What has one and a half million hits a year, four thousand visits each day from three thousand unique visitors, daily posts of over five hundred and has twelve thousand members with a monthly bandwidth of about 200 Gb? Is it a shopping site, betting shop or porn merchant perhaps? No, it’s a forum dedicated to the new Honda Civic.

Civinfo is the creation of Andrew Potts (Pottsy) an easyJet Captain who used to run an engineering company making parts for North Sea oil pipes. He started Civinfo in 2006 because of his frustration with the Honda sponsored blog, never dreaming his forum would be such a success. The only previous experience Andrew had was ten years before when he created a Porsche Boxster website. (Porsche? This captaining lark must be nice work if you can get it).

Andrew explained: “In early 2006, I decided that I might want to buy a new Honda Civic instead of a VW Golf. I searched around for the forum for the new Civic and discovered the only site was a blog, run by a commercial company sponsored by Honda.”

Censored
“It was based on the dreadful Wordpress software (as used by this site you are currently reading), so had very limited searching and categorisation facilities. All submissions were fully moderated, any post was checked before it appeared, which took up to 24 hours and was often censored.”

When Andrew’s new Honda arrived he decided to set up his own Honda Civic forum and installed phpBB, a free forum software package, onto the webspace provided by his ISP.

“I posted a few how-to’s, including one on how to get an MP3 player connected. This got the ball rolling. I really wanted the site to be the opposite of the typical car forum, where the majority of the content is huge flashing signature images, text speak, foul personal arguments and racing boasts. Civinfo got some strict rules about politeness, a conservative look, and a name that reflected the purpose. The formula has worked well to this day.”

Dedication
As Civinfo grew, Andrew had to move to dedicated hosting solutions, currently Vidahost. The forum now runs on the more robust vBulletin which Andrew has modified (and published the improvements) as well as installing others’ modifications to the software. The site uses Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP5 and is also supported by vbSEO, vbCMPS and vbWikiPro.

“Running Civinfo takes about 1 to 3 hours a day, even on holiday. Free wifi in hotels is a good thing though easyJet crews usually end up back at home every night. Finding time to do website stuff on a work day is tricky, so I have a team of 4 voluntary moderators. Between us, and our busy work schedules, we keep the site running, helping people with computer problems, moving threads in the right place, and stopping rule breaks and spam.

“I’ve learnt that to get a site going like this you need content. Stuff that people want to read that has been posted by ‘a member of the public’. This encourages them to post their content, and away it goes. The site needs to be easy to use and have a friendly atmosphere. It is also important to make previously posted content easy to find, so a good search engine and a thread categorisation system really helps.

According to Andrew, the feeling of community at Civinfo is strong. There are regular meetings, and users can pay a small fee for a car window sticker, which also unlocks many community features on the forum (such as a private forum and a chatbox).

What the future holds
Andrew has great plans for the Civinfo: “Some time after the site started, the Civic Type R appeared so I created a section for it. Likewise with other new topics, including the Honda Hybrid, Honda Accord, franchised Honda dealers and other suppliers. The rules on politeness have clearly appealed to many users, since we now (without any effort) have a large number of members who have moved from other more traditional forums.

“I can only conclude that the future holds more of the same steady growth with the aim of making an informative and friendly place to discuss the car.”