Let me give a little background about this site.
Chevycamaro.com first came to life as one of many vanity email addresses. Before I owned it, it was just a portal site, let's say chevyamaro.com had a colorful past.
As I was an auto mechanic, Camaro owners would email me questions about their cars. I responded back as most questions were easy. I tried to answer all the emails the best I could, but in time this became overwhelming. I needed to find a way to make it easier and faster. I picked up on the idea of people submitting their questions online, and then all I had to do was reply instead of sending emails back and forth.
This forum came online December 4th 2002. I never really planned for it to become anything big, as there were many other automotive forums. However I felt a need to answers ones questions in great detail and with the understanding that it needed to be in plain English. I believed this helped the person asking as well as the person reading.
I obtain some free forum software (phpBB) and the forum chevycamaro/forum was born. Others then became members and all of the sudden, I'd say within 12 months, this site started growing. I mean really growing, at it's height it was almost 500 hits a day and in no time hit the 50,000 mark of total hits. There were members starting to come from another Camaro site, A few wanted to become MODs. As I remember it, a few new members stated chevycamaro was more user friendly, or something like that.
On one of our original backups I noted: "Our users have posted a total of 1434 articles
We have 303 registered users"
Well you know what a pain it can be to reply to a simple question on a forum and then wait until the admin approves you, well I never really liked doing that just to reply to a simple question. So I made it easy for folks to ask and answer questions. You just registered yourself and then posted. Then all the sudden repeated hacks. The problem was the forum used a format called phpBB and it was always getting hacked. Since I knew little of backing up, a lot of forum material was lost. Then I just started my own automotive repair shop and chevycamaro was put on the back burner for all these years.
In the meantime, I lent the name out and redirected chevycamaro to another Camaro site. You may know which site. Within no time, that site then took off. It's ratings doubled. About two years later I asked the owner of other site if they wanted to provide a little compensation to keep chevycamaro directed to their site. Hmm... Not even a thank you.
Well I sold the shop and have a little time on my hands. Now seems a good time to get this site back online. Chevycamaro came back online with a different forum format called SMF. This was around the middle of Jan 2008. So far, no real hacks and backups are at least once a week now. In February using "chevy camaro" as the search words we were at number 79 on Google. Just today we are number 19 on Google and number 9 on Yahoo. Before this site went down we were listed at number 2 on Google, just behind
www.chevy-camaro.comSomehow I obtain:
chevycamaro.com
chevycamaro.net
chevycamaro.org
chevycamaro.biz
chevycamaro.US
chevycamaro.info
chevy.camaro.name
Chevy-Camaro.US
and
Chevy-Camaro.com
No one wanted to use Chevy-Camaro.com as an email address, so I let it go. A fellow named Sean picked it up and developed it into a great site. Sean is real cool and has really done a fine job on his site.
