Gee, isn't it fun having video ads at the bottom of each page Like I really want to know about some of this crap The site is slow to load, moderation is hit and miss, and it appears that IB thinks it does not need to respond about anything it does. Well I guess it doesn't, it's making money.

Mark

 

Video adds?

 

Something seems to show up at the bottom of some pages. If I'm wrong, pardon me. Site is still slow compared to other sites I go to.

Mark

 

It is a pretty slow site. But, it seems to be one of the most useful when I'm looking for answers.
R

 

NAM is the most useful site for Mini research. Members are very helpful and courteous.

 

i agree the site is a little slow to load on my hp mini netbook... i personally can easily ignore the advertisements and i think this site it pretty useful.

 

You are a riot.

 

And it looks like you're part of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

 

Not a bad site. Now, I've got two places to visit. Wonder what the subscriber overlap is?

 

I gues they need to sell advertising to pay for this site.
I really don't see anything wrong with that. The site is FREE to use and it is very well kept up and policed.
It is easy to use and some people get use from the advertisments.
Ronnie948

 

Nobody that has joined after 2006 has any idea of how good this site used to be, so don't tell me that.

This site is the shell of what a good forum used to be.

 

We had the same thing over at www.fordtruckworld.com As it got larger, it lost all of it's personality. Such things happen. At that point YOU have to adapt or move on. I was a moderator over there and we heard the same stuff. Simply put with growth come a higher cost of providing service. Thus ads become a mandatory addition. The other option i snot to have ads, and settle for an underperforming site. Or, charge for the privilege of using the site. Neither of those would set well with the general populace.

Having said that, I've sent a coupld of emails to the moderators and not heard anything back. So.......whatever.

 

+1

I remember having fun visiting this site. Today I only visit it occasionally to check for PM's from old friends and the latest rant from someone who has only owned a MINI for 2 days, driven it 200 miles and now wants to let the rest of us know how it needs to be redesigned and refined.

 

+1 on that........I think most of the sites owned by Internet Brands are like this or going in this direction......sad if you ask me.

 

So is Internet Brands like what Clear Channel is to radio

 

Yup, the idea being the more subscribers/listeners, the more advertisers like you, $o then you don't have to worry
$o much about content and focu$ on vendor$.

Mark

 

Internet Brands owns the following community sites.

6SpeedOnline
ATVConnection
AudiForums
AudiWorld
CamaroForums
ChevroletForum
ClubLexus
CorvetteForum
DodgeForum
F150online
Ford-Trucks
G35Driver
GreenHybrid
HDForums
LandRoverForums
LS1Tech
MazdaForum
MBWorld
MustangForums
My350z
MyG37
NorthAmericanMotoring
PassionFord
Rennlist
RX7Club
S2000.com
ScionLife
ScoobyNet
ThirdGen.org
VolvoForums
Wikicars
YotaTech
zDriver
So pretty much most of the major forums. Some forums depending on the admin dont allow you to post your detail pix unless you are a sponsor. Its pretty sad.

 

Mark, I do sincerely hope that MA thrives and eventually becomes a viable alternative to this site, to M|U (which seems more of an uncontrolled, social network) and to MINI2 (more for the across-the-ponders). That said, it seems beneath you to lob the random turd on this site given your leadership role on MA and the considerable investment you're making in its success.

NAM still has advantages due to its longevity that will take time and effort to supplant, and that is just a fact of reality. I get a bit tired of the endless reincarnation of thread topics but I recognize that you're going to develop that problem over time at any site. I don't even notice the unrelated advertising anymore (guess I've become numb to it since it's seemingly everywhere).

If I'm looking for interaction and responses, the site that averages 400-800 online at any one time is more likely to meet that need than a site that runs 10-80 (note: the reported record number on this site was pre-IB but occurred a few years after the site supposedly went to crap). If I'm researching modding and maintenance items--particularly for 1st Gen--a half-decade of post archives is more likely to hold the answer than one that is less than a year old (yeah, we all wish for a better search engine). If I'm in the mood to spend $$, I get more choice among 47 named vendors than I do with 17. If I want to look at pictures from an early MOTD or MITM1...well, you get the picture.

I'm not trying to dis the upstart, but pointing out why people who hope for an eventual, significant niche for an alternative like MA still find themselves gravitating back to this site and are able to look past the commercialization and the warts from its largess, at least for the time being. And the late-comers who feel like the site provides them a service shouldn't be ridiculed just because the plank-owners know that NAM isn't what it used to be. Hardly anything ever is.

 

I'm a small manufacturer and a long time member. I'm also one of those people who put in content for free that helped create a site with a reson to visit....

When IB took over, vendor rates increased a lot, and services dropped. Banner add rotation used to be free with vendor status, now it is not. Banners used to be mini focused, now many are far from it. I see stuff from GM advertising the new camero, or something from ford for a flex or a mustang, heck, I even see some stuff from investment companies! So with the increasing vendor fees comes less services as well. This really sucks cause FES and many other small players don't have the income streams to really justify the expense.

IB's strategy is to have lots of sites where they can bundle and cross-sell to bigger vendors. This dilutes the value to the membership (if you really wanted to buy a Camero, would you really be here?) and really squeezes the smaller vendors (if you're smaller than X, we don't need you).

Yes this is part of the maturation of the site as it grows, but what lets it happen is the membership just sits back and accepts it. Every time you see a banner add or something that isn't Mini specific, we're accepting the "big money" model of sites like this. Every time we come here to keep supporting the "machine" because it's easy, instead of spending time at the new upstarts, we perpetuate the model and make it take longer for the grass-roots alternatives to thrive. If we all put some work into making other sites better, then we would create viable alternatives to this.

Mini2 had a huge bunch of pissed off people go form TotalMINI... There have been people here who have gone off to form MotoringAlliance.

The internet isn't just what we make it, it's what we allow it to become. The complacancy of the masses, who come for the easy access to information without thinking about how the business model is changing, are what allow the dilution of quality that is all to evident to long time members.

Matt

 

Of course it's about making money. Check out <a href="http://www.internetbrands.com/">their site</a>. They provide a free forum to us and sell our eyeballs and clicks to advertisers. Same as television and radio, which provide us free content.

Anyway, you might want to try installing a Flash blocker. It's super-easy if you use Firefox (try out the Flashblock extension), and I think there are some available for IE too. If you do use IE, I suggest giving Firefox a test drive; it's more secure and faster than IE. (Apple's Safari is wicked fast and available for Windows and I love it, but it has no Flash-block capabilities built-in. )

But even with a Flash blocker, this site gets slow during peak use periods. To get around this, I use the "Quick links" menu to view "Today's Posts", then open the ones I'm interested in in a bunch of new tabs. That way, they can load in the background while I read the first one.

Hope this helps!

 

For your reading pleasure;
http://www.nicoclub.com/articles/forum-history.shtml

I'm not sure how my role on another site relates to this site I still come to this site often, and gave IB about a year before I started expressing my thoughts about the buy-out. Now if something bugs me, I speak my mind, on this forum, made for feedback, not all over the site, wiggly-niggly.

It can't hurt to let IB know how we feel about how the site is run. They can choose how to deal with info.

Mark

 

That's a great article Mark...thanks for sharing it.

As I read this something seemed to ring familiar, then realized that you could replace the word "information" with "merchandise" and we could be talking about WalMart.

I think the subset of the longer-term membership who "just sits back and accepts it" is more than offset by newbies who--in the absence of knowing all of the background--buy a MINI, do a Google search for an online resource, and they find NAM which superficially appears to offer the greatest breadth and depth of the available resources. As with the typical WalMart shopper, how do you educate them that it's much better for everyone in the long run to go downtown and buy local?

Aren't the vendors who continue to do business here also playing a role in perpetuating the "machine?"

 

I don't think that vendors, who sell Mini/MINI stuff are the issue, or even vendors like Tire Rack, who sell more general automotive wares. It's the ads that pop up that have nothing really to do with cars, let alone Mini/MINIs.

Mark

 

to put it bluntly, this is where the credit card numbers are.... But IB sure charges dearly for for that access....

As a comparison, MotorringAlliance is less than a quarter the cost, and comes with a lot more features for a vendor. While in terms of cost per sale is higher there because it's just getting started, I'm hoping that it will grow into something more....

IB added more adds to the home page.... and couldn't even fix this...

With the increased income, we still have a search system that sucks, rendering a huge amount of the accrued knowledge here inaccessable.

Really, IBs strategy is to make money here, and that's fine. But the critical mass of the large membership allows them to not take care of the site infrastructure as the inertia will keep it profitable even as other competition grows in size.

I haven't notices any longer time for answers or response at either TotalMinni or MotoringAlliannce. While there are a lot less people there, there are a lot that know a lot.

Matt

 

I don't want to get into the entire discussion but would like just to point out one thing.

The search is an issue on all large forums based on vBulletin as this one, TotalMINI, MiniTorque, my own and M|U are. There is a fix that is mighty expensive for the smaller sites and a big pill to swallow for a larger site. vBulletin 4.0 is in an alpha stage right now and supposedly does have a fix for this. While IB does own Jelsoft, the creators of vBulletin, their purchase was after the current code was in place and I'd imagine IB will just as ecstatic as the rest of the forum owners if vB 4.0 does fix this search issue.