Originally Posted by Empire

key word there is LATELY.
What about a year ago?
What about 18 months ago?

anyone that has been on the site longer than a few months knows that TR was a lot better 18-24 months ago. And many of the "old timers" would argue that 24 months ago didn't cast a shadow in comparison to the way the site was 3+ years ago.
Of course there would be some natural nutrition from the site because of the economy. BUT, you can factor that out just like you can factor out natural inflation when talking about the crashing value of the dollar.
So that aside, the major downfall was because all of the meets stopped. When was the last time you even heard about a site wide, TR meet? When was the last time TR officially did anything? Meet? Event? booth somewhere? Its been years. Considering how tied TR is to the community, and when you consider that the average car enthusiast is a "get out and do" kind of person, it is no wonder that activity on the site went down. The majority of the posts were about someone doing something, be it a meet, or working on their car or something.
That started the decline. Then all of the sudden, the general feeling on TR was "if you don't like it, get out of here" That attitude was all over the place, especially the moderators.
At the time, we still had a decent number of "local" meets going on. But I remember watching "hey, come to this place at this time" threads get deleted because they weren't "tech" related. Or just as bad, deleted because they weren't in the meets and greets section. Has that section ever gotten much traffic? No. It became the place to post your thread, and link back to it when in your actual section.
So now we've created an environment that hinders the community aspect of TR. The life blood of TR.
From there, that "don't let the door hit you on the way out" attitude moved to any thread the moderator didn't like.
This is where the individual sections themselves got hurt the most.
Instead of the moderators working with the users of the site to build, create, and archive good content with good useful information, they started deleting threads that were "stupid" or where the question was answered. Really? A site that is already starting to die, and we are going to help it along by locking threads that might have turned out to be a google hit? Yeah, that was smart.
We created "lounges" for the off topic conversations, but they weren't really off topic, they were in line with the manufacturer section, but just weren't tech related. And instead of moving threads to the appropriate section, Moderators just deleted them. I can see deleting repeat offenders who can't get their "for sale" ad in the right place, but common, is it really that difficult to move the thread to the right place? Who knows, maybe getting the thread in the right place might spark a conversation and help bring some life to a rather dead section. Instead, we've deleted it, driving that user away. I've seen users with either low post counts, or users that haven't been active for years, get their thread deleted, and not come back to the site. I can't blame them, we've created such a warm and fuzzy place to be.
I know on more than one occasion, instead of coming to TR for information, I've gone to the bigger national forums to find what I was looking for. That's pretty sad when you consider I've been part of TR since 2005. If I hadn't been around so much, say I was a new user, and I got my "stupid question" deleted, I'd end up back on google. From there, I'd end up at a national forum. I'd make an account, and post my stupid question there, I'd get my answer, and while posting, I'd see all of the great stickies and information, and I'd stay there. Why come back to a local forum when the moderators are over bearing and no one will help me when I can go to a national forum and get everything I need? It isn't like the local forum is hosting meets and events anymore....

So yeah... the downfall of TR had a lot to do with the moderators. The leaders of the site. The "example" of how to be.

Other things like pumping it full of ads after selling the site don't help any, but that isn't going to drive away new users, that just pisses us old users off. But even at that, if TR was active, it would be something we could all get over.
To think that the downfall of TR was something recent is foolish.
To think that it is because of something as minute as too many ads is naive at best.