45 replies to this topic

[Risil]

Over the winter, the moderation team has been considering a new Racing Comments subforum to give RC regulars the chance to chat about events from the last three decades or so of recent racing history. We’d like to put these ideas to you, the Racing Comments readers and contributors, to see:

1. If you think it’s a good idea
2. How you’d like to see it evolve

We’re proposing a new subforum of Racing Comments where you can discuss not-current, but still fairly recent events of any motorized sport you happen to be interested in. Right now, the forum as a whole has a “dead zone” where potentially interesting topics happened too long ago to be a live, matter-of-moment Racing Comments story, but are still too recent (or populist!) to be of major interest to the folks at The Nostalgia Forum. From reading many “state of F1” threads over the years, we’re also aware that a great many RC folk are nostalgic for the F1 of the 1990s and 2000s, but don’t have a forum to share their passion and speak their brains.

We’re expecting the timeframe of the subforum to be flexible and to evolve as we’re going along – however, as a basic rule we would like it to start in the late 1980s and come to an end some time in the 2000s. 1989-2006 is one possibility. Another possibility is starting in 1989, but no more recent than 5 or 10 years ago. Not that we want to be overly severe about it: if you want to discuss Nigel Mansell’s CART career, it would be fine for the discussion to wander back to the 1980s.

We’re also open to suggestions about what the subforum should be called. So, er, fire away.

So why is this different from The Nostalgia Forum? Well, for a start there’s no need to worry about whether you’re contributing to historical research: the idea is to have fun, settle scores and chat about racing, just as it is in Racing Comments. You’ll also be free to talk about drivers who are still involved at the top level of the sport: the early careers of Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen, for instance, would be fair game. Finally, the subforum will be under the RC umbrella and will primarily looked after by RC moderators. We hope that the subforum will be able to serve as a meeting place for posters from RC and TNF, but while the subforum may be nostalgic in content, the tone and purpose will be RC-style.

Feel free to add comments and suggestions below. There’s another thread on the same subject in TNF. Please also feel free to PM your thoughts and ideas to me, Vitesse2, SophieB, Goingthedistance, PayasYouRace or Tim Murray and we’ll take them onboard as we work out what to do.

[pacificquay]

Gut instinct is no.

 

Everything that is suggested for discussion in this post should go in the Nostalgia Forum.

 

If it's not current, it's nostalgia.

 

Doing so helps keep "nostalgia" alive and keeps the forum busy enough to be interesting.

 

Multiple splinter forums tend to kill things.

[as65p]

Feels like a move to protect the current nostalgia forum, more than anything else. The regulars there will surely love it. Logically it doesn't make sense, but then again that period which isn't really welcome in the existing nostalgia section must go somewhere, so why not. From my observation everything from the eighties onwards is frowned upon in current nostalgia, so the new section should probably start in 1980.

[HP]

IMO it'd be better to introduce tags.

 

Thread starter, mods and admins can assign them. Mods and admins can edit, reassign (when it's misspelled, our if using MS, MSC instead of Michael Schumacher) and remove them.

 

There can be multiple tags for each thread, each containing a single driver name, a team, track, year, incident, FIA, FISA, F1, Indy, rally, and whatever is permissible in the context of this forum (all subfolders included).

 

As an example: I want to to talk about a specific incident that involved several drivers at a certain track in a certain year. So I could create (or use existing) tags for each driver, track, year, series, even the nickname for the incident. Even a tag if it happened in practice, qualy or race.

 

It'd be even possible to tag old threads automatically, running a comparison against these tag names for maybe the thread title and opening message.

 

For anyone using this forum, the benefits is that one doesn't have navigate folders, but can limit oneself to the topics of interest. Choose the appropriate tags and presto, get the topics one is interested in. Even better, searching the forum can be made less resource intensive, being a bon for the website owner too.

 

What for me the beauty of such an approach is, I can truly select what I am interested in, without the need to search in different folders. Also it removes the need to set the lines of what is recent history and what not. That issue could be done very elegant in at least 2 ways, by creating group tags or let an user create his own personal group tags. A mod created group tag for recent history for example could include all threads that refer to content from the last 30 years or so, excluding the current year. So the group tag contains tags of each year from 1988 to 2017.

 

So a thread is about something that happened in 2010. So one of it's tag is 2010. That thread will be automatically shown in the recent history group. A race thread created in 2011 would also automagically be inserted in that group, even if the thread title didn't mentioned the year. But the creation date will have that piece of information. Now as time moves on, the lines of what recent history is shifts. No problem, update the individual group tag's year. With that approach group tags can be tailor made, even in nostalgia. The reason I am not much in Nostalgia for me is not the people, but that info is too hard to find.

 

And IMO, that's something else to consider. With tags, the forum can serve better the individual informational needs and interests. There's nothing to stop anyone in Nostalgia from creating a Nostalgia group tag, and maybe also a historic research tag.

 

And from a coding perspective it's not that hard to implement tags these days.

[ensign14]

Leave it in mainstream RC.  People will suss out whether it's historical or not fairly quickly.  And if they were not expecting something vaguely historical, then maybe they will be intrigued, and want to know more.

[jonpollak]

Agree with Rt.Hon.QC lawyer dude above.

Too niche and not a place foot traffic will notice and hence minimum engagement.

 

Jp

[danmills]

Should be like the rolling tax exemption cars; 12 years or older, nostalgic.

[Sterzo]

Sounds like a good idea. As for titles... maybe it should be called the Nostalgia Forum, because it's for the period people feel nostalgic about, while I've always thought our current Nostalgia Forum is misnamed; it would be better as The History Forum.

[JHSingo]

There's definitely a void there. The Nostalgia Forum is a bit too Ye Olde Motorsport for my liking (and I guess the regulars don't appreciate anything past the 1800s ). I'd be in support of it, definitely.

[PlatenGlass]

Couldn't we just allow it in normal racing comments? Quite often 80s and 90s stuff is discussed there. Sometimes it will be moved; sometimes it won't. But it doesn't do any harm.

[milestone 11]

Why on earth marginalise recent history. Are we to assume that F1 '17 will be a TNF subject thread because the open cockpit has become a thing of the past?
I thoroughly enjoy a little history from the last 50-60 years being discussed in RC, Rindt, Fittipaldi, Hunt and Lauda should remain as discussion points without being confined to TNF or a sub-forum in here.
Sadly, I believe this proposal has been generated by the lack of new members using TNF, this is more to do with the general attitude of a large proportion of TNF's contributors than enthusiasm for the subject. Just read some of the replies to this same question there.
It's fine as it is.

[Anja]

I would agree with leaving it as it is. Personally I don't see the need to limit RC strictly to recent events, more casual threads about older stuff don't feel out of place here to me. Putting them in another subforum would probably just limit their reach. 

[Bob Riebe]

This site is called Racing Comments, not Current Events, whether anyone comments on older racing should be up to the commenter.

Nostalgia has become a good old boys club of British racing but that is just the way it is.

Now Donald Capps probably has his own unique view but I see no reason to change really.

One poster above said 12 years or older is some how nostalgia yet 11 years ago the IRL and CART were recent. Where are they now?

 

Racing sites are going to change as people who were around racing ---- back in the years when stock cars, road racing and open wheel racing of any sort fought for press space, ---- in the pits for one reason or another, are leaving forums due to death or simply been there done that, do not need it anymore.

It some times strikes me as odd, or funny, when on a forum I say to some one , "do you remember..." and they say no I was not born yet, so the forums change because most people speak about what they saw and know and those who saw the "glory years" are getting fewer .

Edited by Bob Riebe, 26 January 2018 - 00:24.

[Nonesuch]

Right now, the forum as a whole has a “dead zone” where potentially interesting topics happened too long ago to be a live, matter-of-moment Racing Comments story, but are still too recent (or populist!) to be of major interest to the folks at The Nostalgia Forum.

 

Well, as per the forum descriptions, they do: the Nostalgia Forum.

 

It's just that some people can't keep themselves from complaining about so much as seeing others discuss things that happened after 1962.

 

While I like reading along there now and then, and appreciate the knowledge often on display: that sounds more like an issue with those posters than with the forum structure.

 

Half the F1 grid wasn't even alive at the "recent history" cut-off point suggested. It seems like discussing Senna vs. Mansell is perfectly at home in the Nostalgia Forum.

 

What you could do, and which is pretty popular on many forums, is to insist on proper thread labelling.

 

Perhaps something like so:

 

[F1][1990s] Michael Schumacher's debut!

[Group C][1980s] Tony Southgate's designs.

 

Etc.

[D-Type]

An excellent idea.  It should be a subforum of the Nostalgia Forum.  Include a link as a sticky in Racing Comments.  Maybe title it "Recent events (up to 20-25 years ago)"

[SophieB]

Why on earth marginalise recent history. Are we to assume that F1 '17 will be a TNF subject thread because the open cockpit has become a thing of the past?
I thoroughly enjoy a little history from the last 50-60 years being discussed in RC, Rindt, Fittipaldi, Hunt and Lauda should remain as discussion points without being confined to TNF or a sub-forum in here.
Sadly, I believe this proposal has been generated by the lack of new members using TNF, this is more to do with the general attitude of a large proportion of TNF's contributors than enthusiasm for the subject. Just read some of the replies to this same question there.
It's fine as it is.

 

 

I would agree with leaving it as it is. Personally I don't see the need to limit RC strictly to recent events, more casual threads about older stuff don't feel out of place here to me. Putting them in another subforum would probably just limit their reach. 

 

 

This site is called Racing Comments, not Current Events, whether anyone comments on older racing should be up to the commenter.

Nostalgia has become a good old boys club of British racing but that is just the way it is.

Now Donald Capps probably has his own unique view but I see no reason to change really.

One poster above said 12 years or older is some how nostalgia yet 11 years ago the IRL and CART were recent. Where are they now?

 

Racing sites are going to change as people who were around racing ---- back in the years when stock cars, road racing and open wheel racing of any sort fought for press space, ---- in the pits for one reason or another, are leaving forums due to death or simply been there done that, do not need it anymore.

It some times strikes me as odd, or funny, when on a forum I say to some one , "do you remember..." and they say no I was not born yet, so the forums change because most people speak about what they saw and know and those who saw the "glory years" are getting fewer .

 

Just to pick up on variations of a theme of 'what wrong with just having more (recent-ish) historical stuff in Racing Comments? Well, in theory, not that much? And  we wouldn't rule that out. However, strictly speaking at the moment they're not supposed to go there.  The reasons for the forum structure splits were before my time but it *looks* like currently they're done ostensibly on a strict linear division where Now = RC, The Past = TNF. But in practice, I don't think many people would go into TNF and start a thread about which was the best car to have in the 2006 season. They in theory *could* - it's twelve years ago now, for goodness sake - but it would feel out of place. And out of tone in the more considered, scholarly atmosphere. So in practice, topics from about 1990 onwards go nowhere at all, and that misses out some real golden era stuff. 

 

So what we're trying to achieve is the following:

• A clear forum structure that people, especially new users, can look at and understand at a glance. Where they can just post with confidence without worrying it's the wrong place and that people are going to tell them online they've breached forum etiquette.  
   
• Somewhere where people can lightly chat or indeed rowdily argue mostly lightweight stuff about Damon Hill, Michael Schumacher, how good Our Nige really was or wasn't, whether Ayrton Senna was really that great etc etc in the company of like-minded souls.

Because it ain't really happening now anywhere.  I am sure some people in TNF  would like to read or contribute to chatty 80s to 00s stuff in TNF, but I think for others it would be distinctly unwelcome. And I'd have sympathy with them. From the outside, it looks as if TNF is filled with hugely informed motorsport historians who are  primarily interested in using TNF for scholarly research. They may or may not also enjoy weighing up and considering 'Was Damon Hill Too Nice' too from time to time but I suspect it was quickly pall for most or be disruptive. I think it would be a good idea to have somewhere where people can post stuff like that without having to have to worry that they might be pissing the regulars off by disrupting the rhythm of their forum.

 

Now, as you say, the obvious alternative if this sort of thing is too rowdy for TNF would be to just slacken the reins of RC a bit and let it live there. We could. We'll definitely consider that as an alternative way forward. But isn't there value for those who want to talk about one of the golden periods of racing to be able to find that stuff easily? For people getting into the sport now to be able to look at the adventures of Senna, Prost, Schumacher and co in their own context? And indeed for those who want to find the stuff that's just about THIS season all in one place? It also seems a bit much for a new user to come in and intuitively understand whether his or her topic is more suited tone-wise to RC or TNF. I think the era division to the forums helps people find their feet.

 

However, in any case, I am sure I speak for all the moderators when I say how much all the thoughtful feedback is appreciated. 

[PlayboyRacer]

Anywhere I can discuss events and controversies spanning the 1980s till sometime in the 2000's would be most welcome, my favourite period of Formula 1 and IndyCar/CART.

 

Logically the current Nostalgia forum fits... though the vibe doesn't. Sub forums seem an unnecessary step, however if that suits the majority... I'm all for it.

[pacificquay]

Just to pick up on variations of a theme of 'what wrong with just having more (recent-ish) historical stuff in Racing Comments? Well, in theory, not that much? And  we wouldn't rule that out. However, strictly speaking at the moment they're not supposed to go there.  The reasons for the forum structure splits were before my time but it *looks* like currently they're done ostensibly on a strict linear division where Now = RC, The Past = TNF. But in practice, I don't think many people would go into TNF and start a thread about which was the best car to have in the 2006 season. They in theory *could* - it's twelve years ago now, for goodness sake - but it would feel out of place. And out of tone in the more considered, scholarly atmosphere. So in practice, topics from about 1990 onwards go nowhere at all, and that misses out some real golden era stuff. 

 

So what we're trying to achieve is the following:

• A clear forum structure that people, especially new users, can look at and understand at a glance. Where they can just post with confidence without worrying it's the wrong place and that people are going to tell them online they've breached forum etiquette.  
   
• Somewhere where people can lightly chat or indeed rowdily argue mostly lightweight stuff about Damon Hill, Michael Schumacher, how good Our Nige really was or wasn't, whether Ayrton Senna was really that great etc etc in the company of like-minded souls.

 

 

This is surely what the current TNF and the sub forum for Historical Research does.

 

Either those could be rebranded, or better promoted from in Racing Comments.

 

Adding additional subforums will merely dilute not enhance.

[SophieB]

This is surely what the current TNF and the sub forum for Historical Research does.
 
Either those could be rebranded, or better promoted from in Racing Comments.
 
Adding additional subforums will merely dilute not enhance.

 
Yes, I got it. And yet looking at your own posting history in TNF it's not extensive. If it's so clear to all, I wonder what has been stopping people posting about these things there already? Maybe threads like this where more time was spent whether Button's career really belonged in TNF, more than it was spent actually being considered. Discussions in threads like that suggest a lack of consensus on this at best.

[pacificquay]

 
Yes, I got it. And yet looking at your own posting history in TNF it's not extensive. If it's so clear to all, I wonder what has been stopping people posting about these things there already? Maybe threads like this where more time was spent whether Button's career really belonged in TNF, more than it was spent actually being considered. Discussions in threads like that suggest a lack of consensus on this at best.

 

My point was not that it is clear to all.

 

My point was that the structure is already there to support it - but it needs some direction for people to use it.

 

A lot of people will come straight into RC without realising TNF exists.

 

Similarly, clarity that TNF is the place for such discussions would prevent posts suggesting that they are not.

 

I am a daily reader of TNF and RC, albeit an irregular poster, but that doesn't signify a lack of interest.

 

I do however, tend to view the forums overall as being "the Autosport forums" rather than separate entities as many seem to.

 

(Additionally my comment in that thread was backing it being where it was posted, so my position has been consistent.)

Edited by pacificquay, 29 January 2018 - 12:05.

[PlatenGlass]

Somewhere where people can lightly chat or indeed rowdily argue mostly lightweight stuff about Damon Hill, Michael Schumacher, how good Our Nige really was or wasn't, whether Ayrton Senna was really that great etc etc in the company of like-minded souls.

In all honesty we're very limited about these sorts of discussions about current drivers. We're only allowed to compare team-mates, and while other comparisons inevitably come up in other threads, they're always on a knife-edge of being shut down as off topic.

[SophieB]

I would *hope* given we're talking around the 80s and 90s (ish), that the passing of the years would grant a somewhat wider perspective which might allow us to consider people's careers without getting hopelessly bogged down in fights.  Much beyond that, I feel like we'd be more talking about the RC board rules which I'm happy to do by PM.

[king_crud]

I say put them in TNF, if the clique that lives there doesn't like the threads they can choose to ignore them, in the same way that others ignore the threads about the one off 1904 Mongolian Grand Prix etc

[Disgrace]

Yep, another vote for keeping the existing forum structure. Nobody is obliged to open threads they're not interested in. Driving users to TNF means the content is more accessible and the longevity of the forum ensured. Otherwise, it will eventually become a museum.

[RacingGreen]

I'm all for leaving things as they are. I think most people get that;

 

TNF is for discussion of past events in and of themselves. 

 

The RC is for the current seasons racing (but can include how it is shaped by it's historic context.)

To just shunt any comment that mentions Jim Clark or Niki Lauda or Michael Schumacher (or wherever you draw an arbitrary line) off TNF would do a great disservice to the quality of the discussion.

 

If you need to clean up the forum perhaps have a separate archives / sub threads for old driver Vs driver pairings from previous years (particularly if the pairing has been split this year) (eg http://forums.autosport.com/topic/197292-daniel-ricciardo-vs-daniil-kvyat-2015/) ,  old race threads and build up threads (eg http://forums.autosp...de-méxico-2015/)  and old car threads (eg http://forums.autosp...mclaren-mp4-28/). 

[SophieB]

For those who want Button, Montoya, Mansell, Piquet, Schumacher, Massa, Prost, Senna and the gang to live in TNF, how do you suggest they be encouraged to do so? Because right now, they mostly live nowhere. There *are* the occasional threads, but they're rare.

[pacificquay]

For those who want Button, Montoya, Mansell, Piquet, Schumacher, Massa, Prost, Senna and the gang to live in TNF, how do you suggest they be encouraged to do so? Because right now, they mostly live nowhere. There *are* the occasional threads, but they're rare.

I’d like to see the forum better integrated into the website.

If there’s a feature on that era, which there often is on the website, there should be links to discuss it on the forum.

At the moment there are tabs to share articles on Facebook, Twitter etc, which often generate a bit of discussion on those platforms.

It seems a shame that discussion isn’t driven to the relevant section of the forum.

[milestone 11]

For those who want Button, Montoya, Mansell, Piquet, Schumacher, Massa, Prost, Senna and the gang to live in TNF, how do you suggest they be encouraged to do so? Because right now, they mostly live nowhere. There *are* the occasional threads, but they're rare.

If they're rare now, they'll be non-existent confined to a sub forum wherever.

[SophieB]

That's not really a barrier to giving it a go, because if it's like one thread about how Jenson Button was in fact really good, we'll just conclude the idea hasn't worked and shut it down, moving the orphans back in. Still, as you say threads are rare. And last time one got started about him, the thread got s bit hijacked about whether he belonged in TNF.

[king_crud]

Then the mods should

1. Advise the TNF it is open to all discussions about previous years, no matter how it may be perceived by current users

2. Mod threads accordingly. If people moan then remove those posts

It's about culture change, not forum change

[Disgrace]

It might also be worth re-ordering the list of forums. TNF is the second most active forum yet third from bottom in the list, behind even Racing Simulators.

[PlatenGlass]

I also find it strange that website feedback is top while we're at it.

[DCapps]

It's about culture change, not forum change

 

As the person responsible for the creation and the first moderator of TNF back in November, 1999, this comment best probably touches on the real issue at hand. The Nostalgia Forum, despite its name (I did not choose it, by the way), was actually intended to be The Motor Sport History Forum, but that did not turn as intended for a variety of reasons, as things often go awry whatever one's intentions or notions might have been. There is a significant difference between nostalgia and history, of course. Needless to say, the former won out, but such is life. The Racing -- now Readers' -- Comments Forum has always been very a active, vibrant, and even volatile at times forum, definitely and deservedly the centerpiece of the Bulletin Board. One might pick any of range of various metaphors or analogies, but for any number of reasons the audiences and the participants of TNF and The RC tend to be rather different, thanks to the interests and demographics of the two communities. That said, there are some commonalities that tend to get overlooked, the most important and primary one being an interest in motor sport. I would suggest that this often gets lost in the shuffle.

 

There seems to be something of a quandary as to how to deal with the gap between what is considered as being current and what should be consigned to being nostalgia. I am afraid that we historians aren't much help on this, given that we tend to be a bit inconsistent at times as well as tending to shy away from fixed parameters as to what is Now and what is Then. Generally, we tend to look at the context of the matter and whether we can begin to develop our initial interpretations of that matter, which are subject to further re-interpretation or revision as time passes and we reexamine the context and so forth. In other words, there is a gap between the Now and Then of historians, which in the scholarly world tends to be filled by journalists, social scientists, and so on. I think you get the picture.

 

So, how to bridge the gap between what is on The RC and what is on TNF? Although I have had previous thoughts on this issue, it struck me today -- thanks to a topic I was researching and a discussion that I came across regarding it -- that perhaps everyone should, as we say in the Rangers, Take a Knee, that is stop for a moment. I suggest that we simply let things work themselves out between the two fora, with this suggesting that both communities develop a sense of amity that seems to have vanished or at least become greatly diminished both here and elsewhere. Easy to say, but hard to do, of course, but definitely worth the effort, I would suggest, in the long run. I think that what people here have in common, their interest in motor sport, should, and will, prevail. There are lots of Good People on both fora and they have far more in common than they tend to realize.

 

Postscript: Not a bad idea to rearrange the listings on the Bulletin Board, placing The RC first and TNF second.

Edited by DCapps, 02 February 2018 - 04:33.

[Radoye]

My $0.02:

 

For those who want Button, Montoya, Mansell, Piquet, Schumacher, Massa, Prost, Senna and the gang to live in TNF, how do you suggest they be encouraged to do so? Because right now, they mostly live nowhere. There *are* the occasional threads, but they're rare.

 

Button, Montoya, Massa are all still actively competing in high level racing series, albeit not in F1, so i'd still consider them current. Unless RC forum is strictly F1, which it is not, i don't see why they shouldn't be discussed there even in the context of their former F1 careers.

 

The others listed are long retired from any major league racing, by their own will or by other causes, and thus are now part of the motorsport history. As such, their place is in the TNF.

[discover23]

Montoya vs Kimi round 2 .. bring it on!
Alonso vs Lewis round 2. Oh wait. Why stop at 2006 when 2007 was all full of drama for which new information has risen from the ashes..some ex mclaren enginneer writing something in a book very recently.

Edited by discover23, 27 February 2018 - 00:40.

[SophieB]

My $0.02:

 

 

Button, Montoya, Massa are all still actively competing in high level racing series, albeit not in F1, so i'd still consider them current. Unless RC forum is strictly F1, which it is not, i don't see why they shouldn't be discussed there even in the context of their former F1 careers.

 

The others listed are long retired from any major league racing, by their own will or by other causes, and thus are now part of the motorsport history. As such, their place is in the TNF.

 

By this measure, Button's contract disputes with BAR from 2004 would count as current business in RC? I'm not saying it shouldn't (necessarily), I'm just saying I don't think everyone would automatically see it like that.

[as65p]

Alonso vs Lewis round 2. Oh wait. Why stop at 2006 when 2007 was all full of drama for which new information has risen from the ashes..some ex mclaren enginneer writing something in a book very recently.

 

Don't get your hopes up. Certain things will remain "taboo" here, sub forum or not.

[RSNS]

I would welcome such a move. It is true that TNF members are not interested in the kind of talk one would get, say, by comparing the careers of Prost and Senna. Perhaps this is a problem of TNF members, but the group is formed and I feel it will be difficult and perhaps detrimental to its activity to try to change its global attitude.

 

It is also true that these discussions are somewhat out of place in RC. Each time a issue about racing about 20 years ago pops up someone is sure to ask for the thread to be moved to TNF.

 

It would be good to create a new area and, who knows, promote the acquisition of some more knowledge about that period. Anyway, I would be visiting often.

Edited by RSNS, 18 March 2018 - 01:53.

[sopa]

Yeah, current TNF is a bit too hard-core for my taste. I like history, but not to such an extent to discuss, what is the dog's name of the driver, who finished 9th in a 1962 Paraguayan Grand Prix in Formula 5000, lol.

 

I'd propose a "Modern Racing History" forum from early-to-mid-80's till late 2000's. I mean 10 years ago is already a long time ago, frankly - history, even if it doesn't feel like that? 

 

It should be easily connected to the current 'Racing Comments' forum though, so that for most users it's very visible and they would easily go there. If it is 'somewhere else', it can get easily forgotten, like I personally most of the time don't think of the existence of anything else besides this RC subforum.

[Borko]

Yeah, current TNF is a bit too hard-core for my taste. I like history, but not to such an extent to discuss, what is the dog's name of the driver, who finished 9th in a 1962 Paraguayan Grand Prix in Formula 5000, lol.

 

I'd propose a "Modern Racing History" forum from early-to-mid-80's till late 2000's. I mean 10 years ago is already a long time ago, frankly - history, even if it doesn't feel like that? 

 

It should be easily connected to the current 'Racing Comments' forum though, so that for most users it's very visible and they would easily go there. If it is 'somewhere else', it can get easily forgotten, like I personally most of the time don't think of the existence of anything else besides this RC subforum.

Spot on.

[Sterzo]

Yeah, current TNF is a bit too hard-core for my taste. I like history, but not to such an extent to discuss, what is the dog's name of the driver, who finished 9th in a 1962 Paraguayan Grand Prix in Formula 5000, lol.

 

OK, we've waited long enough. What was the dog's name?

 

And on topic: why not start a few threads about ten or twenty years ago within Racing Comments, and see what the interest is? If no-one posts then maybe a new sub-forum wouldn't help.

[Risil]

First of all, thank you for your comments, criticism and advice. We've considered the results of the open threads in RC and TNF and decided that we're going to move ahead carefully along familiar tracks. From now on we will welcome threads about the last 20 years or so of racing right here in the main Racing Comments forum. No new subforum.

 

We're aware that posting about the past in this way has never been explicitly banned, and indeed when such threads have appeared in Racing Comments they've mostly been tolerated. However, we thought it would be useful to clarify this position in the hope of encouraging such topics to be created and discussed.

 

We've agreed on "last 20 years or so" as a deliberately fuzzy sort of boundary. Please think of it more as a guide than a clear-cut rule. As always, the guiding questions when starting a thread should be "Will RC readers be interested in discussing this?", "Will RC readers want to read what I've got to share?"

 

At this point I should mention that Autosport also hosts The Nostalgia Forum (or TNF), a more historically-minded and deliberative forum that's exclusively dedicated to discussion of motor racing past. If you have a historical question you'd like answered or a research interest you want to dive into, you will get a better discussion in there. If you want to poll the Racing Comments regulars on whether Nigel Mansell's Indycar career was a success or disappointment, or who was the standout performer of the 2009 F1 season, then be our guest and open a thread in RC.

 

If you look at the RC House Rules at the top of the forum, you'll see that this is now part of the official RC rules. Happy posting!

 

p.s. Funny how the last comment turns out to be what we're proposing to do. Next time we'll just ring Sterzo...

[pacificquay]

Mildly amused that one of the examples of something in the "last 20 years or so" is Mansell's Indycar career which started 25 years ago ;)

 

That said, this seems to be a sensible solution, albeit more still needs to be done to drive traffic and fresh blood into TNF. One proposal which seemed a good one but hasn't been implemented was to reorder the list of forums on the main page to bring TNF up immediately below racing comments...

[DS27]

There's a nostalgia forum? I have been coming here all these years and never even knew. This is probably a result of lack of social media skills and being generally unobservant....

[Zmeej]

Waaaaaaay late, my own drei Groschen...

Funny, kinda like the idea as proposed, and the fact that its proferring prompted comments from more long-standing members than it did newbies might have been in its favour.

Too bad they all opposed it.

Edited by Zmeej, 05 August 2018 - 00:49.

[DeKnyff]

Yeah, current TNF is a bit too hard-core for my taste. I like history, but not to such an extent to discuss, what is the dog's name of the driver, who finished 9th in a 1962 Paraguayan Grand Prix in Formula 5000, lol.

I'd propose a "Modern Racing History" forum from early-to-mid-80's till late 2000's. I mean 10 years ago is already a long time ago, frankly - history, even if it doesn't feel like that?

It should be easily connected to the current 'Racing Comments' forum though, so that for most users it's very visible and they would easily go there. If it is 'somewhere else', it can get easily forgotten, like I personally most of the time don't think of the existence of anything else besides this RC subforum.

I really love TNF. Not posting there for fear of not being knowledgeable enough, though.