When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
So, we've lost quite a bit of the institutional knowledge here at RL. It was bound to happen eventually as folks retired or passed on, but this forum's purpose is greater than any one or five experts. We've still got Stan and Dr. Bob, but does anyone have a game plan to make sure we can keep our machines running into the next generation? I'll certainly post my trials and errors putting my '85 back together in the coming months.
My "active" participation level has fallen off steeply since the 'promotion' to moderator. I budget a certain amount of time to RL and all the other web support themes I follow. That time gets diluted across more space, amazingly. There's also the idea that I don't actually do much work on my own car beyond a lot of PM stuff. I read about things that are happening to others' cars, and typically go after the issue before anything breaks. My most recent "parts" order was a few age-related plastic deterioration bits, to give you an idea. I finally got around to fixing a drip from the gearbox related to the o-ring at the reservoir connection to the tube on the sump. The leak only showed up after a month or more of winter storage up on tall stands. By five months, the massive oil slick under the car had reached the size of a quarter. I noticed that the headlights sit at slightly different heights at rest, so will adjust the bar height and the stop next time I have the car up and wheels off. The years of PM attention are paying off nicely.
What does this mean for others here? No recent first-hand knowledge or experience to draw on when folks have issues with their cars. Got a question? Find something that you can't figure out and not getting good responses from others here? Sometimes I'll do the research to find some advice to share. Meanwhile, others here are doing their part to help on those questions.
Many of our most generous contributors have moved on from here. Duane has a very nice barn full of 928's a couple hours from here. He's not posting because he's kind of in the same place I am -- Nothing to report really. Some of our most precious tech assets have moved on or are posting less for reasons unrelated to this forum. Some are just getting older and life priorities change. I've had a prophylactic fuel pump change near the top of my list for a couple years. Parts are sitting in a little project bin, just waiting for me to get a round tuit. Looked at them this morning, then at the other things to do list. Bird feeders got filled, fuel pumps still in the project box. I need to send the MAF down to Rich Andrade this fall after hibernation season starts again, and swap in a new oxy sensor at the same time so the ECU's can learn together. That's been a three year list item now. Car still drives great, but there's that risk that something will give up unexpectedly and my PM and disaster-avoidance mission will have failed.
Meanwhile -- Others are doing a great job these days with fielding questions and providing solutions. The tone and spirit of supporting other owners is still strong. This forum remains the premier 928 owners' resource. But it's changing all the time.
I need to go drive out about 40 miles of fuel before swapping the fuel pumps for new. Everybody remembers how to change the pumps, right? Need to go find my switched relay jumper for leak testing, and throw it in that project bin. I think it's in a plastic bag with spare relays behind the tools tray in the car with the relay extraction tools...
Speaking of Seth, he actually hit upon a brilliant idea back when the Red Witch first bought him.
He made a whole series of tentative threads at the same time.... like this .... "Coolant system for 928"... "Suspension upgrades for 928"...
He explained that the reason was for having a catch-all for whatever specific topic he was currently working on for TRW,
I think RandyV then jumped in his oatmeal about starting a lot of threads all at the same time.
I have always thought that if there were some sort of "community sorting-and cataloging" effort for what is already here it would make a huge deal of sense...
This is a problem, and the latest kerfluffle points out that we should be archiving information somehow. We had a similar split in the US Electricar community about 10 years ago which took out a good bit of knowledge, and the closing of files on yahoogroups almost lost us our tons of files. Fortunately I had a copy, and now I host it on my own personal web server. That should last another 20 years or so.
The 944 people have "Clark's Garage" which is a site with very well written up documentation on pretty much everything. Then the guy who ran it upped and died, so someone took over the URL, and is maintaining the site. Maybe we need to do something like that here.
I personally am not a very good source of information myself but I'll try to help as I can.
We've still got Stan and Dr. Bob, but does anyone have a game plan to make sure we can keep our machines running into the next generation?
We need to keep our brain trust out of the OT forums!
But seriously, it was mentioned during the hubbub a couple weeks ago that some (the ones that are still here) no longer contribute technical knowledge because they're not comfortable with what IB can/may do with their information. IMHO, and to make sure the brain trust sticks around, I think it would be good for IB to do some damage control and reward some our best contributors with lifetime memberships and give them the title of "guru" or something. Sean, Dave, Stan, Greg, Rob, Dr. Bob, Shocki, Dwayne, Tony, James B., etc. Put it to a nomination of top-10, tally the votes, flip their status and maybe they'll feel like the website they love is loving them back. It could also be an incentive for others to go and become the new Dwayne.
There's not a lot of damage to control, at least as far as integrity of the posts and the forum history. There's a fine balance between allowing everyone to edit/delete posts back to the beginning of time here, and the cries of censorship and rights and ownership when those abilities are limited, as they were for some members during the recent upset. Note that the limitation was in response to a few who decided to go edit all the posts they could reach easily, replacing them with "...". Restoring those edited posts one by one is tedious but possible. So what's a good compromise on how far back someone should be allowed to do that to their own posts?
When you signed up for the forums, you agreed that the info you post here is the property of the site owner. That's usually done to avoid cat-fighting when someone decided to leave mad, and wants every post and every bit of their history erased. The previous account-holder leaves, and the usernames on those posts gets changed to something else so the posts and threads remain intact. It allows IB to make regular backups of the database, optionally mirror the data in other places for both physical security and maintenance of availability. Headquarters is nestled between a bunch of refineries and the airport in Los Angeles, sitting on the intersection of five active earthquake faults and the edge of a tectonic plate. Not really, but you get the idea. Good Idea to have a recovery plan.
I'm guessing that a group of hobbyists would have a bit of fun trying to duplicate the functionality without a lot of $$ and effort, and would have an even tougher time gathering the vast collection of experts knowledge needed to replicate the content. I know my mini server farm here at the dr bob world headquarters has nowhere close to the bandwidth needed to provide reasonable user access just to this forum. Even if I left out OT and P&C traffic, performance wouldn't be nearly as optimized as it is now under IB. Those who know founder John Dunkle know that he spent a pile of time and $$ keeping things going. IB offers to do that for us, and only asks that you click through the ads when you need to buy something.
If you truly feel the need to have another forum available just-in-case, support the 928OC with you dollars and technical posts. As noted, there's a huge amount of indexed content already here in Rennlist; makes it hard to justify starting new somewhere else.
While the idea of a dedicated archive sounds good - nobody - absolutely nobody has that amount of time.. Remember you are never done... its a never ending task on every single topic - they all evolve continually with the forum learnings.
For this reason Search really is Your Friend - get good at search options & strategies and you will be rewarded with more information than you could ever read on almost any topic. A casual search isn't enough you need to really think about it if you want to find all the gems, also you can ask and others will usually be willing help you to refine your search... This is a much better forum for technical issues than say facebook where its all fleetingly 'available/visible' and the same topics come up again and again, also the overall quality of the answers is better here I think. More signal - less noise (mostly!)
What REALLY needs to happen is for someone at I.B. (or for I.B. to authorize someone) to go through the thousands of threads here and consult with experts we do have, and create and publish a full-on book. The Boxster maintenance and project manuals are considered to be the DIY gold standard, and they'll always be available - even if Pelican dries up and blows away. I know that there are shop manuals (I have digital copies), but the information and TTPs here on RL are based on decades of experience in the day-to-day work needed to keep these cars on the road.
This is exactly what I hope happens. One of the experts from here who is going into retirement could partner with IB and produce an updated version of the workshop manuals which include all of the working knowledge and mod options found here. I can almost guarantee that they'd sell enough copies to make it worth their time. Certainly, not enough to get rich, but enough of an incentive for someone really passionate about these cars.
Frankly, the best way to do it would be to have someone take the lead roll but then have a group of people help out and contribute.
Originally Posted by Shawn Stanford
What REALLY needs to happen is for someone at I.B. (or for I.B. to authorize someone) to go through the thousands of threads here and consult with experts we do have, and create and publish a full-on book. The Boxster maintenance and project manuals are considered to be the DIY gold standard, and they'll always be available - even if Pelican dries up and blows away. I know that there are shop manuals (I have digital copies), but the information and TTPs here on RL are based on decades of experience in the day-to-day work needed to keep these cars on the road.
What REALLY needs to happen is for someone at I.B. (or for I.B. to authorize someone) to go through the thousands of threads here and consult with experts we do have, and create and publish a full-on book. The Boxster maintenance and project manuals are considered to be the DIY gold standard, and they'll always be available - even if Pelican dries up and blows away. I know that there are shop manuals (I have digital copies), but the information and TTPs here on RL are based on decades of experience in the day-to-day work needed to keep these cars on the road.
That's exactly what Clarks' Garage is. I'd suggest people at least check it out, it's an older format site (who cares!) but still has the key information handy on how to do most things with a 944. Yes a 928 is more complicated but for a lot of issues we run into the same thing over and over.
Sorry to say it, but in the year since Yahoo dumped the files sections for the mailing lists a *lot* of information has been lost. Sure Google and IB and whatnot may be around for a thousand years, but the same was said for Altavista, Usenet archives, Jeeves, and Facebook (Oh wait, that third one hasn't happened yet)
C
Ugh. Same as usual. Slow and painful. Everything keeps getting in the way. Current work involves cleaning ABS pump, and bending a new brake line from the ABS pump to the passenger's side front brake caliper.
People who have nothing to do with 928's but monetize clicks and the content 928 owners create and maintain. As long as your ideas line up with theirs you are allowed to lay the golden eggs for them and use the forums. Some of us just gained a different perspective about posting technical content. There are a lot of knowledgeable 928 owners who never started posting info here because they were smart enough to see how things work, and decided to keep their knowledge to themselves. Some of us are also like Dr Bob described, got older and wiser and our priorities changed about how much time to spend online posting about our adventures.
08-28-2020, 11:25 AM
Succession Planning
