The death of ft86club

[removedonut]

I think we can all agree it’s plainly obvious that whoever is running this site has zero interest in maintaining the community other people have built for them, and at this point are just leeching off the bribes that forum sponsors like CSG are paying them. Though if I were a vendor who pays for exclusive rights to advertise commercial products on this site, I’d be reconsidering that given this site is down more than it’s up these days.
I don’t have a chance to reconsider that, fortunately, because the admin team has ignored multiple emails from me trying to set up a vendor account so I don’t randomly get banned for advertising the bits and bobs I sell for this platform.
I’ve been trying to build a personal archive of useful threads for when this site inevitably bites the dust, but even that has been extremely difficult since it’s been down every weekend for the past few months, and when it is up it’s slow as balls. My running theory at this point is that the site is running in somebody’s basement off their home internet, and they regularly bring the site down to save on bandwidth.

Anyways, if you own this site and are reading this: I hope you step on a lego.

[villainous_frx]

Originally Posted by removedonut

Anyways, if you own this site and are reading this: I hope you step on a lego.

Or sell it to someone who cares (or just puts it on AWS since it's 2024).

[removedonut]

Originally Posted by villainous_frx

Or sell it to someone who cares (or just puts it on AWS since it's 2024).

And miss out on that sweet gravy train of forum sponsor money? Pshh.

[RT-BRZ]

Originally Posted by villainous_frx

Or sell it to someone who cares (or just puts it on AWS since it's 2024).

What would putting it on AWS do exactly?

(IT guy here and website admin for my local SCCA region) - The issues they are having are because the forum software eventually gets to the point that it can't really seem to live under its own weight. The version of vBulletin they are using is from 2016 (v3.8) and the current version is v6.x. They haven't kept it up to date. The down time is like trying to repair a car you've never done any maintenance on after driving it a million miles.

At least they have sponsors to support it.

[gkubed]

Originally Posted by villainous_frx

Or sell it to someone who cares (or just puts it on AWS since it's 2024).

I don't nearly have the time to do this, but I've thought about it. FT86club.com admins, shoot me an email (you know it) sometime.

[Spuds]

Nah, it's all ad revenue. If you turn off ad blocker it's getting ridiculous. Literally inserted an ad into frx's quote. Even seen ads in place of personal avatars or in line with text lol.

[HKz]

...sees OP's join date.....?

From the looks of it they have been doing something in general.. it wasn't that long ago where new posts was completely broken. I always figured much of the issues they've had were due to how popular these forums generally are, perhaps not but the other forums I'm on for my generation RAV4 and Prius are crickets compared to this and nothing really ever happens over at the GRC forums aside from the once in a blue moon OP roasting..

[WolfpackS2k]

It's a problem for a lot of (all?) automotive forums/message boards. For some reason a lot of people these days prefer to use Facebook Groups in lieu of message boards. Other than the increased traffic, for the life of me I do not know why. Their organization and search functions are complete garbage.

[removedonut]

Originally Posted by HKz

...sees OP's join date.....?

I own a second gen, I didn’t join this forum until the second gen was out.

This contributes to my disenfranchisement, frankly. The second gen twins have been around for almost 3 years now and the topic organization on this site is still abysmal. General discussion is needlessly separated into GR86 and BRZ topics when 99.9% of threads in this category are going to apply to both cars. And unlike every other online messageboard for a car with multiple platforms, technical subforums don’t have any way to categorize topics based on 1st gen or 2nd gen, so 2022+ owners effectively have nowhere to post anything actually useful.

I’m at the point where I’ve been documenting my 13-20 FA24 swap projects on GR86dotorg even though that site is dedicated to 2022+ because I have no faith that this forum is going to persist. Besides the admins being MIA and putting no effort into maintaining the site, all it’s going to take is for one major vulnerability to be found in the 10+ year old EOL software this forum runs on for it to all come crashing down.

[RToyo86]

Originally Posted by WolfpackS2k

It's a problem for a lot of (all?) automotive forums/message boards. For some reason a lot of people these days prefer to use Facebook Groups in lieu of message boards. Other than the increased traffic, for the life of me I do not know why. Their organization and search functions are complete garbage.

I'm an admin for local Facebook group and between that, a messenger chat and discord... It's a lot

[ichitaka05]

I've been here since the beginning and has done even events (86EXPO if anyone remembered) to boost the twin community across US... I do wish to see a tiny bit more love/update from the admins (yes there are 2 admins). With that said, I'll continue to clean the forum much as I can within my limit (cuz mods has very limited power), even if I'm the last mod on this forum. Oh wait, I think I am the last mod on the forum lol

No way in hell want this forum to die and does not wish on that to happen. I know over the year, these car forums dies 1-by-1... but If admin just upgrade and let me have tiny bit more power to take care new member approval and few other things, I think, it's golden. Again, I don't get paid to do this nor care to get paid. I just want this forum to keep alive... in a good way.

But that's just my 2 yen

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by ichitaka05

I've been here since the beginning and has done even events (86EXPO if anyone remembered) to boost the twin community across US...

I still regret not making either of the 86EXPO events.

No need, I'll do it myself

[removedonut]

Originally Posted by ichitaka05

I've been here since the beginning and has done even events (86EXPO if anyone remembered) to boost the twin community across US... I do wish to see a tiny bit more love/update from the admins (yes there are 2 admins). With that said, I'll continue to clean the forum much as I can within my limit (cuz mods has very limited power), even if I'm the last mod on this forum. Oh wait, I think I am the last mod on the forum lol

No way in hell want this forum to die and does not wish on that to happen. I know over the year, these car forums dies 1-by-1... but If admin just upgrade and let me have tiny bit more power to take care new member approval and few other things, I think, it's golden. Again, I don't get paid to do this nor care to get paid. I just want this forum to keep alive... in a good way.

But that's just my 2 yen

I would start a crowdfunding campaign to hand the site over to you lol. You are a stalwart shield against the porn spam bots.
I’ve got a webscraper pointed at ft86club right now for archival purposes but there’s so much data and the site is so slow that I can’t get any of the useful forum sections archived between site outages. A complete copy of a recent database backup would be a godsend but I have no earthly idea how much data that would be.

[ichitaka05]

Originally Posted by removedonut

I would start a crowdfunding campaign to hand the site over to you lol. You are a stalwart shield against the porn spam bots.
I’ve got a webscraper pointed at ft86club right now for archival purposes but there’s so much data and the site is so slow that I can’t get any of the useful forum sections archived between site outages. A complete copy of a recent database backup would be a godsend but I have no earthly idea how much data that would be.

I know we had several ppl interested in this forum & wanting to take over. I did forward all the interest to the admin. From the looks of it, nothing happened.

Honestly, I don’t mind taking over the forum… but have no clue where to start on it nor even have a clue on it. Even admin allow me to buy this site (btw admin is a nice guy), I’ll be start from scratch to get things updated or transfer data.