Autoweek’s Combustion Chamber: ACATT Investigates

6/6/08 update: AutoWeek has posted a mea culpa and brought its Combustion Chamber forums back to life in the form of Car Life Community. It has been almost two years since the AutoWeek unceremoniously yanked CC from their site. Has it been too long? Have readers moved on? You can check out their new forums here.


Original 9/8/06 post:




As first reported back on August 31, AutoWeek’s popular forums have been offline for over a week now. Since this has been a longer outage than normal, I took some time today to do a little research on this issue. Picking up the phone on the other end was AutoWeek’s assistant web editor Phil Floraday.

ACATT: Doug, when and why did this happen?

Floraday: The boards were pulled down on August 31 basically because they were not providing the level of functionality that our users expect.

ACATT: Could you elaborate a bit more?

Florday: Well, for one, there was no way to effectively ban problem users.

ACATT: Were users notified of this pending outage?

Floraday: No. We didn’t give users any notification because we didn’t want the problem users to think that it had become open season.

ACATT: What are some of the ways you are looking to achieve better control over problem posters?

Floraday: Measures such as IP banning are being looked at.

ACATT: What are some of the models that you are looking at for the next generation of AutoWeek Forums? Would VWVortex be an example?

Floraday: Yes, VWVortex is actually one of the names that has been mentioned of boards that are doing a good job. If you go to big-boards.com, a list of the most active message boards and forums, you’ll see the kind of product that we are looking at.

ACATT: When will the Combustion Chamber return to the site?

Floraday: We don’t have an exact timeline for that.


On a side note, when I first called up and asked about the Combustion Chamber, they referred me to someone who thought I was talking about an AutoWeek hosted design forum. Heh Heh…In any case, that’s the 411 on AutoWeek’s forums. I did find it interesting that it disappeared so quickly and without a real plan in place for the next generation of boards. It's also interesting that AW is willing to let its forums go to "dead air" for so long. Whenever fresh content goes AWOL off your site and users go elsewhere for their automotive fix, there is always a risk that everyone might not come back.