Question for the Chapter

I for one have been away from this place, mostly because I stopped wheeling and wrenching on my Jeep. Several other projects have come along and with that comes checking out other sites relevant to the work being done. I'm still not able to go wheeling at this time, but I am going to make an effort to to be here on a regular basis again.
Leave the drama on FB, and lets get back to the core idea of this club. Saving trails, wheeling, education, helping, and spreading the weird love we have for these station wagons!
 
Good to see you back, Dean!
 
Message boards are a tough sell these days unless you're 4chan or Reddit, and especially if you're a very specific board i.e. a club for a vehicle that ended production 16 years ago. I see it happening to other boards I've visited over the years, including ones with hundreds of thousands of members and vastly more diverse interest/user bases. On the other hand, I follow four local XJ or Jeep specific Facebook groups and they are all very active - however the member crossover/duplicate posts are telling, and all of the content is either extremely stupid questions or for sale/wanted. I mostly stay subscribed to them for the cheap parts, and the ability to get quick help if I get stuck somewhere with cell service. They're an unfortunately necessary evil, and they're the new defacto due to ease of use and single-click registration. Like someone else said, Tapatalk sucks badly and it's the best option. A local facebook group for your vehicle/hobby of choice is easy to join and integrates seamlessly into your daily smartphone habit.

I found & joined NAXJA while jumping straight into building my XJ with no real knowledge three years ago, during which time I realized most of my Google searches lead to threads here. I saw that all the really knowledgeable guys posted here, and I registered/paid dues because I appreciate that kind of concentrated resource and wanted to contribute. I fall into the oldest part of the "Millennial" bracket though, and let me tell you... as a whole we don't give a flying **** about anything not easily accessible in a modern cellphone app format (and paying money to participate is a foreign concept). I'm a dying breed in that I prefer message boards to "social media". As a funny side note, this forum automatically censored my above f-word to **** which is pretty hilarious in a late-1990s AOL family browser-filter sort of way. It's outdated and telling.

This board already falls firmly into the greybeard-specific OEM knowledge or custom-fab welding areas, which are both fine and good but will not drive an increase in new members or activity purely because XJ Cherokees are not really being purchased by people who aren't already in the scene - they are likely already members of your group/forum/page/club. Cal touched on this in his post. Most people I know who offroad either have newer TJ/JKs or Tacomas, etc. Personally, I think that if NAXJA wants to remain around we'll have to drop the club dues/local voting/etc, and become just another frame & engine-specific tech board with occasional trail runs/local meets put together ad-hoc by regular members. I'm not sure how much bandwidth/traffic naxja.org pulls in with archived posts and the like, but I imagine it's not too much for a standard webhost server package. Who funds that is a different issue, but certainly not out of reach of a generous person or two. Think a Chevy smallblock forum or a FJ40-specific enthusiast board, not a fragmented regional thing... as XJs fall into an increasingly smaller ownership base, subdividing that group is a failing proposition. Everyone gets older and acquires new priorities as life goes on, and our online communities will shrink due to attrition (especially in our very specific case with California vehicle emissions :looney:) but we can still keep the user knowledge base going as a whole.

That's just my $0.02 :dunno:
 
Message boards are a tough sell these days unless you're 4chan or Reddit, and especially if you're a very specific board i.e. a club for a vehicle that ended production 16 years ago. I see it happening to other boards I've visited over the years, including ones with hundreds of thousands of members and vastly more diverse interest/user bases. On the other hand, I follow four local XJ or Jeep specific Facebook groups and they are all very active - however the member crossover/duplicate posts are telling, and all of the content is either extremely stupid questions or for sale/wanted. I mostly stay subscribed to them for the cheap parts, and the ability to get quick help if I get stuck somewhere with cell service. They're an unfortunately necessary evil, and they're the new defacto due to ease of use and single-click registration. Like someone else said, Tapatalk sucks badly and it's the best option. A local facebook group for your vehicle/hobby of choice is easy to join and integrates seamlessly into your daily smartphone habit.

I found & joined NAXJA while jumping straight into building my XJ with no real knowledge three years ago, during which time I realized most of my Google searches lead to threads here. I saw that all the really knowledgeable guys posted here, and I registered/paid dues because I appreciate that kind of concentrated resource and wanted to contribute. I fall into the oldest part of the "Millennial" bracket though, and let me tell you... as a whole we don't give a flying **** about anything not easily accessible in a modern cellphone app format (and paying money to participate is a foreign concept). I'm a dying breed in that I prefer message boards to "social media". As a funny side note, this forum automatically censored my above f-word to **** which is pretty hilarious in a late-1990s AOL family browser-filter sort of way. It's outdated and telling.

This board already falls firmly into the greybeard-specific OEM knowledge or custom-fab welding areas, which are both fine and good but will not drive an increase in new members or activity purely because XJ Cherokees are not really being purchased by people who aren't already in the scene - they are likely already members of your group/forum/page/club. Cal touched on this in his post. Most people I know who offroad either have newer TJ/JKs or Tacomas, etc. Personally, I think that if NAXJA wants to remain around we'll have to drop the club dues/local voting/etc, and become just another frame & engine-specific tech board with occasional trail runs/local meets put together ad-hoc by regular members. I'm not sure how much bandwidth/traffic naxja.org pulls in with archived posts and the like, but I imagine it's not too much for a standard webhost server package. Who funds that is a different issue, but certainly not out of reach of a generous person or two. Think a Chevy smallblock forum or a FJ40-specific enthusiast board, not a fragmented regional thing... as XJs fall into an increasingly smaller ownership base, subdividing that group is a failing proposition. Everyone gets older and acquires new priorities as life goes on, and our online communities will shrink due to attrition (especially in our very specific case with California vehicle emissions :looney:) but we can still keep the user knowledge base going as a whole.

That's just my $0.02 :dunno:

While I do agree with much in here I cannot agree with the option of shutting the club down and turning it into yet another forum that exists only for its own ad revenue (to line the pockets of the owners).

As a club NAXJA donates thousands of dollars per year to land use organizations. As a chapter SoCal has two trails that we have formally adopted through the San Bernardino National Forest. A simple casual forum could not achieve that.

NAXJA needs to evolve to grow, we're working on that on the back end. We have no intention of closing our doors. :cheers:
 
Not in favor of shutting it down either, quite the opposite. :NAXJA: has definitely done some great work in keeping trails open locally and across the nation. The amount of info in here is incredible, and the friends I have made here have been there when I needed them, and vice versa.
What I would like to see is the old dogs come back and hang out here again and teach the new pups a thing or two. lol :cheers:
 
Not in favor of shutting it down either, quite the opposite. :NAXJA: has definitely done some great work in keeping trails open locally and across the nation. The amount of info in here is incredible, and the friends I have made here have been there when I needed them, and vice versa.
What I would like to see is the old dogs come back and hang out here again and teach the new pups a thing or two. lol :cheers:

Oh no, I didn't mean shut 'er down right away, lordy no! Like Sequoia, the AAT program etc. are all great and should be maintained as long as possible. It was more more of my own thoughts on what may have to be done at a future date; if current attrition due to social media and the other stuff got bad enough and the club as a whole had to make tough decisions. I hope we run strong well into the future.

NAXJA needs to evolve to grow, we're working on that on the back end. We have no intention of closing our doors. :cheers:

I am glad to hear it and again, I hope I didn't come across as critical of the state of us or management or anything of that sort. Just my experiences with the state of message boards and clubs on the internet over the years :)

WOW! You all sure do have a bunch of words there in Pasadena.
:yap: Hah sorry, I forgot I was a millenial there for a minute. What I meant to say was "lol wtf were did evryone go fam. btw any1 know what size lift I need to run 35s thnx"

:cheers:
 
No lift needed, just trim a little.
 
FWIW, the SoCalXJ.com group has also been in a very quiet period. Not just the posts, but also the monthly M&G numbers. Once in a while a lot of people show up, but more often then not, it's me and 4 other folks, and half of them don't even have XJs. We used to have 10-20 people show up pretty regularly
 
That's the other thing about a vehicle-specific club that's odd: You only really wheel with those type vehicles on runs.

I remember the good ole days, before large-scale internet, when a few of us backwoods types would just get together for some wheelin' fun. There would be old Chevys, a Bronco, a 22R Toyota, someone's Sammy, and whatever anyone else thought they could wheel.

Vehicle-specific clubs are cool but they aren't very well-rounded, haha. Don’t get me wrong, I loved wheeling with a group of 30 Cherokees, but a little cross-pollination would be nice sometimes.
 
All great topics - I mean to post a long response, but what Geoff said.

Hmm, I can't believe I'm agreeing with The Jerk.

From a funds standpoint, we continue to be solvent. This is with contributing tens of thousands of dollars to land use, which is the main reason, I believe, for member contributions, and for our existance outside of the social aspect.

David Bricker / SYR - YYZ
 
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