As most of you know we are a very "liquid" website that isn't afraid of making changes or taking gambles on new sections and subjects, or inversely clipping sections and subjects if they don't excel. I have always valued the members input and direction, and with this "remodel" of RDP most of the changes were member driven, while others were driven by sheer necessity.
Because I have already gotten a few PM's asking "Where did the v-drive section go?" and "Where's the outboard section?" I figured I would take a moment to explain that aside from everything else. On the original Hotboat those sections kinda became the hang out for the people that own the various types of boats. PB is still that way to this day, and the NRKA guys hang out in the v-drive section, and the outboard church guys hang out in there section, and the Jet guys do their own thing in there section.
To be bluntly honest about it, that never really happened with RDP.. Pretty much everyone hangs out in the lounge regardless of what type of boat they have. That said though because those sections didn't get a lot of traffic RDP has generally been perceived as "weak on tech." Which sucks because perception is reality, even if reality is a different case.
We never had a lot of traffic in our v-drive section for example, but if a member asked a question we do have pretty much the top guys in the Industry all ready to answer the question (Prime Marine, TCM, BoostPower, Schiada, Racey Industries, to name a few). So in the few cases where someone did ask a question it was a real short thread.. It's "How do I?" and then a single "This is how you do it." Needless to say, while it's great the guy got his question answered, when you see a section that has little to no traffic, you want to go where the people are, regardless if you can get a direct answer or not if for nothing else camaraderie.
Being that we have had those sections for years, and they have never really taken off from a "social" standpoint, I decided to merge them all together and make a "Boat Setup" section. If you have a question about your v-drive, jet, I/O, Outboard, Surface Drive, Cat, Vee, I do'nt care what it is.. You can pop it in that section and you can be damn sure it's gonna get answered by some of the best in the Industry. I figure if I combine them 4-5 slow / weak sections it might make one good one. If nothing else, at least my industry guys don't have to look through 4-5 sections, they can just check the one.
As for the rest, I encourage you to take a look at the Forum Index and see some of our new sections that we have put up! You can do that by clicking the "FORUMS" button in the top left hand corner of your screen. We now have a "Detail" section so people can discuss cleaning products methods, we have a "Man Caves" section for people to put up their garages, an entirely new "Nostalgia" section that I hope will become very cool as it's filled out, a trailer section and a whole lot more!
As you are looking at the Index itself, you will see that the entire forum has been restructured to have a kind of "flow" to it. The top of the forum is entirely social. The middle of the forum is entirely informational / tech etc.. and then as you ease down towards the bottom of the index it is where transactions would happen. Things like the classifieds etc.. (Which we have several improved classified sections as well!)
While we are still doing some minor tweaks and adding descriptions, for the most part it is complete. I look forward to your thoughts on the remodel, and hope that you guys will find the organization much easier to navigate, and reference content into the future!
RD
