from happening again, the Petrol Club is different in some important ways. It is:
- Invite only. you have to be invited by an existing member, or ask me for an account personally.
- Low on features. fill out a profile of your preferences, search for other members by interest, write private messages, or post something to a public space. That's it. No discussion boards, no big photo galleries, no file sharing.
- Focussed on my own interests. to make it less likely that I'll grow tired of running the site, it's not built for topics I have no personal interest in. It revolves mainly around my own fondnesses: two-stroke engines, motorsports, reckless and senseless air pollution, deforestation, racing gear, and synthetic protective clothing.
How to Join
If you'd like to access the site, please contact me using one of the methods described on the contact page and let me know the following:
- The e-mail address under which you'd like me to create an account for you.
- If I haven't been in touch with you before, a short introduction about yourself and why you'd like to join the site. Important: I'm only asking for the second point to make sure that you're not a bit, and you know what you're signing up for. You don't have to actually be into any of the topics yourself. If you're just a curious visitor and would like to find out more by chatting with some actual exhaust enthusiasts, just mention this in your message. Everybody's welcome as long as they behave properly.
Visit the Club
A Sneak Peek
If you'd like to know more about what the site offers before applying for access, here's a quick overview of the main features.
Each member gets a profile page on which they can write posts and declare their main interests (see user tags on the right). You can also customise your profile with a portrait photo and a banner background image.
The top menu shows the main sections of the Club site: a guide for new users, the user's dashboard with a personalised feed, the people search, a list of spaces where specific sub-topics can be discussed, and a calendar to notify other members of events or organise meet-ups.
In the Interests section, members can answer some questions about which topics of the site they're into, and in which way. For example, you can tell other members whether you just appreciate exhaust fumes passively or also burn gasoline for fun yourself, and whether you enjoy having an exhaust pipe pointed at you or rather get a kick out of subjecting somebody else to some exhaust fumes (or both).
The Preferences section is a more freeform page where you can select from a list all the topics that you're personally most interested in. These are separated into types of pollution, types of motor vehicles and gas-driven power tools, motorsports disciplines, types of racing gear or other protective gear, and types of synthetic clothing. If you don't find a particular fondness in the given lists, you can also add your own entries.
These preferences cannot be explicitly filtered for in the people search form, but if you enter any of the terms in the search box, users who have mentioned them on their Preferences page will show up in the results.
On the Collections tab, you get four free-form text fields where you can describe any interesting vehicles, machines, or personal gear you own which are relevant to the topics of the site. This could be helpful for planning meet-ups, because you can see what interesting stuff someone might be able to bring.
You can go into as little or as much detail as you want, and even add pictures. As for the Preferences section, what you enter here will make you show up in the search results, so anyone looking for "KTM" will find you if you mention that you own a KTM dirtbike.
Every user gets a little gallery on their page, where they can upload a few photos. This isn't meant to be a large-scale photo sharing feature, but feel free to upload a few pictures of yourself, your polluting machines, or some speck of defiled nature.
The heart of the Club, on the people search page you can filter the list of members by many different criteria. If you're looking for someone to chat about a topic you're excited about, filter the list by people who have expressed interest in it. If your topic is not one of the predetermined interests, use the text search field. If somebody has mentioned your search terms anywhere on their profile page, such as in their collection, they will show up.
If you're looking to meet up with someone in the real world and enjoy causing some air pollution together, the Meetings and Location filters are most important. People can declare whether they're up to meet in person in the first place. If so, the Country, Area, and City filters can help you find someone not too far away.