Dead?

I'm assuming someone neglected to post the obit. There is no activity to speak of in the Noth Atlantic region. Has all interest in the North East for BMWs died? Why is there a 2012 post pinned. What relevance does it have. Does anyone actually read these forums. I'd love to hear there is still life here.

Regards,

Lee Fisk

Participation on the national forums here can be kinda thin, your best bet to see what's going on locally is your chapter's website, newsletter, Facebook group or page (groups are more interactive), any other chapter social media, or possibly chapter message boards/forums; some chapters do have their own msg. forums.

Thanks for the recommendation!!!

It just seems that a national organization for a car with such universal appeal would be able to attract activity both globally and locally. Social media rules currently. Are there other social media outlets for the organization? Sorry for the slow response.

At the national level, the club's history with bbs/forums has been a bit variable. The first iteration of the forums, can't recall exactly when that started, but I don't think it was all that long after the club starting it's website, which I think was around '95 or maybe '96... anyway, after those had been around for a couple of years or so, and had built up both a user base and number of posts, were rather unceremoniously upgraded, and those original postings were not preserved, ultimately. Memory gets fuzzy, they may have been archived for awhile, but eventually they were dropped. Such was also the fate of the 2nd iteration of forums. The problem with that is the starting-from-scratch again aspect, and disregarding the member-built input over time as if it were meaningless or valueless. The earliest posts you can find on these forums date a decade+ ago, to 2008. The earlier posts seen here were from the previous one or two iterations of the current forums, and are only preserved here due to Steven S.'s laboriously & personally taking on the task of manually copying over all the posts from the previous forums when the club switched over to these forums several years ago - there was no automated way to convert or transfer. We had a pretty active user base built up with the most-recent previous iteration of the forums, but, once-again starting over with totally different forums & different functionality, the majority of prior active participants apparently had little interest in adapting to & learning how these forums worked vs. the other ones (which were relatively standard to others, at the time). Combine that switchover with the timing of the rise in social media and Facebook, and I think we find generally we may be past the era of message forums being as widely popular as they were... and, as it is, with relatively few regular and active forum participants. Generally, that's somewhat unfortunate - forums are an excellent means of keeping an information archive as opposed to FB, where useful information or answers might be provided, but scroll into the past as quickly as the next posting comes along.

Many, if not most, chapters have either Facebook groups or pages. FB pages generate less interactivity than groups, since you have to click through to "Community" to get to a space showing member's posts similar to in a group, and, I'm not sure if FB even drives through notifications of posts by community members for pages, which they do for groups. Pages are plainly designed more for a person/organization to disseminate information as opposed to generating further input & interactivity, which the functionality of groups helps facilitate. 'CCA's FB page is here: https://www.facebook.com/bmwcca/

I presume there's twitter, instagram, & reddit feeds for 'CCA also, but I don't use any of those myself.

Some chapters have their own message forums, which should be findable through their chapter websites.

Activity on chapter FB groups varies no doubt, the several I'm in seem reasonably active.

For novelty's sake, here's what the forums looked like in fall 2008 -

https://web.archive.org/web/20080915125738/http://www.bmwcca.org/forum/index.php

Just for reference, this is an early capture of these forums around the time the current website must have been brought online, from late July 2011, so, summer '11. The following link has Steven's verbiage of the carryover tasking -

http://web.archive.org/web/20110725085945/http://www.bmwcca.org/forum/

http://web.archive.org/web/20110927085931/http://www.bmwcca.org/forum/

I wouldn't know why, but sometimes the wayback captures the actual messages - I had some luck trying some with some message dives on this particular capture - found a post I'd written in late March of '06 on website feedback, that must have been around when they revamped the 'CCA site then. Interestingly, you can navigate (variably) the page capture, but it looks like sometimes it goes to a different capture page/date for what you're trying to navigate to.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070102235620/http://www.bmwcca.org/forum/

My memory tells me there was more to the site than this in '98 - 43k members then! The tech tips still might be of use to folks with older cars, although they're not particularly categorized. Up to a point in time, the effort was made to make a tech. article reference of past roundels, still found here in the "Archives" section.

https://web.archive.org/web/19980213084103/http://bmwcca.org/core.htm

That is sad to see that there was disregard for the community. I can only imagine that it was sales driven in treating the forum as a promotional opportunity. Unfortunately in the attempt to improve they destroyed. Thank you for such a detailed response.

-Lee Fisk