I am a car guy in my 30s, I have been in the scene since the early 2000s and anyone else that was around back then knows what I am talking about with forums. Forums used to be THE place to find everything car related. Whatever car you had, you could find a forum for it with hundreds of active users any time of the day. For sale threads, regional meet ups, anything you wanted was there. It was like an online mecca for whatever car you had. If you had a BMW, there were huge BMW forums with hundreds of posts and discussions happening every day. Fast forward to now, almost all automotive forums are dead, like dead dead. For sale sections dried up, regional sections with the last posts being 6 months old. It’s a ghost town.
So what happened? My guess, is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube divided the community so hard, and gave everyone their “own” little pages, that this is all people do now. I joined a few Facebook groups and found those to be just as dead as the forums. It’s really not the same. We used to be able to post in a regional section and by nightfall have a whole meet arranged with locals from your area. Now, that’s a no go. I miss it, and I would love to know if there is a place everyone is at now, but I am also scared that maybe that era of online car culture is lost forever. r/cars seems to be the only place I can find that has constant activity with other gearheads, but that’s only because it serves as a “hub” for car guys on reddit, which is another “hub”, and all other hubs have been abandoned. I am trying to get involved on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, but it’s not the same, how do you arrange a meet in an Instagram comment section? It’s just not the same.
I was a moderator at focusfanatics.com during it’s hayday.
Sometime around 2015ish, some corporate org paid out the webmaster and bought the forum for an undisclosed sum. Virtually overnight our forum was injected with ads for CARiD, etc. The new “owners” of the forum assigned some employees to oversee the community and moderators, but these individuals were Chinese, and spoke very little english, which made communication a challenge. Long time members were upset to see their community so shamelessly monetized, and the frustrations of dealing with the new owners led to most of the staff bailing, leaving the site under-moderated, and in the hands of greedy/unmotivated leadership.
These days, most of the OG members are now just in facebook groups - I reconnected with a lot of them when I did a project car build a few years back. As much as I absolutely despise facebook’s interface, it seems to be the most convenient platform for most.
I was a member of Jet’s Audi A4 page way back in the day, and became a mod when it became Audiworld. It ran on a language called KAWF, which had a unique look and interface.
Jet brought in a partner to handle advertising. Growth followed the rising popularity of Audi. The partner had a near fatal accident, possibly got hooked on pain killers, very possibly cooked the books and skimmed ad money. Facing a financial cliff and tired of dealing with the day to day dramas of running a site, Jet washed his hands of Audiworld by selling it.
The new owners switched to Vbulletin, which led to a palace revolt in which the best contributors left the site for Quattroworld. The founding of that site has some interesting and possibly shady beginnings.
If you search for the term “kawf” and keep the date range around 2009, you can still find some spicy threads.
I don’t know that many asians, but they all seem to speak English pretty well, even if just learning. Possibly try using google translate to send Chinese to reach some common ground first or something. I don’t think they intended to ever work with you and just ruined the website for fun, possibly, I’m not trying to accuse anyone of anything
Oh we did, but google translate wasn’t as refined then as it is now, and even our attempts to talk to them in their own language were a struggle. There was also an element of them just being slow to reply. The forum wasn’t really their priority, and the things they wanted were often counter to what the boss wanted. Friction + language issues just isn’t a good combo.