I just wanted to discuss with the mods an idea me and David have been talking about heavily recently. Assumingly the Suburu community is also very forum oriented and david has volunteered to head up a new endeavour.
We're talking about developing a Car Network, called UnitedCars (not a final name). Basically it'd be a collection of sites, right now just United Bimmer and United Suburu, based around this same technology base we have developed here.
It'd be a very similar design, changing the header, images, and color scheme of the site, only based around Suburu's of course. We'd add about a 30 pixel high (small) bar across the top of the site, identifying it as part of the UnitedCars network, this one being the BMW Chapter. We'd use the same memberbase so users at one site can post at another without reregistering. I'm thinking there'd be a shared Lounge, General Automotive, Comedy, etc... to enhance both sites (for example, if someone posts a joke on the Suburu site, we'd see it on the BMW site too, the Comedy Forum would be shared)... however all the tech/make related forums would be only visible on each of the respective sites.
This is an opportunity to grow beyond our single area, and hopefully one day have a major hand in every car make online. We'll expand to one of the largest car communities on the internet, while still keeping the small-forum feeling because of seperated chapters. Technologies like UnitedGarage and Rate-My-Car would be applicable to all makes, since they're not BMW specific.
My inital thoughts as for distrobution of staff priviledges are as follows. I'll create a new account rank called Chapter Administrator, which will basically act as an admin over their make. I'm thinking David will obviously take the position of Chapter Administrator over the suby community and Spielhur will take the BMW community. I'd like witeshark to oversee the non-make-specific forums for all makes.. like the lounge and general automotive. I'll help out a little on overseeing the bmw community, but I'll step back a bit and mostly concentrate on the site development side.
If United Suburu is successful, I'd like to start up an Audi chapter next, as I've been thinking about that for a while now. We'd just need one or two dedicated members with a different make to go off and create their own chapter (like david wants to do with us.c.
What do you guys think about this? I think this could be the way we'll move from a competiting bmw forum, to a truely successful car community, with tech knowledge bases for every major car make. For example, we could one day surpass CarDomain with UnitedGarages alone since it's all makes.
