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Quote:

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey (Post 11607584)

The failure, from where I sit, is not bringing the current crop of younger owners flush with cash to the fold.

These guys are buying cars at mulitples the price we paid for ours and have the same objective, DYI and bringing the car back to their level of satisfaction.

This current crop will spend far more money than most of us did.

The Pelican Forums represent the single largest publicly accessible database of knowledge on Pcars.

It's like the library of Alexandria for Porsche's.

This, in a few words was exactly my point in contacting the management. However, I may not have targeted the correct person and the person receiving my comments may have simply looked at them and moved on. As I remember, the business was compartmentalized to the point that one dept had little interaction with another.

Quote:

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey (Post 11606770)

scrape the whole site and keep it mirrored for the day the current owners no longer care to maintain it?

I hope that day never comes and that the last few episodes are not an indication that they don’t see the forums as something worth preserving but I’m starting to think that’s the case.

Found this thread after searching for Milt's posts....

These forums will simply cease to exist unless something radical changes imo. The "writing is on the wall" and has been apparent for quite some time and it should catch no one by surprise. If it does, you just weren't paying attention imo. It's been a good run.... enjoy the rest of it while it lasts. Just my .02 ...

....and the band played on ;)

^^^ I have no idea how forums work, but how would one move all of the posts and pictures from PPOT and all others to another site?

When I look at a few BMW forums, I’m surprised how many links are dead ends and pictures are gone.

I clearly remember a post by Wayne, many years ago during the heyday of this site, in which he said something to the effect of: "The computer that runs this site is sitting next to my desk. If you saw it, you would laugh out loud."

It was probably an ordinary desktop tower. Apparently, the hardware needs are not great and there are standard forum software packages available, running fine on many sites. But apparently, the key is desire, know-how, attention to detail and good judgment. Those resources seem to have walked out with Wayne.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Superman (Post 11645689)

I suspect things have changed substantially since those days. It may be less about the computing power to power the forums themselves and be more about all of the stuff required to make sure that the site is rarely ever down. I seem to remember that Wayne said that he taught himself how to perform the routing for multiple connections in case one went down and a bunch of the "programming" required to have the forums do what he wanted.

I don't think we've had any of the issues here in a bit that we were having.

These days it would probably be relatively simple to put the forum "in the cloud" so that you could leverage all of the resiliency that's baked into "the cloud." With multiple Internet connections, DNS load balancing, and things like VMWare with the capability of V-motioning a server to whereever at the drop of a hat, things would be pretty stable most of the time. It just takes time and money.