Automotive Forum

Thread Starter

Back to school

Joined May 22, 2019
106
I just read about the automotive forum being removed. IMO, that's too bad. The first time I came here a couple of years ago it was about integrating two CAN systems that operated at different speeds but otherwise were the same. I eventually got the answers I needed from the manufacturer but I have no doubt that the forum helped me ask the right questions to get the answers I was after. Without the help I got here I'm confident the questions I would have asked would have been incoherent and led to not getting the answers I was after. JMO but how often a forum is used is a poor reason to do away with it. The value of the information exchanged defines usefulness and not the amount of traffic. JMO FWIW.
 

Papabravo

Joined Feb 24, 2006
21,159
Automotive topics were always controversial here, and the automotive forum was only formed after we went from private to corporate ownership. Was any particular reason offered for this decision?
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
Automotive topics were always controversial here, and the automotive forum was only formed after we went from private to corporate ownership. Was any particular reason offered for this decision?
The automotive forum was added when the original site owner was persuaded to make a change to the ToS/UA and was completely independent of the commercial side of the site. The changes at that time sparked a discussion of whether increasing the number of forums, so as to allow increased specialization, might be a good idea. There are pros and cons to doing so. That resulted in the creation of several forums, most of which see almost no traffic.

The ownership recently decided that there were too many forums and that it made sense to collapse them somewhat. Again, pros and cons to doing so.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
I just read about the automotive forum being removed. IMO, that's too bad. The first time I came here a couple of years ago it was about integrating two CAN systems that operated at different speeds but otherwise were the same. I eventually got the answers I needed from the manufacturer but I have no doubt that the forum helped me ask the right questions to get the answers I was after. Without the help I got here I'm confident the questions I would have asked would have been incoherent and led to not getting the answers I was after. JMO but how often a forum is used is a poor reason to do away with it. The value of the information exchanged defines usefulness and not the amount of traffic. JMO FWIW.
Just because the specific forum has been removed does not mean that you can no longer discuss automotive questions; the ToS/UA has not been changed. Most automotive questions were still being asked in the General Electronics Chat forum, so the ownership made the decision that members would be better served by not having them split so much. It is impractical with a small, all-volunteer mod staff to identify and move all threads to their "appropriate" forum, so the goal was to reduce the number of forums that they get spread around. There are pros and cons to doing so (and to not doing so).
 
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