Traffic Slowing Down Here a Bit...

[Gimpdiggity]

Traffic seems to be slowing down on this site just a bit. The new posts seem fewer and farther between. New members seem to be trickling in slowly. Maybe it's just that Gypsy hasn't posted in a week...but anyways, with the traffic slowing down a bit, I wanted to mention something about my past on internet message forums...so here goes:



I don't know an awful lot about this board. I do know one thing. I was a part of a HUGE message board geared towards import cars back in like 2000. I was actually a moderator there for a while. Then they decided not to have member moderators. We were all cool just going back to being members again. But then...the site started to change. Guess why?? Shouldn't take you long...it got bought by some corporation...kinda like a late 90s early 2000s version of VS, but not VS. After that, the board really started to change. Things didn't get updated very often, broken things on the board didn't get fixed very quickly. Moderation of the users was nonexistent.

So what did I do?? I went and formed one of those EZBoard message boards. It was free and easy to do. I then sent out a few e-mails inviting a few of my closer friends over to the EZBoard. We had a lame name for it...the website that we were leaving was called speedoptions.com...the name of our EZBoard was SOClub. Basically, we were a group of people that had formed the core group of posters on SpeedOptions and we had gotten tired, so we moved to the EZBoard.

Well, we had maybe about 100 members that posted regularly...and they posted in pretty much the same types of forums that there seem to be activity at on this board. Well, eventually a guy asked me if it would be alright if he formed an actual website for us...so we had a home. It was given a more realistic name and some better features than the EZBoard had. The people that had been part of SOClub migrated there, and it was just the 100 or so of us for a good two or three months. There were a few times when the board seemed like it was going to completely die...but we just kept going, posting amongst ourselves as friends (and some enemies) because we all knew each other so well.

After about three months, all of the sudden, people started showing up that we didn't know. More and more members were signing up. Somehow, we had been found by the masses...which to us was okay, because we had a strict moderation philosophy so when many members started showing up, we kept the good ones around and the shitty ones got banned quickly. Within about 8 months of the start, we had about 600 people that were posting on a fairly consistent basis. We had people providing articles and essays and such for the site. We had monthly contests. We had donations to keep the site up. We had a successful internet community.

A few years after that I left the site. I sold my share in it to the partner that I had been working with and I never posted there again. He and I had a falling out over a few members that I thought were causing trouble on the board that he just happened to be friends with. When I banned them, he unbanned them, and that was that. I was also fairly tired of actually running the site. I don't blame Fred over on SBN at all for doing what he did. Running a large community on the net is hard work.

I guess this was a fairly long winded way of saying that I've been in a situation very similar to this one right now on this site. As I look back, the transition from Speedoptions to our own website was almost a mirror image of how this site came to be and who came to be posting on it. We waited through the slow times and eventually things fell into place. Alas, the site that I helped form just recently went offline. I don't know what happened, all I know is that it's not there anymore.

But I guess, maybe it's worth it just to hold onto this place for a while...even if the traffic seems to have taken a turn down recently, it's worth it to remember that you never know when all of the sudden an influx of people might show up.

(This was a PM that I sent to a member here just a few minutes ago. I won't name the member, but figured that it should be shared with everyone. My apologies to the member I sent it to if it offends you that I posted it to everyone.)

[SassyBikerChick]

I think you will always have an influx right at first b/c that's when everyone is finding out about it and joining up. At some point you get to where there are no more friends to invite so you just have to wait for people to find you by their own searches or new people getting into the sport or whatever. But from looking at my new posts screen things haven't slowed down. I've seen a lot of welcome new member posts and I can't read my posts quick enough to stay caught up on all the new posts that are being made. Maybe it's just b/c I was a little late joining due to being out of town though....

[AaronB]

after VS bought Ducatimonster.org in 2007 and completely changed it in may 2008, six of the member mods built ducatimonsterworldwide.org, now ducatimonsterforum.org. 4700 members in just over a year.

[MEANGREENER]

"IF YOU BUILD IT.....THEY WILL JOIN"

as soon as I post some of ZXhunteR's sista' pics this place will flood

[Alawicious]

Is there any way to prevent the fizzle out or corperate takeover or is that the natural evolution of a message board. This site and SBN is the only one I've ever been on so I'm definitely a n00b when it comes to message boards.

I feel like I'm on the verge of being addicted to this one...

[White Knight]

Trust me.. give it time.. Right now enjoy the tight nit group we have. It wont be like this for long. Trust me. I have seen a lot of boards do the same thing

[Gimpdiggity]

Originally Posted by White Knight

Trust me.. give it time.. Right now enjoy the tight nit group we have. It wont be like this for long. Trust me. I have seen a lot of boards do the same thing

Yup.

That's basically the point of my long, drawn out post. Just hold on and eventually there will be all kinds of things going on.

[Gimpdiggity]

Originally Posted by Alawicious

Is there any way to prevent the fizzle out or corperate takeover or is that the natural evolution of a message board. This site and SBN is the only one I've ever been on so I'm definitely a n00b when it comes to message boards.

I feel like I'm on the verge of being addicted to this one...

I don't really think there's any way to prevent it. It's just something that inevitably happens. There are ways to slow it down, but it's like Judgement Day...it will happen.

Sometimes it happens faster than others. But I think that in some way it always happens. It has on every message board I've ever been seriously involved in.

A lot of it probably comes from the fact that it IS difficult to run something like this. It's like the life cycle goes like this:
--Board starts out and has a few hundred dedicated members, board is being paid for by one or two people who are doing it as a hobby
--Board starts to grow. Users start joining faster than the one or two people running it thought they would. It starts getting more expensive to keep it up.
--Board starts to need money to continue to survive. Owners start asking for donations. Members oblige because they like the board.
--More members continue to join. Costs go up even more. Owners start looking at advertising options. Google Adsense or whatever makes this an easy task to do.
--Members start to get upset at changes and the addition of advertisements. It's the nature of the beast. People don't like to see ads in pretty much anything.
--Members start to think the board has gotten "too corporate" and that the owners "have forgotten what the site is all about."
--Members start to migrate to some other site where they feel that they aren't being bombarded by advertisements and it has more of a community feel.
--Original board starts to fade because less members clicking means less ad revenue. At the same time, the new board is starting to go through the initial stages of expansion that the initial board did.
--Cycle starts again.

[kman458]

LOL I remember when SBN was smaller than this site is now. Back when 10 to 15 members being on all day was alot and you could read ever post made all day in 15 to 20 minutes so we need to enjoy this calm before the storm hits and if it does not well then that's their loss and our gain. We have such a good group going here now I would rather see this site stay on the smaller side.

I need to thank everyone here for making me want to sit down, read, and post again. Its been so long since I have wanted to and I guess I really did miss it.

[Scissors]

All I saw was a bunch of words, so my interest waned. We need pictures.