New Rat Rod Talk forum at CHR!

[Bob Parmenter]

Yet another welcome sign of continued growth of the site.

As a self professed Keeper Of Odd Knowledge it might be interesting to point out a few things . A site like this doesn't just happen. It's human nature to think of something like this as always being like this. (was I the only 3 year old who thought his parents were always adults?) Like most things of value it starts as an idea and grows from there. Brent of course deserves all the credit for starting the site. In his Christmas letter he noted we have in excess of 16000 members now. But he didn't carry the water alone. Just for fun I took a look at the members roster. If you sort by "date joined" you'll note that on pages 533-544 there're some 300 names representing the total of membership for the first year. Though not the largest in numbers of posts, many of those folks paved the way for the future growth of CHR. In those days before search engine optimization, and the referral potential we enjoy today, it was the pioneering members who greeted each new member with whatever info they could share. I noticed that someone said it's nice to see that CHR "now" opens for rat rods. In my experience it has always been open.......................for all types of enthusiasts. Okay, make that enthusiasts who don't mind playing well with others. In those early days of maybe gaining only one member per day (average) we rarely had one of the "my purpose in life is to piss people off" types. Nowadays we get a few more, but happily they're still an extremely small number. Again, that's life. They nearly always filter themselves out, with rare intervention from moderators. Hopefully it will remain so.

A couple examples of what I mean are from page 533. Each of these guys has less than 1000 posts, but both still contribute today. They choose not to do what some might consider frivolous posts, just good hot rod knowledge sharing. Weeg still makes meaningful suggestions from time to time, sharing his many years of experience. For probably the first three years of this site's existance, our go to (and only) guy with the day in and day out hands on experience in automotive painting is Spraytech. Of course I'm leaving out a number of others for the sake of brevity. And this isn't meant to slight the contributions of others who have come along since who also contribute daily to the ebb and flow of club interaction.

When Brent started this there was no guarantee it would take off. Afterall, there are a lot of other rod oriented sites out there. But over time we've weathered good times, sadly a couple bad, and progressed as "old blood" and new have meshed and grown together. There's no reason it can't continue as long as no one poisons the well.