Quote:
Originally Posted by BonzoHansen
And Facebook groups are so full of stupid it makes my head hurt.
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I was thinking the same thing. They really allow anyone in, open or closed groups even. So of course you get the spam/fake users. But I often see someone ask a simple question and then get all irrelevant responses. The one NJFBOA group that exists, when i get a new member request, I look into who they are. If they don't list living in or right near nj or don't have any pictures of a camaro/firebird, I then look at what other groups they are in and if they have like 5000 groups, they get blocked. You can tell who's legit and not with a little work. But also most often, no one truly knows anyone on some of those groups and you can't really know who to trust. And with many questions, people don't read previous responses. So you end up getting the same answer multiple times. At least on an established forum like this, users can usually tell who to believe if they have a question, or other users can point them in the right direction such as "ask so and so...".
Thirdgen.org seems to be decently active but thats also due to the large amount of archived info available on that site too. Ive also noticed thirdgen is a lot more friendly than a site like camaro5. And that goes back to the whole "latest and greatest" thing. The 5th gen owners are, for the majority, not normal. I'll leave it at that. The typical thirdgen.org user has a longtime history with their cars and will always own/want to own one. A 5th gen owner will have no problem trading it in for a new model.
One big thing that I think helps online forums is the occasional meeting up. Our monthly meets are good but not always "big" enough to draw newer members. thirdgen fest and camarofest or whatever are huge and get talked about year round. I know those are too large of a scale for a site like this but when we had the nationals, It would attract new members just because of it. If njfboa wants to stay active, I think we need to promote our tech forums and the knowledge of our members as well as try to get a yearly, larger meet set up to kinda make members strive to get projects done so they can attend it and show their work.
That's just my opinion lol.