Lamenting The Loss Of Good Car Forums

I think it's a combination of FB, YouTube, sites selling and (big part) Photobucket falling apart.  When PB blew up, it decimated so many tech/DIY posts on the forums.  I had two huge threads on my LS swapped 951 and all the photos were hosted by PB.  It's way too much work for me to go through them and repopulate the pics, so they're gone.

The sites selling certainly doesn't help, as pointed out now things are behind pay walls, or you need to buy a subscription so you can navigate the site without getting hammered by ads/pop ups. 

Some of the sites I go to are still useful, Rennlist is awesome, as is this site and advrider.  I haven't been on bimmerforums in awhile, but it used to be good too.

I'm not a fan of FB groups, too hard to find anything and no real way to pull things up.  Yes, you don't need a specific log on for each group, but you do need to join each group and the FB algorithm frequently won't show you the new posts on that group.  Several times a friend has sent me a link to a post on a group we're both on but I never saw because FB filtered it...

Forums made neat car ownership affordable for me.  From the 90s restoring my 914 to the 2000s learning standalone EFI and now to the 2020s with prius and british cars the sharing of knowledge and support during frustrating times forums enabled me to take on tasks that I thought were beyond me.  But like gravity everything costs is a rule of life.  Paying for admin, website and hardware stuff to who knows what else forum existence is not free.  Thanks GRM management for accepting this responsibility and keeping some of the trash talk out.  That is the other issue.  Internet bullying is not just for teen girls.  Back to GRM, thanks again for a forum that has existed since free AOL CDS were handed out like napkins at WAWA.  I wonder how many forum members are also paper media subscribers, which reminds me time to renew!

Photobucket death is a huge one. Also the private forums being bought for max profit potential changed them quite a bit near the end and didn't help. I was a mod on vwvortex for over a decade and things definitely morphed a bit after acquisition. 

I was a part of a pay private forum that was an unbelievable archive. Server crashed and it was gone. Some of the users got together and put together a book of some of the key bits (from old mailing list info pre forum and memory) to document it but its only maybe 1% of what was on the forum. 

Forums were great for the detail and documentation. Searches were usually crappy. Fb is way worse. Glad we have this forum still here. Its the only one I look at regularly. 

GRM is where I landed.

Too many single-make/model forums became full of gatekeeping "shiny happy people" (hello, Miata.net!) and other forums just seemed to be abandoned.

Golfmk7.com was abandoned by the owners years ago and is held together by a single moderator who sifts through a daily mountain of spam and tries to keep members from literally threatening each others lives and doxxing over politics.

There are some good members on each site, but you'll have to commit to wading through the virtual sewage to find them.

There's a kind of cycle in this sort of thing -- in the 90s we had Usenet and email mailing lists, forums killed those in the same way that FB has mostly killed off forums today.  Ironically, the strength of email was that the storage was distributed, so a lot of those archives survived the transition in a way that forum data likely will not.

Something will be along in a few years to change it again.

In reply to Tony Sestito :

The Performance Years / MaxPerformance Pontiac board has a T/A section that's still pretty active.  I haven't been there for a while due to personal reasons but check them out. http://forums.maxperformanceinc.com

What I'm seeing in the trenches of the public school system, is that the little cherubs these days are struggling with retaining information.  It could be it is because there is so much information readily available, and it is all so flash-instant-adhd-now that there is no need to remember anything.  As such, there is no value in information that is well organized and readily available.

I steer kids to forums "not instachat, facegram, readit, or whatever.... FORUMS.  You'll find some old guys there who know everything, and some of them might even have built what you are working with - they will have the answer!"  And very few kids go there.  It's too hard, I guess.

At any rate, looking at what's coming up the line, I have little hope for the future of forums.  Sorry.  I am trying my best though.

Corvette forum used to be really good for C4 and C5's. Then it got sold and all the knowledgeable folks left for C4 guru. Sold my C4 15 years ago so I don't know the  current state of things.

Gotta also remember that forums cost money and lots of time for the forum owner. My buddy, RIP PurpleLX, started Hardcore50.com from nothing. He skirted the server usage because he was an IT guy running IT somewhere, but vbulletin was kit exactly cheap not user friendly. He commented one time on average he would have to cipher through a few million lines of code for the bugs that popped up for a few hours every day.

It sucks a bit more than back in the 2000's but yellowbullet is still around even after Monty sold it to the original PE buying websites, VerticalScope.

I cut my teeth on neons.org (which helped me learn the info to build a N/A 2.4, and later build an SRT4 based 2.4 for putting in my 1g ACR).  I remember being on the first email list with Bowling and Grippo and mail ordering the first public batch of some sort of PCB to control the fuel for those builds.  Revolutionary at the time, and the transfer from email list to forum was awesome.

Lot's of time spent on miata.net, e30tech, r3vlimited.  r3v is still around, but a shadow of its formal self.  I just can't bring myself to trawl through youtube or facebook to try to learn what used to be so easily available on forums.   My younger family members (who share the hobby) don't get it: there's a generational difference, it seems, and they are happy to learn all their "DIY"s via video, social media.  They don't gravitate towards the forum format in any way. 

Lots of great points here. 

All of this reminded me that if I couldn't get the answers I needed on a forum, I could reference a service manual. And that is easier said than done, of course.

Pontiac (and GM for that matter) was weird about service manuals back then, and offered entire line manuals with yearly annexes, but ALSO offered specific model manuals. Because of this, you had to buy 3-4 paper service manuals just to have all the info you would need. The guy who ran 78TA.com (The Hitman, as he called himself) decided that was dumb and somehow got a license from GM to compile all of these onto a CD with searchable PDFs of all the manuals. Then I remembered that sometime around 2007, I bought one! After digging around last night in my basement, I found it still in the CD-ROM drive of one of my old PCs.



It's like hitting the lottery! You can't get this anymore from that site as far as I know, and I've been unable to find PDFs of all the service manuals online anywhere. This is the kind of thing that made forums great; the more successful ones would offer things like this to people for a reasonable fee (I think this was $20 back when I bought it). You don't see that kind of thing on FB groups or Reddit threads.