Are we going to have to….
 

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.

Maybe they should hire Wayne as consultant to straighten things up…

I posted the same. Don't know if it showed up.

They should be actively promoting to social outlets.

I’ve joined a fair number of FB Porsche groups lately and there are a ton of younger new owners out there that remind me of us 20 years ago who want to DIY but seemingly have not found Pelican.

Well it is free...

I'm not a tech person so sorry if these are dumb questions but....

1. What exactly went wrong?

2. What caused this to happen?

3. Does this happen also on a regular basis to all forums?

4. If so, do other forums have tech staff assigned to monitor 24/7 and they just stay on top of it - and we don't?

5. How come these things weren't happening when Wayne was the owner? I mean - not like they are now anyway.

Thanks - just curious.....

1. Any number of things, nearly impossible to know without access to the system.

2. See 1.

3. Yes and likely for the same reasons. What are those reasons? See 2.

4. Yes and no, maybe , depends.

5. They happened but the forum was also Waynes baby and he understood the value so for many years it was just him keeping an eye on things and when they happened he addressed them outside of "normal working hours"

Really impossible to know what's happening on the tech side.

The board runs on vBulliten 3.8.7, current major version is 6 so the board is running on really ancient architecture by industry standards. Could be lack of maintenance. Could be the people charged with maintaining the infrastructure are green and lack experience or commitment.

I suspect there is no dedicated tech crew. For the most part vBulletin should just run with regular maintenance but minimal oversight.

But this is a big board, lots of users and a lot of activity. That makes things way more complicated.

Ideally you would have a minimum of two people (+ a 3rd junior backup) whose primary role was taking care of the board who would also provide other IT services during idle time, when the board is behaving properly as it does 95% of the time.

Add in hardware and other soft costs and a board this size with a dedicated team could easily cost $100k a year to run.

And that's where the pencil pushers show up.

Let's be honest, are we going to abandon the board over these random service outages?

No.

And they know it.

So, what is our Plan B? It is possible that at some point, this forum will go offline for an extended period or for good. We should establish a meeting place in advance.

Well, there's a pool hall down I5 near Salem Or., past the fork in the road...

Wanna meet up there?

Or, there's a restaurant called People's Pig in Portland. When the weather is good, a few of the people I've met IRL from this board meet for lunch on the last Friday of the month. Noon-ish, if anyone wants to join us...

Great post. I had all the same questions that Baz posted!

Wayne was great. Actually, he still is, he’s just not around as much to remind us. I always appreciated his immediate attention to problems like this.

Maybe someone with the necessary IT skills should reach out to pelican an offer to fix these problems when they occur, either for money or free parts.

Since it happens on weekends, typically, I suspect that these problems are self-inflicted.

Turns out it costs more to have better response to issues. Lower cost = slower response, faster response = faster response. The site owners decide where to spend for the best return. Lately it looks like the parts sales UI has been and is changing. That's where they make money.

correction higher cost = faster response

I'm glad you made the point that these forums are still a small part of the big picture. The parts catalog in ginormous and took Wayne more than a decade to get it as good as it is (was? IDK, I don't have need to buy parts). And at that, the site takes a lot of attention. — all aspects of it.

They do have internal IT to update the parts side. If not on site anymore, then at corporate, which as we know is ECS. ECS may not see the value of the forums as they built their business up from a VW service facility to an Internet parts retailer from 1962. And to my knowledge, never supported a forum. So, with the purchase of PP, they got forums, something new to them.

Again, to the best of my knowledge. many of Pelican's employees at the time of purchase remain employed there. So they get it. But they are not Wayne whose lifestyle was that he worked practically all night every night, so he was constantly aware of the condition of the overall site.

You have to consider that if the catalog went down for 2 days, that would amount to 10's of thous$and$ in sales and frustration sending customers elsewhere. You can bet your last dollar that would not have been the case under Wayne's watch.

So, the question that has come up time and time again, is do the new owners care? And at that, do they care about the OT and PARF in particular? I have a partial answer for you: OT and PARF are the elephants in the room AFA ECS is concerned. They are afraid of backlash if they shut it down.

This is real as demonstrated by this thread alone. The members here are the ones that want OT and PARF badly enough to talk about 'recovery'. And that doesn't begin to address the archives that contain vast amounts of information by the likes of the Grady Clay's and Early_S_Man's contribution as well as thousands of other very capable authors of information.

ECS must realize the value in maintaining those archives as well as the active car forums. OT and PARF are mere appendixes. At least we hope.

BTW, I wrote to the local Pelican management early last week and have yet to have heard a word. I just figure that is the same attention factor that I get from the local politicians in that I have never given any one dime of support. My PP purchases are pretty much in the same plane. So it may be that if you're not a paying customer, STFU.

I had no idea that the ECS group bought Pelican. I knew Wayne sold it...didn't pay attention to that detail

I wonder if ECS owns Turner Motorsports, too...

Yes, all funded by Bertram Capital.

Zeke,
Great Post.

After this past weekend, I thought that maybe the burden of the forums was cause for ownership/management to just let them die a slow death over time due to us old timers fading away in more than one form.

IMHO it is just how the life of things work out. Seeing the Grady and Early_S_Man does harken back to the, dare I say, "Golden Age" of these forums. Twenty years, has been a good run, and maybe the younger group (who will eventually own all of our stuff) will find another site or forum or type of social media that relates their needs, as this forum has for all of us long time users.

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.

Is maintaining an old OS the same as keeping an old car going? PITA?