I'm not at all buying into the doom and gloom..Prime of old lives in all of us.....The billions of bickering sheeples can have all they want on other platforms....prime is for the eternal sportsmind in all of us.
Call me an optimist, but I tend to agree here. I don't think the forum is dying, I think it simply changed. If you think about it, during NSX Prime's "heyday", i.e., 2002-2012ish, most member were first or second owners and the car was still relatively current and new. Most of the forum content was about how to live with this awesome exotic car and the things one could do with it. Since that time, a lot of those owners moved out of the car to something else. The lag time on the NC1 development often meant that the "something else" was not a NSX.
Looking back through the forum, I feel like 2015-2019 was kind of a lull as older owners got out of the car and newer owners got in, and not much content was generated. Unfortunately, most of the newer owners gravitated to FB, which is great for instant response and selling stuff, but it pretty much awful for everything else. Many have no real idea about NSX Prime.
However, as the Gen1 NSX is experiencing its second wave in terms of value, I'm starting to see many new owners come here again. Also, more NC1 owners are trickling back in. Unlike 2002, we now have to understand that the forum/site content will be calibrated to living with a classic car instead of a modern exotic in the case of the Gen1 and, in the case of the NC1 (assuming we can convince the community to come back here from FB), perhaps something like what Prime was like in those early years. The earliest NSXs are now 30 or 31 years old, so that means NSX Prime will become a place for the community to discuss and share experiences with how this great Honda will age. I think we'll see a lot more action in DIY and new owners sections.
The way I see it, we have a few major priorities to get Prime back to prominence:
- First, we need to get the software and hosting upgraded (including https [MENTION=3821]DocL[/MENTION]) so that the site runs stably and potentially at a lower cost than present. Based on cost, we will need to keep at least some ads.
- Second, we need to get the site subscription service back in front of members and drive revenue to keep our new software and servers going. Leading by example, I'll be upgrading my subscription to Champion level and selecting automatic renewal.
- Third, we need some of our long-term and knowledgeable members to volunteer some time to actively moderate the forums. This is how we can compete with FB- it will speed up response time for questions, welcome new members into the community, and weed out all of the garbage content and nastiness of social media. MANY of you have already volunteered and we greatly appreciate it. You'll start to see new moderators appear on the forums over the next few days. They will be familiar faces to you.
- Finally, we need to start steering new members who post on the FB groups back here to the forum, where helpful mods and members will answer their questions and encourage them to post more stuff on Prime about their new NSX instead of some Civic Boi who doesn't even own a NSX screaming at them about the best 20" rims and some snake oil engine treatment.
If we can do these 4 things even a little bit better than current state, I think NSX Prime will last the life of our cars and we'll all still be arguing about what the best oil is for the NSX when we're all 90 years old.
Other than the priorities above, which I believe are critical, we also have plans to address photo posting/hosting, site layout, membership access to content, and potentially cross-linking to social media. We're also going to upgrade/fix the Wiki and we will need volunteers to start combing the old forum posts to populate the articles with good content.
A lot more to come, but I'm glad to see so many old faces coming back. [MENTION=4282]docjohn[/MENTION] is right- even without all the FB members, there is a core group of owners here who can keep it going. I think Prime's future is bright.
