IBMWR is Cutting Back

[Dennis Andress]

Internet BMW Riders  Until Carey started this discussion board IBMWR was the only place to find help wrenching your BMW.  They are where I found directions for adjusting my K-Bike's TPS. They are not shutting down, but their Marketplace goes away on the 15th of this month, and the E-Mail lists will be archived but no longer sent.

 

From the Analytics I posted I feel we are doing the same thing they did: providing tech help for old BMW motorcycles.

 

[taylor1]

They have been dying a slow death for quite some time. They were also my go to for quite a while. Now when I pop in, the classified section is like a ghost town.

[realshelby]

I remember being on it....maybe 20 years back. 

 

Too easy to "stay the same". In todays world of Vertical Scope owning about all the forums you can name, I still think there is a place for "independent" sites like ours. I don't have any idea what average monthly costs are. Maybe a rough idea of that would be interesting for us? Software updates/upgrades are bound to be expensive. But without a fresh looking, easy to navigate and use site, new prospective members might not be impressed enough to come back. Like it or not, new members are what counts in the long run. 

[Dennis Andress]

1 hour ago, realshelby said:

I don't have any idea what average monthly costs are. Maybe a rough idea of that would be interesting for us? 

Monthly costs look to be a couple tanks of gas (for a V8 SUV). There are some annual expenses too. Email, which we use sparingly, is expensive.

[taylor1]

My social media consists of 3 BMW forums, and the IBMWR really wasn't social for me. More to just glean information. The second one is an airhead forum which still has participation from a couple extremely knowledgeable mechanics. Unfortunately, it too, is dying a slow death. I attribute it to the age and decreased interest in airheads. It also has a F.T. with little or no boundaries that has hit rock bottom with no participation. I think even the posters on those threads got tired of screaming at the walls. As Terry mentioned, there are very few new members so I think the mods. are seeing the writing on the wall. I still try to contribute when I can and throw them a few bucks, but their inability to change with the times will be their demise. IMHO. They could certainly take a few lessons from this great site, but probably won't.

[R65_Steve]

I never fully understood how to use that resource.  I did buy two bikes from there.   One in 2006 and one in 2020.   When 2020 rolled around, it was a fraction of what it used to be for for sale ads.  

 

Was there an associated club with it?

[Dennis Andress]

2 hours ago, R65_Steve said:

I never fully understood how to use that resource.  I did buy two bikes from there.   One in 2006 and one in 2020.   When 2020 rolled around, it was a fraction of what it used to be for for sale ads.  

 

Was there an associated club with it?

 

IBMWR came to be in a time before browsers. The HTTP protocol was known only to university professors, HTML was a poor simplification of XML (and SGML).

The one thing they did have was email. IBMWR routinely sent subscribers an email containing everything everyone else had emailed regarding a topic. They archived all they emails allowing one to search for something of interest, but there was no search as we know it today.

 

I got the sense that they did get together for rides and events.

[R65_Steve]

5 minutes ago, Dennis Andress said:

 

IBMWR came to be in a time before browsers. The HTTP protocol was known only to university professors, HTML was a poor simplification of XML (and SGML).

The one thing they did have was email. IBMWR routinely sent subscribers an email containing everything everyone else had emailed regarding a topic. They archived all they emails allowing one to search for something of interest, but there was no search as we know it today.

 

I got the sense that they did get together for rides and events.

 

 

Yeah, I remember the old days of the internet.   By the time I got into motorcycles, that time had passed. 

I do think IBMWR had a banner at one of the National Rallies I attended. 

[szurszewski]

That used to be on my regular checking-in internet rotation, but I don't think I've looked at the site in at least five years and probably stopped checking it regularly around 2015 - before that the classifieds had been, though no huge, very good at finding/selling things that fit our little BMW niche, and the tech repository was excellent.