Interview with Scott Molinari - Creator of Skooppa!

[The Sandman]

The Sandman submitted a new Article:

Interview with Scott Molinari - Creator of Skooppa!

Scott Molinari has been been a part of the forum admin and forum software world for a long time and his name is quite familiar to most everyone here. He's probably best known for his work with vB Germany but in the future it may well be that he will be best known as the creator of Skooppa .

Of course, Scott is also a great asset to the TAZ community (and has resisted my attempts to get him to join the Admin Zone staff many times over the years). I was able to convince him to participate what turned out to be a comprehensive peek into the world of Scott Molinari.

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Please tell us a bit about yourself.

I am, what I feel should be the halfway point in my life at 49. I live in Germany, but am an still an American, even though I’ve lived over half my life now in Germany. I am married to a lovely German woman, my wife Carmen and have a son Alex, who is now 23.

I moved to Germany with the US Air Force in 1985. After the cold war ended, around 1990 to 1991, the Air Force closed up a majority of the bases in Europe and I was reassigned to Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas. At the time I moved to Texas, Carmen was pregnant with Alex and decided to stay in Germany to give birth to him, because she trusted the German medical system better than the Air Force medical system (and so did I). I took vacation and flew back to Germany to be with her during the birth. What a great experience a birth of your own child is!

Because of the pullout in Europe, there was a glut in manpower in the States, so the Air Force offered everyone a special deal to get out of their contract, provided the person would have a job and so I got a contract with Manessmann Demag Baumaschine. They built some of the world’s best mobile cranes and we still do actually. I still work for the same company, which is now owned by Terex. I am currently the Service Development Manager for a worldwide network of service stations for our products. I am responsible to help constantly improve the processes and tools we have and use to support our customers. One of the tools being a new and successful Customer Relationship Management system.

In my spare time, I had worked for vBulletin and am now working on my new project, Skooppa.


Do you miss living in the USA?

To be honest, no, I don't miss living in the States at all. I've made my home here in Germany. I am not sure how life is in the States now...

Read more about this article here...

 

[Vilandra]

I really enjoyed reading that. There's a lot of good advice in there - thank you Scott!

 

[zappaDPJ]

Well worth reading, great interview

 

[meetdilip]

Nice interview. Nicely conceived by Scott and Howard.

 

[Shelley]

Always have enjoyed to hear what Scott has to say, Fantastic Interview.

 

[AndyB]

I really enjoyed the interview. Thank you, Scott and Howard.

 

[agandl]

Great interview, good to get to know a bit more about you Scott

I was interested to learn a bit more about the history of vB too, having come so late to the world of forums

 

[doubt]

Thank you Scott and Howard!

 

[Digital Doctor]

Great article. Scott and I feel quite similar about online communities and moving beyond threads.

 

[s.molinari]

Thanks everyone.

It is funny and really interesting what just happened. I saw the interview was posted (thanks Howard!) and was hoping some of you had gone to http://project.skooppa.com to register and I went to look and Pow! I see the site is down and I am thinking, "WTF! How did that happen. Unbelievable!"

And this is why I also want to get Skooppa going. With a VPS or your own server, etc. you are responsible for any "uptime", as the site's owner. If the Skooppa site (which currently is on a root server and is NOT Skooppa) had been busy (thankfully it isn't.... yet), who knows how long people would have been met with the "502 Bad Gateway" error message. That just simply sucks. Maybe I need to also invest in a system that will warn me automatically, when the site isn't working properly. I thought I had turned off everything that might interfere with the site (like the admin panel doing its own updates..ugh!) and looky, looky here, there is still something throwing a wrench into the cogs of the site. Now I have to go find out what happened and fix that too. See, a service shouldn't make its customers worry about the service, yet currently hosting services, unless they are truly well managed and thus more costlier, leave the customer doing exactly that......worrying about the service. Terrible. Skooppa will definitely fix that!

Scott

 

[PoetJC]

Oh my!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Late to the party again... Will have to give this a thorough read a little later.
Great to see this interview The Sandman. Will have a few comments later

J.

 

[s.molinari]

Here is a bit better image of the editor. I just noticed the one in the interview is a bit fuzzy.

Scott

 

[BarneyL]

Now I know the man behind Skoopa and ... fun read!;-)

 

[punchbowl]

Have to say, I only know Scott through online interactions and we haven't had that many but what I really appreciate about the guy is the ability to have an argument about some strongly held belief and still keep it civil. And even more so he desperately wants to understand the opposing view. He rarely just dismisses it as stupid/irrelevant/etc. I appreciate that because so many people are completely entrenched with their views.

 

[esquire]

s.molinari - great interview. I suggest you provide a little intro as to what Skooppa is on your site somewhere. When you go to the forum home you can't figure out easily what you've landed on. For some reason, I think the name is perfect for chewing tobacco - I'm not sure why but probably it has to do with my youth, seeing commercials during baseball games, lol. Best of luck with it!!!!

 

[s.molinari]

esquire - thanks. As for intro to Skooppa, do you mean something like this? Or do you mean there needs to be an introduction in the forum?

About the name. It will probably hit people in many different ways. Main thing, it hits people. Who would have thought in the 1990's "Google" would have become an everyday word?

Scott

 

[esquire]

esquire - thanks. As for intro to Skooppa, do you mean something like this? Or do you mean there needs to be an introduction in the forum?

About the name. It will probably hit people in many different ways. Main thing, it hits people. Who would have thought in the 1990's "Google" would have become an everyday word?

No - just a quick slogan or line that states why you exist. Regarding the name, it's fine... I'm just trying to figure out why I keep thinking the way I do, lol. Maybe because it doesn't look stock English - looks like a Scandanavian word to me. Many times that works where you get a foreign word to use as a concept.

 

[s.molinari]

Hehe...yeah. It was intentional to have a European touch to the name and it was a good excuse not to pronounce it like most americans would.

As for slogans. It is difficult to find one good one, since we are covering so many bases. "The first ever PaaS for online communities" or "One stop shop for website application development for online communities" or "The better social network" or "Website hosting, completely different". I think once we move forward, each one of these might have its place and time as a slogan.

Scott

 

[Phillip]

This was an awesome interview and amazing read. Good job s.molinari on Skooppa.

 

[s.molinari]

Thank you Altari.

Scott