Quote:
Originally Posted by 767Jockey
There is hope, and there is absolutely a market. What's missing is an owner who shares that hope, and who believes in the market and has an interest in developing the market and this site. Brent once was a great example of that owner. Clearly, for whatever reason, that has changed. I hope he will step up and pursue a transfer of the site to someone else who will take this site to the next level.
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Sorry, but I disagree. The market for this forum is slowly diminishing. 20 years ago how many companies were producing replicas? How many are there now? [Edit: And I just saw that Mr. Bruce is retiring. See what I mean?]
How many NEW active members come here?
How long does the average car sit on Cobra Country compared to 15 years ago?
There are only a handful of regular participants here.
Now here comes the kicker. Brent is probably losing money on this forum (and all of them combined). You're assuming a much lower cost of ownership than is realistic.
You've got to find a new hosting company. Don't know what it costs. Other ongoing costs exists, just can't think of them. Domain name registration changes and lots of other one-time costs.
Who out there do you think is IT savvy enough to actually operate the site? It's non-trivial or trust me, it would be fixed.
Then you've still got root cause. I will assert until proven otherwise the problem is not servers and software, but the corruption of the data itself. New faster servers have been transplanted as a fix and nothing changed. Hosting companies have changed. Not fixed. The forum software is old, but software doesn't rot. New sotware may do better things, and yes there are bug fixes, but there is no evidence that this forum's problems are bugs in software. Everything points to corrupted data. The data is the only common thing all along. The problem follows the data.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but it will probably be the starting place that a professional would start and finding and fixing is going to cost a fair amount of money. I'll gladly accept and give a nod to whoever finds the real problem, but so far, noone with any experience has offered anything else. I spent nearly 40 years finding this kind of bug, and sometimes my initial gut feel diagnosis was wrong, but not many times, and in the end, they were much more insidious than what I initially though.
Where does all that money come from? Probably not advertisers. The Total Available Market for Cobra "stuff" is decreasing in real time. This forum is exposed to maybe 10% of the TAM. Every once in a while you see someone bought an exhaust, but that's the last thing I remember. The few parts suppliers are largely gone (or not reliable, we know who I'm talking about).
So lets say someone takes it over. Noone here is going to be around long enough to make a career out of it. And eventually, the new owner will tire of it, try to find a new home and go through exactly what this is going through now.
You have to turn this project into "move the house to a different lot as is", not "move it and remodel". You can't afford the remodel job and the "move" portion has an unknown but not zero cost. Who will pay that? I'll tell you, it's not me. While I get enjoyment from the site and the knowledge and even enjoy contributing to tech and fix-it discussions, it's not worth paying to continue. I spent 10 years on Team Shelby. Contributed much info. It's gone. I miss it, but I survived. If this forum and its data disappears, you'll survive too.
Also be aware that there are low visibility areas that are associated with the forum, notably the "for sale" section that would have to come along since the cost to excise them would be more than you'd want to pay.
And don't think you'll survive if you go to a paid site. Every paid site that I was part of (a few) and those that tried (a few) have failed. Noone really wants to pay for what is a low duty cycle hobby. Most of them moved to Facebook.
One site has partial pay. Paying an annual (or sizeable one time) chuck gets you write access to some areas, incluing the ability to advertise for sale stuff.
Facebook is free.
My personal assessment is that this forum is on life support. It gets a defibrillator shock periodically to get it breathing again, but the heart is still weak.
And, as hard as it sounds, the continual application of baling wire, duct tape and bubble gum that maintains the current unreliable nature is literally as good as it's going to get.
Sorry, but I had to say this since the whole "rescue it" thing seems to come up more and more...