[amol4184]

Originally Posted by NiInJa

Is it just me or anyone else who is not able to open the riderzone link ?

Does not open for me too. Tried on multiple devices.

The author is active member of t-bhp (with same username, @RiderZone) may be he will look at this thread and bring the site up.

[darklord]

Originally Posted by GTO

BCMTouring (founded by a late BHPian - God bless his soul) has just 5 updated threads:

Shutting down .

BCMTouring is slated to go offline on January 30, 2024.

https://www.bcmtouring.com/forums/th...n.82924/page-7

This is what the admin has posted there:

We tried... Unfortunately, it didn't work out. There really wasn't much we could have done anyway. It's not the era of classic forums anymore. Times change. It changes things. This is one of those changes.
This site will go offline on 30th January, 2024.
As mentioned before, we will continue as a community through other channels - Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook.

[montsa007]

I used to develop, populate & run forums in the past when I used to dabble in web designing field, about 15 years from now. Then the crowd shifted to tap-a-talk, reddit and after the arrival of discord forums became ghost towns, as the interactions happen live, people do not have the patience to wait for someone to respond to their threads/posts. Won't be surprised if more forums start to fall, since maintaining them takes a toll on the pocket, specially if they run on a dedicated server & with falling traffic it becomes hard to maintain.

[GTO]

Don't want to brag at all and with the utmost humility, I'll say that we have had 3 - 4 of our best months (website traffic) in the last 1 year. I feel there will always be solid demand & need for high-quality discussions from individuals. Commenting isn't dead - the success of Reddit (they have some nice discussions) & the comments on social media (high volume, but troll + junk) are proof of that.

What really requires commitment is QUALITY. Quality discussions will always grow, poor discussions will wither away.

The recent PayTM thread is already a multi-page rich discussion with 50,000 views.

The informative Safari Facelift thread has crossed 5-lakh views.

The Honda Elevate Review thread has crossed 2-million views!

[UNSC117]

Originally Posted by GTO

P.S. Our forum activity levels have gone up by 25 - 30% in the last 2 years. We're growing, but we're an outlier among online communities. Team-BHP has hundreds of teenage members signing up too, clearly proving that youngsters serious about sharing & learning are attracted to forums.

As a fellow teenager on the TBHP forum ( I got to find out about this forum from my dad) I've got to say, I'm enjoying my time here. It's finally great to see likeminded autoenthusiasts who enjoy the same things I do, while also teaching me.


If I may ask / criticise this forum a bit, Why is the website of the forum so dated? My friends saw the forum open on my laptop and asked me if I was on Internet Archive (A website for viewing saw\ved collections of older websites) The website's also clunky, and hard to navigate. I'm speaking as someone with a pretty good reach over technology, but it actually took me all this time to figure out how to change my profile signature.


Despite the website's quirks, the thriving community and shared passion for automobiles on TBHP undoubtedly make it a special place for enthusiasts like me. Perhaps, with a few updates and improvements to the website's design and functionality, TBHP could reach even greater heights and continue to attract a diverse range of auto enthusiasts, both young and old.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by UNSC117

The website's also clunky, and hard to navigate. I'm speaking as someone with a pretty good reach over technology, but it actually took me all this time to figure out how to change my profile signature.

We are primarily a long form content based forum. Too much color or bling will distract from the primary function of our forum.

We are like Kindle, you are expecting iPad. Those who want to read books most of the time, will pick Kindle over iPad.

Originally Posted by UNSC117

Perhaps, with a few updates and improvements to the website's design and functionality, TBHP could reach even greater heights and continue to attract a diverse range of auto enthusiasts, both young and old.

We have lots of content that is timeless. If someone wants to know how fiat currency works, I can just point them to a post I wrote 12 years ago. If you want to know how Mahindra Thar was conceived, you can check this thread.

This assures contributors on TeamBHP that their content has permanence and is searchable for decades to come. So, we all put extra efforts to write better, with years of future audiences in mind.

I agree that the website could look better, but web technologies come and go all the time. When I joined the forum, smartphones didn't exist. We are about to complete 20 years next week, on a forum software version that is at least 15 years old. Most of us don't keep coming here for the looks of the forum. We come here for content and to share our thoughts with fellow members. I don't know any other forum where I can closely interact with such diverse set of people, and tap their collective knowledge.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by UNSC117

If I may ask / criticise this forum a bit, Why is the website of the forum so dated?

Because it is about content more than appearances.

The forum concept is aged compared to facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube. But it works for long-term information storage. Stuff does not simply scroll away into the past.

Yes, even as forums (and this is what was the new and trendy name for bulletin boards )go, this one does look old-fashioned. The software is indeed old. It has been maintained and customised over the years (decades). It is still changing.

There is twenty years of information and shared experience here. Imagine the work involved in porting that to a different base forum software. There are prettier ones, but is pretty worth all that effort?

[hikozaru]

Originally Posted by UNSC117

Perhaps, with a few updates and improvements to the website's design and functionality, TBHP could reach even greater heights and continue to attract a diverse range of auto enthusiasts, both young and old.

I am not one for hazing generally but a little inaccessibility is needed when the bar to generate 'content' and spam computers is very low in the age of LLM and bots. The forum is accessible through the web and is not locked behind a paywall or account registration and is not going away anytime soon. Prospective users can take all the time they need to validate for themselves if they like this forum enough to engage with it respectfully.

Traditional forums like this also have one more weakness compared to the more modern forums like lemmy in that it gets quite difficult to follow a thread once it gets a lot of users and posts. Following certain threads on resetera is nigh impossible.

[Prowler]

It is not just that the other web forums are dying, but generally a lot of content oriented websites are dying too.

The other day I found a statistics that in the last 4 years, nearly 20 % of all websites have perished. One of the main reasons is the lack of adequate financial model. Google Adsense which added thousands of websites ostensibly written to soak up the Adsense money, dried up leaving these sites starved of money.

Add the LLM to this equation, you can see that content websites whose only reason to exist is to impart information without a clear financial model will have to perish.

But sites like TBHP which have passionate, devoted enthusiasts will flourish. Take a simple example, to post a content here about batteries in UPS, you spend quite a bit of time digging up information and then hammering away at the keyboard to write a paragraph. You need to have a bit of passion to dedicate some time for fellow automobile enthusiasts.

Imagine the kind of hard work mods and the administrators do to run the show.

For us , we don't need bling and show. We need real stuff. Keep 'em coming!

Originally Posted by UNSC117

Perhaps, with a few updates and improvements to the website's design and functionality, TBHP could reach even greater heights and continue to attract a diverse range of auto enthusiasts, both young and old.

[kozhissery]

Originally Posted by darklord

BCMTouring is slated to go offline on January 30, 2024.

So sad. I had some travelogues there. Now it is all gone.
I was thinking of replicating it here just for the sake of memory, but was not sure if that will make sense here (will it be allowed here? If yes would like to have it online again) as some were more than a decade old.

[GTO]

Originally Posted by kozhissery

I was thinking of replicating it here just for the sake of memory, but was not sure if that will make sense here (will it be allowed here? If yes would like to have it online again) as some were more than a decade old.

Yes, of course! Please replicate the most memorable / special of those travelogues here.

If you have them locally saved, awesome. If not, am sure you can use web archive (or Google cache) to view your older content on BCMTouring.

[14000rpm]

Originally Posted by GTO

Yes, of course! Please replicate the most memorable / special of those travelogues here.
.

I'm already trying to replicate my old threads that I lost when gearheads switched off.

[GTO]

On Reddit, there's an ongoing discussion about a new community that failed, and how auto forums in general are declining / dead. People started talking about the "good old days of forums" (from the 2000s), how much knowledge forums had, and how social media etc. have killed car forums.

In the midst of that, someone said this. The "completely different geography" line is because it's primarily a discussion between American Redditors:

[amol4184]

That Redditor from his username looks like an Indian guy. Reddit has some excellent discussions but often times the trolls take over and useless replies are seen in every thread. The mods sometimes take actions (depending on the sub) but on average threads have lot of "junk". I guess since they cater to such huge gathering of anonymous people that is going to happen inevitably and the moderation is a thankless job more so on Reddit. Serious technical discussions are often followed by utter garbage, personal attacks, vitriol and that is why team-bhp sort of forums matter and should be preserved.

If you get banned on sub-reddit its not much of a big deal. If you get banned on tbhp, its a big blow. Membership on Reddit doesn't matter, but matters on forums.

I still feel forums can survive if done well as this website is a proof and social-media frenzy isn't going to last forever. YouTube and forums can do well hand-in-hand as knowledge bases. Of course YT isn't a traditional social media but the comments section sometimes has useful discussions.

Other social medias are utter garbage though and I cannot fathom how anyone can use them as a meaningful medium of conversation with strangers on internet. Or may be I am getting old and cannot handle IG, FB, Twitter, TikTok anymore. Speaking of FB, many of the good old groups and pages have gone the same way as rest of the FB i.e. down the drain. Many good groups I used to visit are now a sad remnants of their former self.

The team-bhp forum stands like a stalwart in the midst of all the nonsense of social media. Its my solace. I also like the old-school format. Some minor usability changes can be done but not a deal breaker. Its a nice throwback to good old days of internet.

[rahulpandita]

I browse team-bhp every hour of the day, there is always something new to catch up on and the quality of content is always top notch. Comparing this to Youtube, Instagram or Facebook where most automotive videos or posts from users are nothing but clickbait and garbage (there are a few channels putting out quality content but it pretty much stops at that). Added bonus - no trolling, name-calling, cussing that we usually see. Just rational conversations.

Another reason why I deleted my social media accounts, there is nothing useful in there anymore.