Inliners International Forums General Discussion Bench racing Inliners Website and Bulletin Board

This is not a shot at Tim. He is doing a great job and he has my total support.


Our search engine sucks. I can go to the HAMB and type in "chevy 153" and get 16 pages of related posts. Here I get 24 pages that are mostly what I get when I click on "Active Topics" If I go to the advanced search it just gets more confusing with mostly the same results. If someone come here looking for information it had better be something that was posted in the past week. I don't want to be told how to use our search feature I want a search feature that I can use.
Several years ago there was a problem because searches crashed the board or something and we had to use the "newer than -older than" boxes. I haven't been able to find old posts sense. Having been here a while I can find some old posts by thinking of who would have posted on a subject or would have responded to it and doing a search of their posts. If you don't know us that doesn't work well.
To me this is an obvious reason new people don't hang out here. There are LOTS of younger than us folks out there with old inlines. If one goes to the HAMB and searches "chevy 216" he gets 16 pages that start out with posts about 216 issues. The same search here gets 24 pages that I quit looking at on page 5 because there was nothing about a 216 yet. Why come back here? It has to be easy. With the same search on Google the 4th hit is the HAMB. Stovebolt shows up twice before our first hit on page 2, the only one in the first ten pages. It is a question about what a 216 is worth.
I'm only saying that we need to make the wealth of information here easily accessible. I know there is a contingent in our club that are against "giving away" information to anyone, especially nonmembers. Some of them see it as lost book sales and some are just pompous old farts who want their knowledge scattered with their ashes. No one is going to join a club before they see a benefit for themselves. These guys will drag the club into their graves with them. The information if in print or steel will out last them. It will only be acquired from another source. Anyone who dies with information others need will not be missed for long. When we drink a toast to your memory we will not be crying.