Honestly, I am ok with it being small, my experience is, as soon as a forum starts to grow and get popular, it loses focus. I can talk to you guys the same way I would talk to the car guys I would go for lunch with, I cant do that on those other forums without a shitstorm starting. Everyone gets it, I don't have to listen to a bunch of guys trying to sell me on the idea that 6 cylinder 4 door '53 chevys with glasspacks are "traditional hot rods", or any of the other idiotic, mindless drivel I have to wade through on other forums.
Over the last couple weeks I have joined a couple t-bucket forums, because I am building one, and figured I could find some usable information. On one of the ones I joined, I found several posts by an old friend of mine who is now deceased, and was a well-known race car and t-bucket chassis builder of the sixties and seventies, he had built several really famous high profile race cars. On several of the threads I found, guys were doing DUMB-ASS, DANGEROUS stuff, and he would attempt to speak out and tell them what they were doing wrong. Like pretty much every experienced, knowledgeable racer I have had the benefit of learning from over the years, he was pretty blunt in his delivery, and did not suffer fools kindly. His criticism was not well received.
As a guy who has had the benefit of listening to and learning from guys like him for many decades, I would expect guys to sit down, stfu and listen, so they could learn how to do it right. What I found was a litany of keyboard cowboys spouting stupid uninformed crap and snide comments. Finally, I found a thread where a guy was building a really badly engineered T-Bucket with a considerable amount of power, and my friend had commented that he had better correct the ackerman, because if he didn't, and the car got out shape under power, he would have a hard time getting it back under control. A bunch of clowns bitched at him for "dissing the guys car", and told the op that "ackerman didn't matter" and "who do you think you are" type comments, bla, bla, bla.
As I kept scrolling through the same section of the forum, I found another post by the guy who was building the badly engineered car. He was doing a burnout in a parking lot
, and had lost control, and rolled the car. The very same group of clowns that had been dissing the chassis builder a page earlier were all condolences, and "gee, its really good no-one got hurt" and so on, but not one one of them thought to say "geez, looks like the chassis builder with 50 years of experience might have known WTF he was talking about after all, maybe next time we should quit spouting shit on a topic we know nothing about, and listen". For me, that was enough, I might flip through the pages there, but I wont be participating in that forum. My experience on automotive related internet forums is, you can have quality, or quantity. Sure, the post count here could climb up to the level of the HAMB, but all that means is that we end up wading through pages and pages of moronic rubbish to find a few meaningful threads. The amount of real, meaningful content probably wont change that much. I am pretty good with it the way it is. Slow incremental growth is the best bet.
