Hi all,
Ok i thought i would jump in with a few thoughts to help give a bit of transparency. I think the most poignant point has been made that the more posts there are, the more people will post. At the same time... just a thought and to add some lightness to the situation, could it be a case, as mentioned before that Camaro owners not being ones for forums... could that be because our cars do a good job of keeping themselves going
Could it be that 'Rustang' and More Old Parts And Rust owners
need a forum because their cars need a lot of attention, whereas ours have more parts available and they last longer? Please don't take offence, i'm having a bit of a laugh there... i love all muscle cars and most American cars regardless of make.
On the flip side, i think that what's missing is having events that we participate in... even having a club stand at an existing event where a few of us can meet face to face etc. We are quite a friendly bunch here and that's something i admire about the forum... it's the least intimidating that i've come across as everyone is happy to help and get along with eachother. By having events where we can meet i'm sure it will help with participation and give us more common ground to be able to post about. From that we would also help attract new members and give us a chance to distribute club merchandise to help raise funds.... bringing me to the next thing:
Funding is definitely an issue as we don't have any. This makes it difficult to get involved with events that require a fee and to also order merchandise upfront to re-sell. I know that Nige and I have been working on trying to get sponsorship but it's not proving too fruitful. I've been trying to get NPD involved and the owner Rick pointed me to his marketing director who has managed to ignore every contact i've made with him and never bothered to reply. I'm actually pretty pissed off with NPD as i think that's just plain rude considering a fair few of us are their customers. It's not like we're asking for a lot either, it's not even to compensate us for our time running the club, purely to cover the cost of the site which isn't much, then a bit to help us promote the site, i.e creating merchandise (some with sponsor logo on it) that helps increase traffic flow that leads to the sponsor getting more visibility. Doesn't take a genius to figure it out but you can only lead horse to water
I need to figure out what's the deal with the ACCUK too. We are associated with them but don't appear to have any benefit. Honestly, i felt cheated paying a membership fee to AACCUK as i appear to have got nothing for it. This site receives nothing of the membership fee's and no where recognises it for discounts. I think the
only benefit is a discount on insurance but the membership fee is often more than the discount or equal to it. So it would be a start to rejuvenate that relationship to reflect the modern needs of the clubs and add a level of transparency with the association.
Related to the costs, we did have a lot of background issues with the website itself. Spammers love forums and we were getting over 100+ registrations per day. It was pretty labour intensive to filter in the legitimate users and allow them to be able to post in a reasonable time etc. We managed to improve that and all of last week i spent all of my evenings building a spam 'wall' that now means we are down to 1 spam registration per day at the most. That has massively helped in the amount of time i can spend with the forum. I'm on the forum a lot but usually filtering spam and maintaining the running of the site so you don't see me post too often, so i am guilty of needing to post more. As you can imagine though, spending all day infront of a computer all day at work, then visiting the site to keep it clean, means by the time i want to reply or create a post my eyes have gone square and i'm knackered. The spammers were affecting us quite badly as they also drive up the bandwidth.. they get in the system not just to advertise handbags, but also to manipulate the site into doing its dirty work of spreading more spam, so our site was being made to do the work. When the site went down in April due to bandwidth issues, that's the reason, spam accounts got a bit high numbers and used up our bandwidth. That's another issue with cost / sponsorship... we don't have the ability to get a high use hosting package, which is also why we can't have posts containing images as they take up both space and bandwidth. So with sponsorship, we can improve our hosting package, get more storage and bandwidth and overcome that basic obstacle. With this new spam wall, it means i can spend my time away from maintaining and more on the posting front, plus we have a lot less bandwidth issues, making our site more attractive to potential sponsors.
I don't know much about our cars and i would love to help more in the tech sections etc but i'm only in the learning stages so feel bad for not being able to respond. I know that's something that has been brought up before. I won't name a name but a member a while ago was telling me they prefer using the U.S sites as they get answers much quicker, whereas here it can take days. That was a couple of years ago and i think that we have much improved and people tend to get a reply within 24 hours now. Even if it's not a definitive answer, at least it's supportive or a lead to more information. That member was completely right in what they said... if you need an answer quick, you'll go to where you get the quick answer. Of course, it means that users move away and makes the situation worse. So we have to stick with and i think it has already improved
The final thing i can add is that TopCat, Nige and i are in 3 different countries, so it's not the easiest thing for us to meet up and discuss some things. I do plan to meet with Nige as soon as possible so that we can discuss some things to do with the site, merchandise and general club stuff. I would like us to finally get merchandise sorted, but we need to meet and discuss strategy, pricing etc and make sure the decisions are joint. I need to finish my Camaro and get it on the road, it's taking up what time i have left in the week (i don't know how you lot with families have the time to do all this stuff
). So there is light at the end of the tunnel... sponsorship = more leverage for the club to do stuff, leads to more active forum and creating a more interesting place to be, creating more posts, whilst allowing merchandise to be created and used to support the site, advertise it to the public, generate more interest, create more opportunities / events to take part in etc.
What i would like to finish with saying, is that the members we have are great. I do browse the U.S forums every now and then but there's too much 'show' involved and too many digs at other people. This site has really great people contributing and i would like to see that level of maturity and support be something that remains at heart of the club.
We are always open to suggestions / improvements so please feel free to keep pushing things forward. In regards to the Pontiac / Firebird thing for example, maybe that's something we could include as a sub topic area? Again, something Nige and TC and i would need to have a chat about to ensure things are done right. I would encourage it, let's face it, an F-body is an F-body - a rose by another name would still smell the same
I think it's interesting about the classic name too... maybe just Camaro Club UK? I may be speaking out of term on this part, because at the same time we have a good amount of 4th gen owners on here.
Thanks all for your support in keeping the club going!
Ray
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Out of my league but dropping the `classic` part of the forum wouldn`t be separatist or doing anyone with a genuine class an injustice and might convince the odd 96 V6 owner to drop in.
and anyone from other areas who want to attend you can kip in my garage