SaabWorld online for 4 years - how are we doing?
SaabWorld has been online for 4 years (and 3 days to be exact). Thanks to all the contributing members and many visitors, it has become a valuable resource of information and a friendly global place for discussing all things Saab. Cheers to all of you! :thumbsup:
Through the years, the site changed frequently with the goal of making it as user-friendly as possible. We would like to hear what you currently think of the site and, more important, what can be done to improve it even further.
Member Blogs
New entries for the member Blogs has been disabled for a while now as it just doesn't really seem to work. The main issue is that content is separate from the forums and it is mostly content that should be in the forums anyways. I'll be slowly moving content from the Blogs tot he forum. As it is a manual process, this is time consuming and can take a while. Some of that content was already promoted to articles on the Front page so that will not be moved to the forums.
Articles
Not much new content has been posted recently as there really hasn't been all that much news to report after Saab Automobile's bankruptcy. And most news has been posted in the Saab Talk forum. Is there still a need for a Saab blog on SaabWorld? If so, what would you like to read about? Most important would be adding new and fresh content that has been contributed by the members.
Gallery, Downloads and Garage
I think these sections work pretty good so leave them as is for now. I still wish they were a bit more integrated with the site but that's a limitation of the forum software and the need for add-ons.
Software
SaabWorld has been running on vBulletin 4 from the beginning. There were many bugs and need for updates in the beginning but has been stable in the last few years. There is a new version 5 of the software that was introduced last year. With the experience of using vB4, it can take a few years for all the bugs to be worked out. Upgrading to vB5 is a possibility but the main issue is our Garage version is not compatible with new version. And I really haven't found a lot of good reviews of vB5 anyways and vB4 seems to work fine for now.
The community suite from Invision that I have been using on the MotorGearheads website has been great so far. It's a lot more modern and everything like the Forums, Gallery and Articles is much more integrated. They also will be introducing a new version of the software so that will be interesting to see. On one hand, why change software if the current vB4 works just fine? On the other hand, using better, more modern and user-friendly software with more features is progress.
Forums
The Workshop forums for the newer Saab models have been the most active. Other forums for the older models have been slow so far. The problem is because it is slow, not many visit and post. When nobody visits and posts, it will remain slow. How can we change this?
So.... SaabWorld was founded on the principle that a car enthusiast site should be owned and operated by the enthusiasts like a cooperative, not some faceless corporation whose only goal is to make money from user content. Sadly, most car and other forums these days are just like that.
What do you like and don't you like about SaabWorld? How can we (admin, moderators and the community) make it better? How can we increase traffic and member participation? Attract new members? The future of SaabWorld is up to you.
