Unfortunatly for you all, you need an active forum for it survive. Yes, sponsor $$$'s are nice, but having TR.com survive forever is even better.
Facts:
*) FFA is a very busy off-topic area on this site.
*) The tech forums are more busy then they ever have been, since the creation of this site.
*) A slow board will die in a matter of months.
I see tons of complaints on FFA, yet I see no compliments on the fact that the tech forums are more active then ever before.
What you need to understand is that you guys against FFA are the MINORITY in Tampa. Even if there were 300 people against TampaRacing's FFA forum, it's not enough people to support a competing site. Every month 4,000 of our members post. Message forums need constant activity to survive, they need a constant influx of new users to survive, and they need to be entertaining to survive. If a first time visitor comes to a boring dead site, they will not register. If a long time member visits a dead site, they will not post. There is simply not enough technical questions being asked in Tampa to support a tech only forum.. It would die.
Personally, I think TR is a masterpiece of social engineering and web design. Next year we will be averaging over 300 members online at this rate. This means our tech forums will be twice as busy as today. Where else in Tampa could you be on a site with such active tech forums? Even a site with 1,000 members who were active and only posting in the tech forums could not compare with a site with 9,000 members active and 5,000 posting strictly in TR's tech forums. Yes folks, thats how fast we are growing.
A board that only has a few hundred posts a day, will not survive when put up against a board that makes a few thousand posts a day. If we dont do this, someone else will, and that will be our death.
Someday we may split FFA off from TR, but at this point I dont think we are large enough to support that. Once we average a few hundred users online, I think it would be safe to split FFA from the site. But, I hope you know, that TR's life expectancy after that will be in doubt. No website can cator to the minority and expect to survive.
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