The affect Facebook Groups has had on some car forums.
(https://www.hagerty.com/media/great-...880ed5adb10291)

 

I maintain that it's people accessing the internet through phones that's killing activity.
On a PC you're on a browser and while you can use one on a phone, social media tries to keep you within their app.
Additionally, on a phone it's harder to search and scroll through results so people would rather post a question that's been asked thousands of times before.

 

My daily driver is 2000 Acura RL and I'm a member of two first gen (1996-2004) Acura RL forums and it's pretty much the "sound of crickets" on both platforms now days. Forums are a valuable sources of information and it's sad to see then whither away.


My Daily Driver

 

My daily driver is a 2000 Acura RL and I'm a member of two first gen RL forums and when I logon now days there little to no new posts on either site. I have always found car forums to be a valuable source of information, maintenance tips, and how-to tutorials. It is sad to see them wither away.

 

yeah, I'm kinda in the same boat. I've got 24 year old Lexus as a DD and the forums aren't as active as this, probably because most things that need fixing have already been documented.

Even though Farah got an LS400 to a million miles those generation cars are now known for having decaying ECUs being the culprit for bad running.
On one forum there's a Japanese guy who knows the electronics inside and out and has posted exactly which capacitors leak and how to replace them. People like that are what make the forums great.

 

One thing I have noticed is if new members would "Google" the issue they are having many times the RX7club.com posts concerning the issue will show-up as links, which kind of handy for the new folks. I can't say the forum search function is all that good however, that may just be me, I type with two fingers and am more of an "analog" guy.

 

For site specific searching, I added an RX7Club.com Site Search shortcut to Chrome. With this, when I type the shortcut "rx7" followed by the search term, Google returns results for the first gen section forums.

It's easy to setup.

1. Go to Chrome's settings for Search Engine and scroll down to the Site Search section
2. Click on Add and fill it as below, cut/paste this exact URL text:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.rx7club.com%2F1s t-generation-specific-1979-1985-18%2F+%s



3. Click on Save

 

Does it limit the search to only the forum, or does it still give you other finds elsewhere?

 

This limits the search to just the 1st gen section and below, determined by the part of the text here in red in the URL

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.rx7club.com%2F1s t-generation-specific-1979-1985-18%2F+%s

If you eliminate that red part of the URL it would search the entire rx7club.com website, but not the rest of the Internet.

Here's what I get when I type 'rx7 mtheory' into my Chrome address bar, a nice clean set of results. The browser takes my simple entry, creates a custom search string and executes it

site:https://www.rx7club.com/1st-generation-specific-1979-1985-18/ mtheory

 

Sorry to get off topic, but this is essentially the same thing as using the search function on here (and filtering it specifically to the 1st gen forum), correct?

 

Yes, but I find the way the results are sorted, prioritized is more relevant to my needs. And it's easier once you have the shortcut set up.

 

I see this with this forum and I also have Kei van and I see it in the minitrucktalk.com forum as well. I frequent FB related pages for both and always point folks to the forums for the answers. I think younger folks don't even realize there are forums out there and that they are 10x easier to search than FB, plus FB searching just doesn't work.

 

I do google search using the site: keyword, so something like "nikki mods site:rx7club.com" which limits it to this forum. Also google search is much better than the forum search ever was.