Open Letter to all Visitors - August 2016

[synthoova]

Friends,

The time has come to partially shutter PreludeDriver.com. This wasn't an easy decision, but after 11 years of maintaining this site, I just don't have the time to continue as I have.

The PreludeDriver.com forums were launched in 2005 after the forums at hpoa.org were shut down. The Internet was a much different place then, and this small forum achieved some success as it stepped into the vacuum left by hpoa.org's sudden demise. We've helped a lot of people, and I'm very proud to say that we've done it while keeping the spammers at bay and staying very much on topic. I always wanted this to be a place where people would come to talk mostly about maintaining Preludes. In that regard, I think PreludeDriver.com has been a success.

The last few years have been quiet on the forums. I think this is primarily due to two things:

First, Prelude ownership numbers are certainly dropping. Preludes of all generations are getting old and a lot of them are finding their way into the scrap yard rather than finding new enthusiastic owners. As a long-time fan of these cars, this hurts, but it's the truth. I salute all of you who work hard to keep your Prelude from disappearing into oblivion. They're wonderful cars.

Second, the very idea of a forum has drifted out of favor on the Internet. Forums are still an effective platform for discussion, but Internet users now expect richer experiences. This site still gets a reasonable amount of traffic, but our YouTube channel gets a lot more. That says it all.

So, what happens now?

I'm going to place the forums in "Read-Only" mode for a while. Posting and memberships will be disabled, but you'll still be able to read and search all the content we have here. With so many contributions, it didn't seem fair to just throw all the good information we have away. Instead, I'll keep the content up but use the read-only mode as a way to greatly simplify maintenance.

Long term, I may look at a way to make all the content permanently static on some much cheaper hosting that I have. In short, our content will be here for the foreseeable future. No changes will be made to the YouTube channel. It's going to stay open.

Thank you very much to all of you who have visited and contributed your questions and knowledge. It's been fun running this site. Enjoy the content, and be sure to check out our YouTube channel if you haven't already.

Farewell, and drive safely.