Okay here goes, this could be a very long post, so strap in. It is also going a bit inside the sausage factory, which is not always what people want to read about.
There are, as ever, about eight different things happening all at once for Retro Rides right now, which pull things in all sort of directions. By things I mean my time, pretty much. This is fairly normal, however unusually they may actually be pulling stuff to the same end point. I'm going to try and articulate a whole load of what is going on, what my thoughts are and what I can do with those thoughts. Part of this is actually going to be me working this out as I type as well, downloading the stuff that is floating around my brain and trying to give it some actual shape. All of which should serve as a warning that this may be wandering around a bit.
The Forum: Activity
Let's start with the thing that kind of prompted me to (over)share all this. Recently I posted some stats in this thread when we were discussing if the forum was quieter than it used to be. Let me jsut say here, the forum has been running for twenty years, it has had periods of massive activity and periods of very low activity (relatively), and that is just something that happens some times. However right now the stats are pretty steady across the last year, for posting and viewing. The numbers are higher than they were pre-covid. However it is equally true as pointed out by grumpybadger there are definitely parts of the site that don't move as fast as they once did, build threads being one of those.
Some possibilities for what is going on here. Firstly maybe people have less to share, it has been a tricky few years financially for a lot of people and I suspect one of the first things to get put on the back burner would be playing about with cars (never a cheap hobby even at the best of times), so people are visiting, but not updating their threads because there isn't much to say. I definitely fall in to this category. Build Threads in general are maybe a little antiquated now, however I've also noticed less of that kind of activity on social networks, it is possible people are less inclined to share too. I am also looking at the possibility that the changes I've made to the forum (which we'll come on to in more detail later), have lead to less drive for people to post, the redesign work was never supposed to just stop, but circumstances have lead to that, so we're not anywhere near where I wanted it to be, and maybe where we've ended up is not good enough to meet basic needs.
The Forum: Slowness and bugs
One of the more annoying things that has been reported more recently is generalised forum slowness. Given that I've not actually made many changes to the site since February this has to be something external. Most likely culprit is the adverts we run. More on which in a bit. I've turned off the adverts for the time being to see if this resolves the issue, and if it does I'll go to the provider and see what the problem is. However that isn't the only bug floating around the forum causing quality of life issues. There are still sections of the site that aren't styled properly for the new design (Private Messages has some annoying issues in all different resolutions), the on going thread paging bug and the occasional bug where the forum forgets how far through a thread you are, have all been proving tricky to fix.
This is partly a function of my time availability and partly a function of the forum software being a closed platform, so I can't really get in to the nitty gritty of it to fix stuff. There aren't any quick fixes here, but that are definitely fixes to be done.
The Forum: Adverts/Money stuff (THIS IS LONG)
Okay so it has been mentioned twice already, and not covering itself in glory, advertising. Like alcohol, it is the source of and solution to all problems online.
Quick history lesson: waaaaay back in the day Retro Rides ran on Proboards and utilised it as a free platform, Proboards put ads on the forum and that is how they made their money, we had a free platform to run our community, life was fine. We then found Viglink, installed it on our forum, and the eBay links became monetised and we started to bring in a bit of money. This actually helped keep the Gaydon, Haynes and first Prescott events afloat. When the events could keep their nose clean, we split to the two ventures, Retro Rides Website and Retro Rides Events. So now RR had income, which I used to upgrade a few bits of hosting and launch the first version of the image uploader. About a month and a half in to this Viglink revenue imploded, but now I was committed to the image hosting, so I paid for (and quite happily too). Long story short Image hosting costs went absolutely crazy, Proboards ads became increasingly obnoxious, and I was spending a lot each month to keep things running (like £6-700 a month (which I didn't have spare really)). My solution was to go ad free on Proboards so I could control the ads, also I could run better placed ads than Proboards because I controlled the layout, and then that should bring in more money so I can pay for the Proboards side of things and offset some of my spend on images. This sort of worked, I managed to also reduce my hosting costs with some serious tuning and changes on the platform, but it was still pretty high so I was still spending a bunch each month. This went on for a couple of years, some months better than others. Then I realised I had to do something more or it was ultimately going to fall apart.
This is where in 2019 Club Retro Rides came in. The extra income from those first 100 members allowed me to commit to a dedicated host, which slashed my hosting costs and gave me a whole load of flexibility at the same time. I still have to spend each month on image hosting, but it is very much less than it once was. The forum advert revenue was slowly dwindling, not because of lack of activity but because of changes in the way Ads were paying out and the general market. It covered the cost of being ad free, which gave me flexibility I desired for the forum, but not much more. Then 2020 happened and the ad market imploded for a while, but we had other problems. RR Merch only really sells at shows, we get the odd sticker and occasionally a shirt here and there, but shows is where the Merch sells. It doesn't make a lot of profit, but it does make enough that it pays for lots of the kind of "back office" type stuff, Adobe licenses, Shopify costs, Podbean costs, various other bills. With that gone for a year and the ad revenue gone for a year things were bleak. We had bigger fish to fry than a small car forum, but it wasn't good. Club RR is what kept the lights on directly, I also moved a bunch of stuff to be paid from my own accounts again.
Come 2021 I realised I needed to make the whole system more resilient financially, there were always ways I could make more money to pay for various things, but I'm very much not in favour of commercialising RR Community in that way and taking advantage of the good will of everyone here. However 2020 was a fairly stark warning. Ads are what makes the internet world go round, so I looked at what I could do. We're not big enough to be on Google Ads big daddy tier and get those sweet sweet expensive adverts, however we are big enough to qualify for an Ad Reseller that carries those ads, puts them on our forum and then takes a percentage of the income. In order to do that though I needed the mobile and desktop site unified. Which is exactly what Proboards were working on with their 'phoenix' release, so I waited... and waited... and waited. They did a beta, it was looking good. Then they imploded, got bought by someone else and canned the phoenix project. So I had to write a theme from scratch that would work on mobile and desktop and allow me to carry a better returning ad platform. So that's what I did, it still isn't perfect but it allows us to carry Raptive ads.
Which is pretty much where we are today with adverts. The one big change right now is I've turned them all off, because they were causing problems, people had slow sites or couldn't log in, all of the ad income in the world is no good if the people you want to be using your forum aren't using it. Apparently there was a bug introduced in their system somewhere which is now fixed. However I'm quite enjoying the site without ads, and it does all feel faster overall (even from when the ads were working properly).
Club RR, New thing
In that big wall of text above was the genesis of Club RR and how important it became to the forum. I always feel like I've never done Club RR well enough. The shows take up too much of my time, and I've tried a couple of times to do Club RR only events, but they just don't fly. It isn't big enough to attract discounts from companies, and I'm never quite sure what I should be doing with it. Also the three separate systems I've used since it started have never really made it easy to run. Given that I have a million things to do at any one time I need systems that don't feel like they are actively working against me, or my brain sort of checks out. It is a problem and something I try to avoid, but it does happen and I have to own that.
I recently changed over to Ko-Fi as our membership system. I looked at it a while ago, alongside things like Patreon and it was missing some things I wanted. When a podcast I listen to started up a Ko-Fi page I took another look at it, and it was better than what we were running now and allowed me to build some more system on top (aided by that dedicated hosting we now have). I'm thinking it might be interesting if I get rid of the ads and replace a couple of the ad positions with Ko-Fi links, maybe the income would cover the hosting (forum and images) and that would be a good thing. Maybe it would go beyond that and I could look to get some help on content stuff...
Merchandise
Another thing I do terribly is merchandise, we have a sizable following on Instagram, I don't think I've put up that we have tshirts and stickers on there more than once in the last five years. There is no link to the store anywhere other than the side menu on this site, the store looks like dog poop, it doesn't have all our stuff in it. I don't create new or interesting merch often enough. On the flip side I've been BADLY stung in the past making new merch, it is an expensive commitment if it doesn't sell, even worse if it does sell for one batch so you get a reprint and don't sell any of them. Then again, I am clearly not doing the best by the merchandise. This feels like something that should be a couple of days work to improve, but again I always feel like things aren't great, the product photos aren't great, the range of stuff isn't great, what should I do next? Where does the money come from to pay for stock? It is definitely something that feels like a fair exchange, people get a sticker/tshirt/whatever we make a little bit of money and use that to pay our bills etc.
On the subject of making money though, I think currently any sticker purchased through the site technically loses money because of rising printing costs and postage costs. Tshirts fair better, but postage can be a bit of a killer on them too. I make sure we use good quality brands to print on so we're not just using the cheapest Gildan or whatever we can find in order to maximise profit.
Okay in to the home stretch now...
Mailing List
The 'new' old thing that has been a big deal for communities and brands and events and just about everyone the last few years has been mailing lists. They are a great way to push updates and interesting stuff out without being at the mercy of The Algorithm on whatever billionaire owned platform you might want to think of. The problem with mailing lists is one of size and frequency. We had (have) a pretty solid mailing list from back when we did weekly mailing, but content for weekly mails is hard work and time consuming. So we could send less frequently, but content creation for emails is still hard, and what is the focus? Do we cherry pick some threads from the forum? Find some cool stuff for sale and include that? Do original content? If you're turning up in my inbox I'm going to expect something good and worth my time opening. This is hard. What's more the mailing list we have is about 3,500 people for the ones that subscribed to RR back when we had the list, the forum is 50k+ people. In theory I should be able to send out a nice email to that list, like other forums do, but I can't because of the way Proboards limits us. I could go through and copy and paste every email on this site to our mailing list, then it would be a REAL worthwhile venture, but that violates the TOS of Proboards, and whilst I suspect they are not in a position to care too much, I also am not in a position to risk them closing the forum over it.
Youtube/Content/Podcasts/stuff
I've sort of lumped these together, really they could be whole separate topics, whole separate threads in fact. Ultimately though the eco-system of having more content is heavily constrained in whatever manner for the same reason. Time. I've got the ability to create videos, or podcasts, or long written/photo features or daily Instagram updates. What I don't have is the time. There isn't a short cut for this either, there are definitely things I can do better and intend to do in order to make more Youtube videos happen, however it will never be a regular thing without some serious time put aside for it. Time put aside for that is time out of all of the things above. I'm also not sure it is a good use of time. There are plenty of "chap walks around a car show naming cars" type channels out there, there are a few people doing in depth stuff on particular cars/stories/people, so for me it would need to bring something more Retro Rides to the table. I'm not sure what that is.
I've thought about doing an events focused podcast, talking about organising and going to events. I floated the idea a couple of years ago, and I've tried to get it off the ground more recently, even if a bit halfheartedly, but it didn't fly.
What now?
I don't know what I was aiming for with this post... to just get my thoughts out has been super useful. I think I need to decide if we're going to ditch adverts, which have actually been fairly effective this year (until they weren't), and go all in on Club RR. Or if I try to strike a balance.
I think I'm going to do a follow up thread with plans for the next 6 months in the not to distant future, and steps to achieving that. I have a couple of fairly sizable projects that if I can get them to completion will really change the face of things I expect. However over promising and under delivering is a bad habit I've formed online recently, so I need to be sure that is all going to happen.
Thanks for reading this if you have. Just having it for myself to refer to and to have it out there for people to understand the forces at play in this relatively small forum I feel is helpful.
There are, as ever, about eight different things happening all at once for Retro Rides right now, which pull things in all sort of directions. By things I mean my time, pretty much. This is fairly normal, however unusually they may actually be pulling stuff to the same end point. I'm going to try and articulate a whole load of what is going on, what my thoughts are and what I can do with those thoughts. Part of this is actually going to be me working this out as I type as well, downloading the stuff that is floating around my brain and trying to give it some actual shape. All of which should serve as a warning that this may be wandering around a bit.
The Forum: Activity
Let's start with the thing that kind of prompted me to (over)share all this. Recently I posted some stats in this thread when we were discussing if the forum was quieter than it used to be. Let me jsut say here, the forum has been running for twenty years, it has had periods of massive activity and periods of very low activity (relatively), and that is just something that happens some times. However right now the stats are pretty steady across the last year, for posting and viewing. The numbers are higher than they were pre-covid. However it is equally true as pointed out by grumpybadger there are definitely parts of the site that don't move as fast as they once did, build threads being one of those.
Some possibilities for what is going on here. Firstly maybe people have less to share, it has been a tricky few years financially for a lot of people and I suspect one of the first things to get put on the back burner would be playing about with cars (never a cheap hobby even at the best of times), so people are visiting, but not updating their threads because there isn't much to say. I definitely fall in to this category. Build Threads in general are maybe a little antiquated now, however I've also noticed less of that kind of activity on social networks, it is possible people are less inclined to share too. I am also looking at the possibility that the changes I've made to the forum (which we'll come on to in more detail later), have lead to less drive for people to post, the redesign work was never supposed to just stop, but circumstances have lead to that, so we're not anywhere near where I wanted it to be, and maybe where we've ended up is not good enough to meet basic needs.
The Forum: Slowness and bugs
One of the more annoying things that has been reported more recently is generalised forum slowness. Given that I've not actually made many changes to the site since February this has to be something external. Most likely culprit is the adverts we run. More on which in a bit. I've turned off the adverts for the time being to see if this resolves the issue, and if it does I'll go to the provider and see what the problem is. However that isn't the only bug floating around the forum causing quality of life issues. There are still sections of the site that aren't styled properly for the new design (Private Messages has some annoying issues in all different resolutions), the on going thread paging bug and the occasional bug where the forum forgets how far through a thread you are, have all been proving tricky to fix.
This is partly a function of my time availability and partly a function of the forum software being a closed platform, so I can't really get in to the nitty gritty of it to fix stuff. There aren't any quick fixes here, but that are definitely fixes to be done.
The Forum: Adverts/Money stuff (THIS IS LONG)
Okay so it has been mentioned twice already, and not covering itself in glory, advertising. Like alcohol, it is the source of and solution to all problems online.
Quick history lesson: waaaaay back in the day Retro Rides ran on Proboards and utilised it as a free platform, Proboards put ads on the forum and that is how they made their money, we had a free platform to run our community, life was fine. We then found Viglink, installed it on our forum, and the eBay links became monetised and we started to bring in a bit of money. This actually helped keep the Gaydon, Haynes and first Prescott events afloat. When the events could keep their nose clean, we split to the two ventures, Retro Rides Website and Retro Rides Events. So now RR had income, which I used to upgrade a few bits of hosting and launch the first version of the image uploader. About a month and a half in to this Viglink revenue imploded, but now I was committed to the image hosting, so I paid for (and quite happily too). Long story short Image hosting costs went absolutely crazy, Proboards ads became increasingly obnoxious, and I was spending a lot each month to keep things running (like £6-700 a month (which I didn't have spare really)). My solution was to go ad free on Proboards so I could control the ads, also I could run better placed ads than Proboards because I controlled the layout, and then that should bring in more money so I can pay for the Proboards side of things and offset some of my spend on images. This sort of worked, I managed to also reduce my hosting costs with some serious tuning and changes on the platform, but it was still pretty high so I was still spending a bunch each month. This went on for a couple of years, some months better than others. Then I realised I had to do something more or it was ultimately going to fall apart.
This is where in 2019 Club Retro Rides came in. The extra income from those first 100 members allowed me to commit to a dedicated host, which slashed my hosting costs and gave me a whole load of flexibility at the same time. I still have to spend each month on image hosting, but it is very much less than it once was. The forum advert revenue was slowly dwindling, not because of lack of activity but because of changes in the way Ads were paying out and the general market. It covered the cost of being ad free, which gave me flexibility I desired for the forum, but not much more. Then 2020 happened and the ad market imploded for a while, but we had other problems. RR Merch only really sells at shows, we get the odd sticker and occasionally a shirt here and there, but shows is where the Merch sells. It doesn't make a lot of profit, but it does make enough that it pays for lots of the kind of "back office" type stuff, Adobe licenses, Shopify costs, Podbean costs, various other bills. With that gone for a year and the ad revenue gone for a year things were bleak. We had bigger fish to fry than a small car forum, but it wasn't good. Club RR is what kept the lights on directly, I also moved a bunch of stuff to be paid from my own accounts again.
Come 2021 I realised I needed to make the whole system more resilient financially, there were always ways I could make more money to pay for various things, but I'm very much not in favour of commercialising RR Community in that way and taking advantage of the good will of everyone here. However 2020 was a fairly stark warning. Ads are what makes the internet world go round, so I looked at what I could do. We're not big enough to be on Google Ads big daddy tier and get those sweet sweet expensive adverts, however we are big enough to qualify for an Ad Reseller that carries those ads, puts them on our forum and then takes a percentage of the income. In order to do that though I needed the mobile and desktop site unified. Which is exactly what Proboards were working on with their 'phoenix' release, so I waited... and waited... and waited. They did a beta, it was looking good. Then they imploded, got bought by someone else and canned the phoenix project. So I had to write a theme from scratch that would work on mobile and desktop and allow me to carry a better returning ad platform. So that's what I did, it still isn't perfect but it allows us to carry Raptive ads.
Which is pretty much where we are today with adverts. The one big change right now is I've turned them all off, because they were causing problems, people had slow sites or couldn't log in, all of the ad income in the world is no good if the people you want to be using your forum aren't using it. Apparently there was a bug introduced in their system somewhere which is now fixed. However I'm quite enjoying the site without ads, and it does all feel faster overall (even from when the ads were working properly).
Club RR, New thing
In that big wall of text above was the genesis of Club RR and how important it became to the forum. I always feel like I've never done Club RR well enough. The shows take up too much of my time, and I've tried a couple of times to do Club RR only events, but they just don't fly. It isn't big enough to attract discounts from companies, and I'm never quite sure what I should be doing with it. Also the three separate systems I've used since it started have never really made it easy to run. Given that I have a million things to do at any one time I need systems that don't feel like they are actively working against me, or my brain sort of checks out. It is a problem and something I try to avoid, but it does happen and I have to own that.
I recently changed over to Ko-Fi as our membership system. I looked at it a while ago, alongside things like Patreon and it was missing some things I wanted. When a podcast I listen to started up a Ko-Fi page I took another look at it, and it was better than what we were running now and allowed me to build some more system on top (aided by that dedicated hosting we now have). I'm thinking it might be interesting if I get rid of the ads and replace a couple of the ad positions with Ko-Fi links, maybe the income would cover the hosting (forum and images) and that would be a good thing. Maybe it would go beyond that and I could look to get some help on content stuff...
Merchandise
Another thing I do terribly is merchandise, we have a sizable following on Instagram, I don't think I've put up that we have tshirts and stickers on there more than once in the last five years. There is no link to the store anywhere other than the side menu on this site, the store looks like dog poop, it doesn't have all our stuff in it. I don't create new or interesting merch often enough. On the flip side I've been BADLY stung in the past making new merch, it is an expensive commitment if it doesn't sell, even worse if it does sell for one batch so you get a reprint and don't sell any of them. Then again, I am clearly not doing the best by the merchandise. This feels like something that should be a couple of days work to improve, but again I always feel like things aren't great, the product photos aren't great, the range of stuff isn't great, what should I do next? Where does the money come from to pay for stock? It is definitely something that feels like a fair exchange, people get a sticker/tshirt/whatever we make a little bit of money and use that to pay our bills etc.
On the subject of making money though, I think currently any sticker purchased through the site technically loses money because of rising printing costs and postage costs. Tshirts fair better, but postage can be a bit of a killer on them too. I make sure we use good quality brands to print on so we're not just using the cheapest Gildan or whatever we can find in order to maximise profit.
Okay in to the home stretch now...
Mailing List
The 'new' old thing that has been a big deal for communities and brands and events and just about everyone the last few years has been mailing lists. They are a great way to push updates and interesting stuff out without being at the mercy of The Algorithm on whatever billionaire owned platform you might want to think of. The problem with mailing lists is one of size and frequency. We had (have) a pretty solid mailing list from back when we did weekly mailing, but content for weekly mails is hard work and time consuming. So we could send less frequently, but content creation for emails is still hard, and what is the focus? Do we cherry pick some threads from the forum? Find some cool stuff for sale and include that? Do original content? If you're turning up in my inbox I'm going to expect something good and worth my time opening. This is hard. What's more the mailing list we have is about 3,500 people for the ones that subscribed to RR back when we had the list, the forum is 50k+ people. In theory I should be able to send out a nice email to that list, like other forums do, but I can't because of the way Proboards limits us. I could go through and copy and paste every email on this site to our mailing list, then it would be a REAL worthwhile venture, but that violates the TOS of Proboards, and whilst I suspect they are not in a position to care too much, I also am not in a position to risk them closing the forum over it.
Youtube/Content/Podcasts/stuff
I've sort of lumped these together, really they could be whole separate topics, whole separate threads in fact. Ultimately though the eco-system of having more content is heavily constrained in whatever manner for the same reason. Time. I've got the ability to create videos, or podcasts, or long written/photo features or daily Instagram updates. What I don't have is the time. There isn't a short cut for this either, there are definitely things I can do better and intend to do in order to make more Youtube videos happen, however it will never be a regular thing without some serious time put aside for it. Time put aside for that is time out of all of the things above. I'm also not sure it is a good use of time. There are plenty of "chap walks around a car show naming cars" type channels out there, there are a few people doing in depth stuff on particular cars/stories/people, so for me it would need to bring something more Retro Rides to the table. I'm not sure what that is.
I've thought about doing an events focused podcast, talking about organising and going to events. I floated the idea a couple of years ago, and I've tried to get it off the ground more recently, even if a bit halfheartedly, but it didn't fly.
What now?
I don't know what I was aiming for with this post... to just get my thoughts out has been super useful. I think I need to decide if we're going to ditch adverts, which have actually been fairly effective this year (until they weren't), and go all in on Club RR. Or if I try to strike a balance.
I think I'm going to do a follow up thread with plans for the next 6 months in the not to distant future, and steps to achieving that. I have a couple of fairly sizable projects that if I can get them to completion will really change the face of things I expect. However over promising and under delivering is a bad habit I've formed online recently, so I need to be sure that is all going to happen.
Thanks for reading this if you have. Just having it for myself to refer to and to have it out there for people to understand the forces at play in this relatively small forum I feel is helpful.
Ax GTi Turbo
) for all the reasons you mention. 
and it was mental busy - had its own meets, had its own merch, had this and had that and now its all just a memory. Gone. So the fact this forum soldiers on is impressive.
