Thanks for the detailed reply Pat. I agree with most of your points. If I may say a couple of things:
1) there is a difference between posting invites to here on the honestjohn forum to simply answering someone's legitimate question as to everyones whereabouts. We would not sanction the former as that would be impolite (lacking etiquette), or simply wrong. I don't see anything wring about the latter although would not sanction it on the basis that they clearly don't like it and we are not about deliberately upsetting them.
2)
>> Now, what I would love to see happen would be the owners of this site and the BR settle their differences and work alongside each other. It can be done
I would not want anyone to be under the apprehension that we have "differences" to settle. Not at least to my knowledge. After developing their site for the last ten years I have had a business relationship with honestjohn.co.uk longer than anyone here. We still do business with them. We just no longer develop their website. We simply could not devote the resources to them that they required.
A consequence was that we still own the forum software of their previous Backroom and this is what you have here in modified form.
We will continue together as very different sites. Fundamentally honestjohn.co.uk is autocratic (excuse punn). It is driven by articles written by experts. They are the main content generators for useful income. The Backroom (and now owner reviews) are really misfits in my opinion.
On the other hand car4play.com is a community-based website where all the content will be user-generated. The forum, member reviews of cars etc. fit into this model better. It is harder to create a successful site like this that is useful to punters looking for information because as much as I love you all some of the stuff you write is silly (even if some of it is very funny) while a lot of it is really useful information. The only way to get some handle on which is what is with a rating system which I know many if you hate. The usefullness of this system is higher on information that is more motoring based. Eg once we get owner reviews we will rely on it to prioritise good (high rated) reviews on a particular car model.
I believe we have the bigger challenge of the two sites.
Luckily we like a challenge!
Last edited by: car4play on Sun 6 Jun 10 at 18:25
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