Website New Direction - Important please read

[Mad]

Hi all,

With dwindling Gtir owners, the club has been becoming smaller every year and most people nowadays just use the site for our extensive wiki of information gathered over the years or to buy and sell parts.

Now this is fine but in reality the cost, effort and work carried out to continue in its current format does not warrant keeping the site without making some changes.

Now before you start getting worried, the club and website is not shutting down or closing but over the last few months I have been toying on ideas on how to grow the club and have come to the conclusion to keep it viable, we need to adapt and make some changes.

Firstly, I am in the process of moving the forums to a different software called xenforo. Our current platform, vbulletin is out of date and our current site is beyond repair of its current issues, like the Google redirect to a naughty page. I've already tested and I don't believe any information will be lost and all members log in, posts and info will stay the same.

Secondly, we need to bring some fresh blood into the club and fortunately, Nissan are bringing new additions to their Nismo range, including if not already available the Nismo Duke, GT-R, 370z and Pulsar. This means that both the pulsar and nismo brands will become much stronger over the next few months and years.

This means that we have some potential options is which direction to grow the club. In time this will probably mean rebranding but the gtiroc name will always remain strong.

Some potential options are -

Nissan Pulsar Nismo
www.npnoc.com - as in Nissan Pulsar Nismo Owners Club
Nismooc - as in Nismo Owners Club

Fortunately, our model will fall nicely into any of those options as we are both compatible with pulsar and nismo.

So, I have created a poll for members to post their opinions and feel free to reply too

 

[geetee]

Went with Nismooc (is .co.uk not available?) as it should allow the club to expand to cover all new Nismo models - each with their own sub-forum perhaps. I'm thinking along the lines of VWVortex VWVortex.com where the various brands / models have their own niche but there is an over-arching General Discussion area.

 

[gtiroz]

I think there are 3 major factors to dwindling activity:
- Lack of unity
- Age of the car
- Facebook (and the FB generation)

As for becoming a full range club, there are already multiple established and active forums for all those other models - even just in the UK:
www.nissansportz.com
www.gtr.co.uk
www.gtroc.org
www.350z-uk.com
www.jukeownersgroup.com
www.jukeownersclub.co.uk

As for the Pulsar Nismo, the only thing it's really going to have in common with the GTI-R is the parent company and Pulsar badge.
Its owners are not going to have anything to gain from any of the information or discussion here about an unrelated 25 year old relic,
and any of their discussion will be of limited interest to GTI-R owners (especially in the first few years while most of them are kept stock under warranty).

If you're really going to bastardise the purity of a historic one-make club, my suggestion is to make this a 2-in-1 forum.
Create a separate identity for the Pulsar Nismo Owners Club, keep gtiroc.com and logo, add nismopulsaroc.com and a 2nd logo to the header, and split the forum in 2 halves.
If you really want a single identity, make a 3rd umbrella one, ie. "The Nissan Pulsar Performance Owners Club, comprising the GTI-R OC and Pulsar Nismo OC" pulsarperformance.com or nppoc.com

Failing the multiple idea, I vote: The Pulsar Nismo GTI-R Owners Club nismogtiroc.com

 

[Richard_Sideways]

With Gtiroz on most of this - The new breed will have almost nothing in common with the 'R. As for the naming, not keen on any TBH, - beyond a couple of clutch parts and a sticker on its arse which I didn't put there, my ones got no Nismo involvement.

I'll hold my hands up to not knowing the full reasons behind the split of the owners groups, and ultimately it seems like a resolution to that would be the best solution for both groups, the marque and the owners.

 

[Mad]

nismogtiroc.com is not a bad suggestion.

As what Richard said, the best solution for everyone in the UK would have been to have one club. We had 3, now 2 and there is a massive divide between the 2 which is un repairable.

The truth is, the site owes me way over £1000 plus hundreds of man hours I have put in and I am at a stage where I cannot do anymore with the club in its current form and to be honest due to dwindling numbers, I no longer have the desire to maintain the site unless I can see it moving in the right direction.

Im not in this for the money but to keep the club viable, here are our options -

1 - Start charging membership
2 - Pass the Owners Club onto another party - This would have to be discussed by the club hierarchy
3 - Open the club upto new car enthusiasts such as Pulsar Nismo or Nismo and rebrand at some stage.
4 - Close the forums keeping the wealth of information we have available for all to see.

 

[Trondelond]

Definitely with Gtiroz on the facebook-generation thing. I´m also a member of the Honda club in norway, and there´s heaps of new people coming in to the Facebook-group, but none use the forum. Which really is a pity. Damn their short attention spans. So questions are being asked over and over, and there´s no way to organize information. As far as the gtiroc club, I really don´t have a strong opinion. But Gtiroz makes a good argument, and option 3 from Mad4it makes sense to me.

 

[MarkTurbo]

I don't see the point in rebranding it to include cars that have nothing to do with the gti-r, the gtiroc identity will just end up getting lost. I can't see paid membership working either as look what happened last time :lol: and the membership numbers are a fraction of what they were last time it was done.

What happened to all the money from the previous paid memberships? There must have been a few thousand £££ and as far as I'm aware it never got spent anywhere :?

It would be a shame but i wouldn't blame you if you did just bin it off as lets face it this place is dead these days, most the cars have probably being scrapped due to being owned by dickheads and there seems to be hardly any interest in them anymore! I doubt I've seen one on the road for at least 5 years :shock:

Gtiroz had a good point, wasteofspacebook seems to have wormed its way into everything these days like a parasite. You can't seem to do anything these days without it popping up somewhere :roll:

 

[stevepudney]

I think Shalom is spot on with this.................I don't think it should be renamed, this club is called gtiroc.com and if called something else the gtir ownwers club (the original uk club) would be gone, it' doesn't need re inventing and even if it did, renaming it is not the way forward.

As said already, dwindling numbers and social media are at the root of the sites inactivity, people spend more time on a FB app on their phone than they do looking at a website via a browser on a computer (which was the only way when the club first started).

Considering the websites history, going right back to before the website when it was just a Yahoo group, I feel a responsibility to keep it as it is as much as possible.

I think your right to ditch vBulletin, transfer it to new software, keep the name and logo, clean it up and as said make it a 2 or 3 in 1 forum.

Steve

I think there are 3 major factors to dwindling activity:
- Lack of unity
- Age of the car
- Facebook (and the FB generation)

As for becoming a full range club, there are already multiple established and active forums for all those other models - even just in the UK:
www.nissansportz.com
www.gtr.co.uk
www.gtroc.org
www.350z-uk.com
www.jukeownersgroup.com
www.jukeownersclub.co.uk

As for the Pulsar Nismo, the only thing it's really going to have in common with the GTI-R is the parent company and Pulsar badge.
Its owners are not going to have anything to gain from any of the information or discussion here about an unrelated 25 year old relic,
and any of their discussion will be of limited interest to GTI-R owners (especially in the first few years while most of them are kept stock under warranty).

If you're really going to bastardise the purity of a historic one-make club, my suggestion is to make this a 2-in-1 forum.
Create a separate identity for the Pulsar Nismo Owners Club, keep gtiroc.com and logo, add nismopulsaroc.com and a 2nd logo to the header, and split the forum in 2 halves.
If you really want a single identity, make a 3rd umbrella one, ie. "The Nissan Pulsar Performance Owners Club, comprising the GTI-R OC and Pulsar Nismo OC" pulsarperformance.com or nppoc.com

Failing the multiple idea, I vote: The Pulsar Nismo GTI-R Owners Club nismogtiroc.com

 

[lakeview]

Why does it need to change?
I'm on both clubs and to be honest neither are busy not sure now many clubs are.there more post in a day on the face book pages there there are in both clubs in a week.

 

[Fire & skill]

I've always been of the opinion 'if it aint broke, dont fix it' which is why I have never ventured on to the 'other' club and the same reason I wasn't overly social on the modifiers when it was still going. What you're really asking is how do we maintain club activity when the ownership of the car in question is on the decline? well to be blunt about it there really is only enough cars to maintain ONE club, this whole divide divide between members is killing both sides, I suppose we should be asking how do we get a sense of unity?

I'm not too keen in splitting a well organised forum but completely understand the position you are in Danny,I wish I had an answer but the reality is I don't. I'm certainly not defeatist in any sense of the word, it's a pity we couldn't encourage other dwindling clubs such as almera oc or primera oc to have their own section on here. The new pulsar nismo is as far away from our cars as a giraffe is from a hamster, we'd be just as well having the renault sport megane on here if we're asking the new pulsar owners on board.

This needs a bit more thought but I'm glad that we are debating this NOW rather than letting the club dwindle off.

 

[Dangerous Dave]

i know its not much of an input but I do try my best to get people on to the site from Facebook buy giving them a club member discount. It's not much but I've seen a few new members pop up on here because there after the discounts.

 

[Dangerous Dave]

And I would just like to add I've had a few people say about everyone's attitude (not just on this site) rather than saying do a search be helpful and add a link or give them advice stop pulling people apart as I was once a fucktard with these cars but back when I join there was more people on the site.

 

[PobodY]

I was hoping for Shalom's input. - GTiROZ seems as strong as ever so he must be doing something right.

Wasn't there some talk about incorporating the Nissan Pulsar Owners recently, or was it just that their site had died and GTiROZ was hoping to save all their knowledge?

 

[Mad]

Ok,

Im getting very mixed views about what direction the club should go in. Personally I want to grow the club and involve ourselves with other car enthusiasts that we have something in common with and the best I can think of is Nismo. I think this is the best long term solution for the club.

The gtiroz is a fantastic site and I wish our UK gtir community was as one like theirs.

Setting up the new forum has cost me around £200 alone before add ons, hosting and time so I suppose the question is if we want to keep the gtiroc alive, are we all prepared to start paying for membership?

 

[Makaveli_se7en]

Having been a member of a forums with multiple generations of cars (cliosport, passionford etc.) I have found that generally it doesn't work that well as the interests are very different; owners of new cars generally are interested in superficial mods and "will this void my warranty" type questions whereas owners of the older cars are into more extreme modifications and restoration.

If we are trying to grow the club I would like to see us join forces with other cars of the era, something like a group a rally homologation specials forum with contributions from Mazda 323's, GT4's, Integrales etc. would hold much more interest for me.

 

[KieranEG6]

Im all in favour of sustaining the standing Forum as it is. I think this site is one of, if not The best source of information on GtiRs there is. I think trying to add new generation cars into the same place too much will over complicate things. To be honest I think all forums are struggling since the rise in Facebook generation. As mentioned above being more polite to noobs asking dumb questions will help, no matter how irrelevant/dumb/covered million times their question might be its still Forum activity which is what we are lacking. Dont want it to end up like the ITR-DC2 forum with Nazi admins that locked any thread that was a repeated question before there was a hint of an answer (think they have started seeing the light and are slowing keeping the forum going). Not saying its like that on here but every little helps and I know thats a big factor for why noobs don't bother with forums.

NismoGtiROC.com does seam like the most suited option if at all a change needs to occur as it retains the original but adds what the newer generation might be searching for.

As for membership I have always seen that as a bit of a sticky one. Some will get put off by the necessity to pay to be a member to get the benefits of the forum. How can they learn how useful the forum is if they have to pay for it first. My views I have seen an ongoing donation scheme far surpass a membership type. People are more likely to get more satisfaction from a donation after finding the site so useful, than being pushed into a fee to make use of a site. The EK9.org forum has a donation part that is well spoken of and well put across in a way showing what the site needs/goals to maintain etc. Whenever funds for the forum are running low or needed specifically they just Post up a request thread outlining such and the community usually helps out pretty fast. Unsure with the smaller numbers that it will work on here but I thought I would put it across as an option.

 

[gtiroz]

Our marque is going through a fairly major evolutionary period at the moment.
Not unlike a human growing from their 20s to 30s - It's passed the era of carefree youthfulness, but has not yet reached a state of stable responsibility
(although, as can be seen from the quality of discussion in this thread, the ownership base has clearly matured!)

Any major direction decision should consider the long term prospects.
We're at a stage in the GTI-Rs life that warrants nurturing and support if it's to last another 25 years.

Suggestions for retaining the GTIROC identity are based around future-proofing. If you rebrand the core community now, it's unlikely to ever be resurrected down the track.

The GTI-R is special. It has a unique place in performance car, rally and Nissan history.
The Pulsar Nismo looks like it will just be another modern marketing department product, entering the already-saturated Megane/Golf/Clio/Cupra/Civic/Abarth/etc market.
(why they'd do that when they have the opportunity to rekindle heritage and step into the way more special A45/RS3/RS ring I have nfi... probably for the same reason they haven't rebirthed the S-chassis to challenge the 86 market)

What will be the largest demographic of buyers? What percentage of them will be interested in backyard maintenance and modification?
What portion of those will be desktop users? (using a forum on a phone is not really enjoyable, regardless of screen size)
Will diversifying the identity and content dilute the strength of knowledge that's been built?
Do increased membership numbers and forum activity directly relate to club sustenance?

As for GTIROZ, it's a bit more relaxed down here... and a smaller, unified base, with a simple and stable administration structure has made things much easier to manage over the years.

Lowering of costs and a transparent donation-based format is a solution worth projecting.
Our annual monetary costs are mostly covered by random small donations and an occasional prompting.

 

[Mad]

What about merging the gtiroc with gtiroz?

 

[AFDanHef]

I don't own a GtiR because I had to sell mine when I left the UK, but I do still own a motor and rear subframe from one that is going into a project car here in the US. So I haven't been active on the forum for a while but I would like to bring to you all's attention that the GtiR is coming up on 25 yrs old and that means it will FINALLY be legal to import and register in the US in every state except California. (California is ran by Fucktards) There is going to be a new market of eligible US buyers opening up soon. I am planning on importing a GtiR within another year or so and I'm sure there are others out there thinking the same as I. I know the Pulsar isn't as popular as the Skyline or Silvia but I would be willing to bet that we see a bump in interested US GtiR owners within the next few years.

 

[the chief]

Imo if your going to rebrand I think "pulsar owners" might be better name as people who own "lesser" pulsars might still join.