I am a car guy in my 30s, I have been in the scene since the early 2000s and anyone else that was around back then knows what I am talking about with forums. Forums used to be THE place to find everything car related. Whatever car you had, you could find a forum for it with hundreds of active users any time of the day. For sale threads, regional meet ups, anything you wanted was there. It was like an online mecca for whatever car you had. If you had a BMW, there were huge BMW forums with hundreds of posts and discussions happening every day. Fast forward to now, almost all automotive forums are dead, like dead dead. For sale sections dried up, regional sections with the last posts being 6 months old. It’s a ghost town.
So what happened? My guess, is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube divided the community so hard, and gave everyone their “own” little pages, that this is all people do now. I joined a few Facebook groups and found those to be just as dead as the forums. It’s really not the same. We used to be able to post in a regional section and by nightfall have a whole meet arranged with locals from your area. Now, that’s a no go. I miss it, and I would love to know if there is a place everyone is at now, but I am also scared that maybe that era of online car culture is lost forever. r/cars seems to be the only place I can find that has constant activity with other gearheads, but that’s only because it serves as a “hub” for car guys on reddit, which is another “hub”, and all other hubs have been abandoned. I am trying to get involved on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, but it’s not the same, how do you arrange a meet in an Instagram comment section? It’s just not the same.
Let me sing you the song of NABR.
Once upon a time, there was the Talon Digest. This was a LISTSERV mailing list, run by a lunatic who curated the daily traffic into his server into an edited daily digest post. Each morning, you’d receive the day’s copy of the Digest, read every single post, and maybe email a response back to the server to be published the following day.
If you had a DSM (Talon, Eclipse, Laser) this was the only game in town. Everyone was on it - the vendors, the big names, the innovators, and the nutswingers and other fanbois.
Todd was pretty judicious in what made it into the Digest, so quality was high. What wasn’t high was immediacy or volume; demand for content way outstripped the throughput Todd and the Digest could support.
So next came a rival set of forums: DSMTalk and DSMTuners. They each had their own personalities, and pretty soon a rivalry broke out between them. Neither of them had anywhere near the editorial standards that the Digest had (nor was any forum structure going to be able to match it) but each had orders of magnitude more bandwidth.
And so began the “great dumbing down” where anyone could post anything. Traffic skyrocketed, but quality per post plummeted.
And then, quietly, a couple of guys started NABR.
NABR was a forum, but it was invitation only. You had to have either accomplished something, or be vouched for by someone who had. It’s defining principle was “meritocracy” - you had to show your work, quote sources, present data - and it could be brutal if you tried to hand wave away bullshit.
But the discussion quality was off the charts. Freed from public view and the need to play corporate, all the big players were there. We could share ideas, work on theories, display prototypes, and learn from each other. Part Lord of the Flies, part Lockheed Skunkworks. Dozens of small time vendors, fabricators, and race teams became real players because of NABR.
But we eventually grew up. Once product lines were established and matured, the need for shared R&D dwindled. Some moved out of the industry. A couple straight-up died. The “import car boom” fizzled and there wasn’t as much money in it anymore. And so eventually NABR too fizzled and died.
Its gone, and along with it all the history of platform development (and no small amount of interpersonal drama too).
Lightning in a bottle that will never come this way again.
Man I’m glad I was there for it!
This was my entry into the online Alfa Romeo world. Logging on every day and hoping the daily digest was waiting for me.