So here is the dealio folks... The Busa has aged and even though Suzuki engineers have put ridiculous hours of R&D into the mighty bike over the years the color changes and new logo designs just aren't cutting it. Because there isn't anything to hype about with an 9 yr old bike anymore and other manufacturers have come on strong with features and options folks just don't come looking here anymore. There is a slew of social media options for consumers these days, Facebook, email, texting and the list goes on and on.
We have worked hard to maintain this site to keep it free of charge to the members and our vision was always to have corporate America keep the lights on for regular folks like you and me. The plan was a great symbiotic relationship where advertisers found new customers, hence sales, users had access to great people and free relevant content and I just had to work the tech side and an occasional brawl between some members in which I usually just had Mod Squad take care of it.
So what happens when one of the 3 variables start to go away? When membership and viewing of the site starts to slide because the bike doesn't hold the status it once did?
Think back to 18 years ago and what your experience was on the Internet, you didn't have a phone app, media streaming wasn't a thing and uploading a picture was a big deal. The forum has changed just as much as the Internet!
Everyone has seen the diminished volume here and I knew that one day we would be right where we are. We have had less and less outside interest and a smaller core group posting about any topic. So with that slower pace and less viewers our advertisers have seen less reason to advertise here and the spiral begins.
For at least the past year I have been covering what advertising hasn't out of my pocket. You guys would not believe what it takes to keep a website functional and on the Internet with the features that we offer and the bandwidth required along with the requirements of Google and others governing bodies that we have to partner with.
As advertisers have slipped away (more than you know) I have looked into alternate solutions to get 2 of the 3 variable back in play. If I can get more good content on the site automatically that is relevant to our audience then more discussions will occur and then more post and we go positive in one area again.
If I can bring features to the site that bring value then people will use them and again we draw more usage and we are adding to the numbers.
So here it is, the question of the hour..... What to do
As you can tell from the discusion in this thread there were some automatic post that came up, those are called RSS Feeds or (Rich Site Summary). We have an RSS Feed here on the oRg that we send out to anyone that wants to subscribe to it. RSS feeds are put out by just about every active website these days and you see them all the time you just don't know what they are. Every update you might get on your phone might be an RSS feed, news updates etc. Suzuki has an RSS feed and my plan was to find a handful of relevant sites and pull RSS feeds into the site to create topics that could be discussed. Some of those test RSS feeds are hidden in forums you don't have access to while I was working them out.
The Ebay RSS feed is set to pull 2 Feeds, one was Hayabusa Bikes and put it in the classifieds section which it does, I told it to pull every 12 hours and it looks like it pulled about 25 bikes over. We get $$ from Google for showing those ads, since I put them in the classifieds that we don't charge anyone to use I really didn't think that location would be too big of an inconvenience all things considered.
The Second Ebay Feed was set Parts and Accessories and was set to it's own Forum in the classifieds section.
I didn't get a chance to work on the code to eliminate those posts from the "New Posts" button so I apologize.
There it is guys all out there in the open I need to make some pretty significant decisions but for now I turned the RSS feeds off and I will stop working on them while you all discuss it.
cap
