Blake, first I wanted to pass along kudos on your effort to update the
site. I've built commercial and community sites and appreciate the scale
of your personal effort. A great contribution to the community.
So I hate to pile on in saying it seems unwise to limit the handbook
pages to members. You wrote in your note to Bob published on the VTR
site, "the Maintenance Handbook pages are the [second] most visited
pages on the site and arguably are the most valuable asset...." Limiting
them to members-only should change that quickly.
Unless the Board's goal is cost management, I doubt the memberships
gained will outweight the goodwill lost. As a counter proposal, instead
of a take-away of previously free information which isn't especially
exclusive to the VTR site anyway, how about publishing new and old
articles from 'The Vintage Triumph' on the site? You can limit that to
members if exclusive content is strategically important. But I believe
you'll get greater value from the continued use of the maintenance
articles as a free resource to promote the broader community -- just
like the VTR classifieds.
Steven Newell
Littleton, CO USA
'62 TR4 x 2
member, British Motoring Club of Northern Colorado
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