To whom it may concern,

I've been a member of this site off and on for more than 10 years. I've been dealing with some personal problems as of late, like the last 2 years lol. Anyway, I can't believe the lack of interest , member involvement and general lack of activity or traffic on this site. Where did everyone go ? Is there another forum I don't know about. I'm greatly disappointed by this development and if anyone can shed some light on the subject, I would appreciate it. Thanks...

I'd like to know too.... I'm a daily visitor; but of course I don't have questions or answers that often.

I think it's part of the natural course of things. For the regulars, people's lives and interests change. Many of the regulars from when I first joined have seemed to disappear... Nape, Jon, Sean, Sam, Randy, and Mitch come to mind, and a certain mouse of ill repute. For me, most of my car is now built except for gremlins due to age, so I have less questions to ask but I do try to catch up at least once a week. I wish it would be easier for me to travel to meet the remaining regulars before we thin out even further.

Those just getting into the car scene are more likely to look for support on social media resources such as Facebook than traditional web forums, just like people migrated from dial-up BBS's, Fidonet, and Gopher to the internet to look for information. I personally despise the social media groups as the same crap gets regurgitated over and over... there isn't a history or a search engine.

Off the top of my head I only know one person here who has a Camaro newer than a 2002, and I don't know what specific value this forum would offer to owners of the later platforms. The forum isn't really advertised, and I understand there are extra steps to become a member due to prior challenges. As such, membership still has its privileges. I will still dig through threads from the early 2000's looking for information posted by JonA, for example.

There are definitely people autocrossing and tracking the 5 and 6th gens. Opening up this forum to them will bring in some more traffic. But will that traffic keep this forum going... or make it too much work for the admins... who knows?

I'm here every day and race my 4th gen regularly. I just have little new knowledge to add so I rarely post unless the search button fails me.

I try to stay active. I'm not one of the og's but been here for a while. Still a lot to learn so unless a newbie comes in I don't have any info that most others couldn't answer. Don't race either but hpde junkie. I wish there were people around but I think most moved on to other platforms or just out of the business. I've run into one guy driving an early 4th gen at the track that I pointed to the site, not sure if he made it. A couple of guys I've met were CMC or AX and never heard of the site which seems odd that they went pretty far in a 4th gen somewhere else.

Seems like ls1tech is getting busier on the road race section and I've seen few times people saying it is basically impossible to join here.

I can usually tell when we pop up on the other forums, I'll get a ton of emails asking for accounts (and I'm good with that, it's not a complaint). We had issues with spammers and one guy who managed to hack the site years ago. Thus the issues with registrations and doing it the manual way. I haven't upgraded the board for a while and I should likely move to the latest software and see if I can find a way to approve accounts again so that we can automate things to allow people to join.

I can open up registration and try to go back to manually approving them, but we had a dozen pages per day of "junk" registrations. It was almost impossible to dig through them and sort out the good ones.

This board has been fun over the years and I've really enjoyed every minute of it. I never really found a way to make any money with it (not that it was the main goal, but I wouldn't have argued if it managed to make some money too) and I've mostly gone to just running it out of pocket to keep it online. We have a database of what is likely among the best information for racing third and fourth gen cars anywhere on the web. But the interest in the platforms seems to be dropping. I've noticed that there are so many of these cars being parted out on facebook that there won't be any left in a few years. I hate that they are worth far more in parts than they are as actual cars. Guys are actively buying $4,000 Z28's with 100k+ miles on them and stripping them, selling the engine, trans, rear, all the interior parts they can and then selling the shell for $800 to some racer or just scrapping them.

I built a house last year and I've been pretty busy. I don't manage to check in here as often as I should. I was typically around all day as I could drop in pretty regularly. I'm not really able to do that these days and I am also far less active than I have been in the past. I've considered selling the board, but I don't think I want to turn it over to anybody and I don't know that it's worth the risk of losing the information here in case someone wants to turn it into a drag racing board. I've also toyed with buying a 6th gen car and working up some tech on those as I learn to make it work. I tried growing a Corvette section and that never really got legs. Maybe we're too small and too "weird" to ever become an LS1 tech or similar. But I've always liked the "small town" feel of this board. Many of the regulars have moved on, retired from racing or just retired. I haven't run an autocross in years. I have taken a few ride alongs and I've helped some guys with car issues and setup problems through email and private messages. I can still make these cars fast, but the recipe is pretty widely known these days. And I am scheduled to go to the UMI event this summer and dust off the cobwebs. I don't know if I can remember how to drive one of these cars in anger, but it seems like a great place to find out.

I'm open to ideas and suggestions if anybody has any. I certainly like our little corner of the world and I'd be happy to share it with more members if we can find out how to get them here.

I hate the way information is doled out on Facebook. Forums are browseable like libraries whereas Facebook group information comes at you like people throwing candy out to kids from a parade float. I have no idea why people prefer that.

I still visit daily.

The strength of this site has always been it is heavy on tech and light on BS. Over time, this means that it is more of a database of knowledge than an active thing because the number for 4th gens on the track is shrinking and the knowledge database is already large.

It's funny this post showed up recently -

I will likely be selling my +200,000 mile 4th gen Z28 this week and sometime in the coming weeks will be buying a 6th gen 1LE. To track and run time trials. I will still come here but I have been also reading the posts at Camaro6.com under the Road Race/Autox section (or whatever it is called over there).

Kevin, you could set up a donate link or something. I'd like to send you some change at least when I clean out the couch cushions 😁 Seriously though with all this site has helped me I would definitely like to contribute.

It is sad all the people that are scraping these cars for the drivetrain. It's like why ls swap whatever car when this one already has an ls! That was actually my reasoning for not ls swapping my Land Cruiser. I got a Yukon with 6.2 and said the heck with all that work, I already have a great platform, though maybe without the bullet proof drive line.

LS1tech is great for general info and repairs but no where close to the I fo on here. And now if anyone over there want handling, the answer is just buy all the suspension stuff being sold. Also Facebook is crap for tech. What oil, which tires, and what's your mpg is the new set of questions every single day. Maybe a 5th and 6th gen section to keep things going? I know the Vette section didn't take off. I just hope this site stays, so much good info and doesn't get lost in a sea of gratuitous questions, vendor hype, etc

I opened up registrations last night and set it to require my manual approval. The registration email says to email me for access. I had one person do that already today. I’ll see how this goes and hope it helps. Tell the guys in ls1tech that registration is open. 😉

I don't think there is anything wrong with this site in particular, all forums are dying. Kids these days don't use forums, they use social media. I hate social media for technical knowledge, as it can't be searched and is only what have you done for me lately (as in the last 15 mins).

Big thanks to Kevin for keeping the site going. If someone figures out the secret to getting the young whipper snappers off of Facebook/Instagram and onto forums again, I'd love to hear it.

As you can tell, I'm here pretty much every day, and find the signal-to-noise ratio to be about the lowest of any other board I'm on. I have ventured to the 3rd Gen and LS1tech forums for information and to ask questions I've usually already asked here, but again, the on-topic responses have been best here.

The other annoying thing is that the other forums owned by multi-national media conglomerates (and doing all they can do to hide that fact) are so loaded with pop-ups, slide-ins and in-thread ads that pages frequently take minutes to load for us out here in the sticks.

We're still pretty active here, since we still own 3rd Gens. We'll probably have the Firebird until we're too old to drive, or made single due to age/sickness, and we'll probably be leaving the B4C in our estate.

It would be interesting to see what the 5th and 6th Gen pony car guys are doing to their cars for tracking, but I'll bet most of them are on the generation-appropriate forum, if at all. Not sure what the tech there is like.

We're not on faceplant or the twitiotsphere, or any of the other apparent 'social' things. Just not a format that is of any interest, and the apparent free-flow of our interest to 3rd parties from those things is not something we're willing to participate in.

Thank you, Kevin, for keeping this thing going. We'll be happy to donate to the cause. I think we have before, but don't remember. We do periodically send donations to other not-for-profit forums, we can add this one to our list.

I plan to keep the doors open and the lights on for a very long time. With all of the HUGE forums out there, I always wondered why I failed at growing this one. Though my goal was never to grow it for the sake of growth. It was about keeping good information and a high signal to noise ratio and we have succeeded at that. I've been manually building accounts for the last 8-10 years (or longer) and that might be what slowed things down more than I ever realized. But it's also been part of the path to our current state of things. I'd love to see the board more active, but not at the expense of tech or dealing with drama and BS. We had some fights in the early days where I wound up on the phone with guys trying to get things calmed down....I don't miss those days at all.

And I did the "build and price" on a 6th gen 1LE car last night. I've considered one from time to time and wondered if I might want to buy one as my next vehicle. Though I don't want to get rid of the current convertible and I'm about out of space (we didn't manage to get a 3 car garage in the new house, though I don't know that we'll be here too long).

Then why did you move??

We got our current place because of the dogs. Oh, and there was space in the back of the property for a shop. We BOTH recognized that when we first viewed the house. Most of the house is still stuck in the mid-70's, but it's fine for us. Some day, harvest gold linoleum countertops will be 'in' again!!

To take this way off topic... I moved 2 years ago to a place with a smaller garage but room to build this!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/1qKoX8xTF5b9thVNA

I check the site daily, but rarely post as my car is currently inoperable awaiitng electrical repairs. Obviously, that means no track time as well. I try to stay informed while getting the car usable again. Appreciate all the efforts of the folks on this site.

This site is my #1 go to for real answers from knowledgeable people. Even if sometimes the question has been asked years ago.

@trackbird I'd donate again to help keep it running. Let me know a link.

If for some reason it would ever be shut down, I'd really want to be able to d/l the database to keep on my own HD, if that kind of thing was possible.

We looked at houses for two years and we kept getting outbid. We finally gave up and built a new place. We saw one of these houses in this neighborhood sell for $36k more than they paid two years before (and they did nothing to it)...so, we built one. We aren't sure how long we will stay, though after moving...we may not want to do that again soon. lol. We almost went to see a house last week, but it was a fixer upper on 15 acres...and it looked like a LOT of work. We will finish this one up and see what we decide to do next.




I never set up a link. I mostly sold decals for a little extra income to support the site.

There's another 3rd Gen a few houses down the street from me but they don't seem to be AX/RR inclined and the cops keep showing to their house so I haven't told them about the site.

Nice!

Unfortunately that seems to be more of the typical 3rd/4th gen owner, the Dax Shepard character in Baby Mama. Not so much the settled down middle aged guy that seems to be the norm on this site.

To me the 4th gen is just so practical. It may not be the fastest but I always surprise people in mine. I've already done most of the work it needs so it's just maintenance at this point. And if I wad it up, I won't cry, too much. Just find another and swap parts over and keep on going. Id love to get a newer Camaro/Corvette but I would be afraid of messing it up, so I would have to get a cheaper one that's already roughed up, but if I'm not afraid to track it then I'm also not afraid to tear into it and mod it like I'm about to run against Hector and his 3 spoon engine hondas! Which would have me right back in the "can't leave it alone" problem. Plus I'm really looking forward to hitting antique status one day, no more state inspection! All that said my 4th gen will be in my estate as well.

A couple weeks binge-watching 'Fixer-upper' and you'll be set for that 15-acre site, right? I mean, how hard can it be?

Good decision on the investment in the new place. THAT I can understand. And I fully understand about not wanting to move again. As an Air Force brat, I spent my childhood moving. We finally found our little corner of the swamp and are pretty sure we're staying put. We do need to shrink our footprint, even if the overall area doesn't change, but no plans to move in spite of the fact we could probably double our investment in this place, given the comps. We like it here, though. Room for the pups to run, and we feel out in the country even though we're just 10 minutes from a couple of freeways.

I still check in almost every day but my 4th gen Trans Am has been down for quite a while now so I wasn't racing. I had about a five year span in there where life got really complicated. I finally have a nice garage again and I'll start working on the car soon but it needs quite a bit at this point to get it back to what it was. The information and the signal to noise ratio are what make this site great so keep up the good work Kevin and I'm in for a donation if you ever need it.

I bought a 2014 1SS Camaro back in December as my daily driver so I would love some 5th & 6th gen input on the site. It's bone stock except for wheels and I've started to autocross and run NASA time trials again with it. It had been almost 7 years when I went back to Sebring in April. I realized what a heavy car that 5th gen is so I do want my 4th gen back plus I'm too old and fat to be daily driving an f-body any more.

Shit, I never received the memo

I think a part of the issue could be (assuming I'm not alone on this one?), I don't get any notices when posts are replied to. Has anyone else noticed that?

I only know what's going on here because I click 'view new posts'. Fortunately we're small enough where we only go a page or so of posts opening up instead of getting cut off at 20 pages!

Since the “heyday” of the site drag racing has had an enormous resurgence in popularity. There were always lots of fbodies drag racing but it seems even worse “today”

Things in SCCA autox have also changed to the detriment of the 4th gen. Oddly enough the 3rd gen should see more popularity as it’s a nice platform for a CAM T build.

ESP is practically dead. That was a decent amount of users/traffic back in the day.

I still check in here and there and have over the years even when I didn’t have an fbody. My fbody now will use a stock type torque arm otherwise nothing is a bolt on. At all. Which makes most any info I have this time around useless to everyone else

I check the site every couple of days. My issue is I HPDE a 2015 1LE. Love the car it's a blast to drive.


I spend more time on Camaro5 because it's more applicable to my car, however I don't thing the average person in the RR section is as experienced and knowledgeable as the folks here.

I'm trying to take my car to the next level and hate depending on a sales person for advise.

As far as some have said about being to old and fat, I'm collecting Social Security and have been trying to drop a pants size for over a year.

When we had 5,000 spammers per day signing up for the site the hosting company shut down our email servers because they thought we were sending out "mass blasts" of spam. The registration issues were really that bad. Hence, I went to building accounts normally. Now, people seem to possibly be getting the emails about registration (because so far one person has registered and sent me an email to validate his account, so that's from a sample of one), thus maybe I can get that running again too.

A way to upload pics when posting from a phone would make new posts more interesting IMO. Best I can figure out you still have to use photobucket

FTFY!

Not quite dead, you just have to have a 4-door AWD Boost-buggy.

We never had the hosting space for letting everyone upload pics. At one point I had to go through and resize avatars due to people uploading super full sized pics and every time they posted and someone loaded that thread, it loaded the full sized image (even though it was small) and just hammered the data capacity here. So letting people upload images is a little dangerous. It's also how we got hacked once upon a time (long story involving putting "bad stuff" in the code of an image and uploading it).

I'm getting SMTP thread notifications now, I hope we're able to keep it that way. Thanks Kevin!

I went into the board settings and switched it over to SMTP hoping that would fix it. Sometimes it's better to be lucky instead of good.

Funny, pretty sure the name on my jacket says Taylor

There are curve busters in every crowd.

A lot of good replies so far and a lot of truth....drag racing and swaps have claimed a lot of 4th gens, not to mention totals or crashes.

Still here racing CMC in Texas and still friends with the guy who has a cat. Haven't been on in a month for various reasons but the search function and information is gold. Oh I also have one of those wrecked F-bodies to part out that's garaged kept with only 14,000 miles. Haven't been to a drag race in years to know what goes on around Dallas as I thought drag racing was possibly a slow death (maybe just NHRA) but after Pinks died appears Street Outlaws has created a new sort of interest.

CMC still rules by the way other than the Toyo RR. Our rules haven't had a major change in years and any updates have been for reliability.

I dunno. I really enjoyed owning the Camaro for the three years that I did, but I didn't enjoy the fact that the car was dead in FS and CAM-C compared to the new cars, and if none of you have tried them, they are SPECTACULAR!!! Both GM and Ford are putting together world-class sports cars, not just muscle cars. And, if I'm honest, a guy we compete with in the NNJR-SCCA just got a Camaro 2.0L 1LE and I'm very tempted to pay for some co-drives.

Nevertheless... I am impressed Taylor won ESP, but SP in general needs to go away or be dramatically consolidated as ST and CAM can take up that slack easily.

I still have my 1995 Z28 and plan to get it back on track in the next year after a 10 year hibernation. The new Camaros are awesome though not as gritty and raw when its time to race. I bought a V6 1LE in 2017 and traded it for a 2018 ZL1 last year. Incredible daily car but way too expensive and nice to risk on track. I hope this site keeps going. I’ve had my fourth gen for 22 years and am still wanting to keep improving it!

I know I'm not going to win against a fully prepped new car with a good driver. It's still a lot of fun to raw time experienced drivers in new civic type-R's or mustangs in a basically full weight, 24 year old car that I invested a total of $5K in and was still able to comfortably drive 30 miles to the race. Those extra few seconds + glory aren't worth another $30K to me and I'm not a good enough driver to take advantage of it anyway.

I'd rather have 3 or 4 interesting cars that I can beat on and have fun with every day than 1 perfect car.

No they can't. I would rather quit the sport than run full time on street tires

I guess its fitting that I have been a member here since 04 and this is my first post. I don't exactly remember why I joined at that time, I was very active on LS1.com, and a few others, and I think what happened was there was a crash, and everybody on the other sites were PO'd that they lost the "Post Count". And then "Life" just sort of got in my way. Well life has a nasty habit of staying in the way and I'm trying to change that. So since it seems my other passions are becoming less attainable, I have decided to take a car that otherwise might have more value for its parts, and make it into something I can enjoy. The point I'm trying to make is people and circumstances change and sometimes life just puts the brakes on and one never makes the return trip. I am gathering parts to put together a track day car. I'm financially in a position where I can afford a trailer rental and the track day fee, and do this about four times a year. If it turns out I'm any good at it, I may dabble in other things, but for right now that's my plan. In all my searches, this site only came up (1) time, and that was a reference from LS1TECH. This might actually be a good thing. It would seem that as our society moves along, the ability to get along degrades, and I'm seeing more and more where experience is not appreciated. In closing this introduction, I just want to say I'm here to learn and if I don't post a lot its because I don't know enough to be helpful, not because I don't care. Thank You.

I love this site and everything I have learned from it. I hope it never goes away. I usually check once a day but the last month has been busy for me since I got a promotion and turned pulling wrenched back into a hobby. I was a little nervous when I started reading this thread. I’m glad to see it looks like it is staying.
I have priced the 6th gen 1LE and of course the ZL1 1LE. I am actually more worried about the cost of insurance for either one. Of the 2 I would go with the 1LE. I really like the look and price. Still got the 4th gen at the moment with no plans of getting rid of it

Moving in the middle of a strut to SLA conversion was a huge mistake. Having young kids also take up a lot of time. I should've just bought a stock K-member to replaced the hacked up one and put my car back together until I had the the time to fabricate again. It would've made moving a lot simpler if nothing else. Fast forward over 2 years later I've finally got my garage setup well enough at the new place to get some work done. I've got a few more things to fix on my truck then I'm finally going to start working on the trans am again.

I'm looking forward to getting it back out there. I'll have to post some updates once I finish the k-member, hopefully before the weather gets too hot for the big window A/C unit to keep up.

I'll be interested in seeing that update, although still enjoying the strut front on ours just fine.

I find that if the shop can at least be dry, it makes a HUGE difference in working in either summer or winter. I could do great things in a 90-deg F room with 30% humidity vs. the 90/90 we're getting now, or 50/90 in the winter. The dehumidifying capability of an A/C unit is great, even if it doesn't cool things down that much.

I've hauled or drove my firebird halfway across the county and then some. It's not going anywhere. Like others have mentioned, a lot of people seem to have gone to social media for some reason. I've been pretty concerned, at some point, this site would disappear like many others. It would be a shame since there is so much irreplaceable info here.
This was likely never going to be a big site just because most guys want to hit the drags. Making it handle is a foreign concept to many... when you put someone in the passenger seat and show them what these things can do it scares the ?$%^ out of them even if they can get a crack at the wheel. Forward acceleration is one thing and resisting sideways is another apparently LOL

Most things that can be asked has been. Most issues have been solved. This is a database basically. Even if opened up to the newer cars the growth would probably be slow just due to the focus of the cars as a drag vehicle.

I've been here through cross country moves, a marriage and divorce, birth of a child, setup of multiple shops. All while on this forum that I check sporadically with virtually no email notifications. I'll be here for a long time to come. Hopefully I'm in my long term shop and house now and things can continue to return to normal. I really don't want to move my welders and mill and lathe again LOL

Much thanks Kevin for keeping the lights on.

We are mostly a database at this point. If you can get the search to work, there's a lot of information here (besides a specific lowered PHB thread that turned into me making phone calls to the parties involved and a lot of people deleting a lot of good data....or maybe that was the decoupled torque arm thread. THere might have been more than one).

When I bought this board, I believe I was single/engaged. I've owned it through a marriage and the resulting divorce, some years of single/dating and into another marriage. I've realized that FRRAX has been one of my longest relationships. lol. So I don't plan to let it go anywhere. We used to get the click through links to northern tool and tire rack and they paid a small commission when people ordered things and used the links. Then they booted us from the program during a redesign and made everybody reapply...I never did. It was never much money, maybe a couple hundred dollars a year. Heck, when I bought stuff, I got commission on it so it was almost worth it as a discount. But it did a decent job of offsetting the costs. I should probably look into those programs again and see if we even qualify now that we don't get a million hits a week or whatever it was back then.

I've sorta considered buying one of the last of the C7's and selling the current Camaro. I'd love to keep both, but it's not really an option with the current amount of garage space. On the other hand, I took the Camaro out and picked up Racerdad916 the other night and we wandered out into the country and ran through some gears and beat on the Stoptech brakes for a while. It sure is fun to drive...

Funny how life takes us to places we never thought of going. When I joined this Forum, I think LS1.com had just crashed and burned and everybody was looking for a new place to hang out. So I probably followed the rush....I honestly do not remember. I do know that the "Financial End" of the plans to restore one of my cars was well on track (at least as far as I knew) and then I decided the area where I was living had fallen far enough off the cliff, and it was time to find a new main ranch.....which could not have come at a worse time/better time (depending on one's perspective). And the funding stopped, while I just tried to hold onto everything I already had. So the car will never get restored, but it can be made safe and drive able....just not pretty, and I have another car that I think can provide me with an outlet, and use up most of the parts I have collected over the years. I made a referenced to it in my post above, so I'm glad to hear that I'm not to late to take advantage of the collective knowledge here.