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If you're a former Baye30.net member, you may have been wondering what happened to the old site. For starters, Baye30.net was started in early 2001 by some e30 community veterans like Dave Adams, Brenden Selvig and a few others. Since then, we've undergone a few server and management changes until about mid-2009. A few of the older members got together and took a look at what seemed to be a fading community. Throughout most of early 2009, despite a member base of around 1,000 members, active participation was only around 60 members.
The plan was to reinvigorate the BMW e30 community by giving the original Bay e30 Network a major overhaul...both the site and the community. Let's take a look at some of the changes we've made...
The forum software
The old Baye30.net site used an open-source forum software called phpbb2 (php Bulletin Board v2.0). The software was adequate for a number of years until rolled in and we were flooded with masses of spammers, bots, and fake accounts. Despite some code and software enhancements, we were still plagued by the problems...eventually leading to the site going down for nearly 3 weeks! Something had to be done.
The solution was to turn to a commercial forum software that was supported by the developers. The best choice available was vBulletin, a very reputable forum system utilized by more than 2 million websites worldwide. We were able to migrate all of our user database and historical threads with ease and managed to save everything dating back to as early as 2003. Whats the power of information if you can't maintain it, right?
Active membership increase
Another thing that has been on a steady rise in the last 6 months is our active membership. We've grown from around 60 to upwards of 250 active users, and still rising! There has also been a steady growth of meets and gatherings to go along with it. Some years ago, we were lucky to get the community together for a meet'n'greet once a year. Currently, we have regularly scheduled meets on the Peninsula happening every other week.
We're hoping to keep this steady growth going as we move forward by getting businesses involved and reaching out to our fellow e30 sites!
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