Magic Milestone: S2000 Registry Reaches 1000 Entries
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Did you ever have the opportunity to meet almost 1,000 other people who have the same passion as you? I have. Since I’ve started theS2000 Registry I’ve been lucky enough to meet, albeit on line, nearly 1,000 others who feel the same way and who are thrilled to belong to the S2000 community. More on this later, first a little background and history.
This whole thing got started with a post in the Vintage Forum by my good friend Legal Bill. In “Did our cars meet before we did?” Bill mentioned the Austin Healy Registry and spoke about how nice it is when “sibling” cars are found. Every great car has a Registry and so it occurred to me that we could have one too. I put together a little listing of those 15 or 20 people who had posted in that thread and the Registry was started. I posted a thread in S2000Talk and at the suggestion of my friend Levi (NNY S2K) I also posted a thread in Introductions. In a very short time people from both areas began to participate. Feeling that we should include all the people in the S2000 community, I posted a thread in S2KCA’s S2000Chat forum and Ken (kgf3076) posted a thread on another S2000 fan site. Now we were starting to roll. We now had 5 threads in 3 online sites collecting participants. I’d get home from work every night, add the new participants, sort them and print out the roster. I’d scan it and post it. It was growing fast and scanning the Registry was becoming very awkward. Fortunately, one of the members (I’m sorry that I can’t remember who she was) suggested that we use Google-docs. That suggestion made all the difference in the world, especially with what was about to happen next.
One of the S2KI home page editors, saw the Registry and gave it Home Page exposure. That sort of opened the flood gates. Now we started to get 10 to 15 participants a night, and within no time we were up to 300 participants. The Registry was growing very fast, and was beginning to become valuable. Along the way we got our first set of siblings, then our second, then our third and so on until we now have 16 sets of siblings. Also, somewhere along the way s2k4play set up a database for viewing the Registry which hopefully we’ll be able to use in the future. When all was said and done, all of these great ideas and help from all of these people helped to make the Registry a fun and valuable part of the S2000 community.
Along the way to 1,000 participants, I’ve been amazed and thrilled by some of the comments that I’ve read. It’s not unusual for someone to post their info and add a comment like, “I’m going to keep it forever” or “I love this car” or “thank you for doing this”. What a thrill it was for me to read these comments and know that others in the community felt the same way about the car as I do. What a thrill to read each thank you and know that people were appreciating the Registry. Each night I’d get home and check the threads to see if there were any new participants. Each time I’d see one, I’d cross my fingers and hope that we had a new set of siblings. That didn’t happen too often, but most nights we’d get a new participant or two, and I’d feel good about meeting two more members of the community who feel the same way about the car as I do.
We’ve also been greatly honored by being allowed to include two members of the S2000 community who are no longer with us, RC Ryder in model year 2001 and Smirfs2k05 in model year 2007. Both John and Paul left us at much too young an age, but we are honored to know that they will always be with us in the Registry as members of the S2000 community.
Along the way we’ve also been able to make a connection or two for our members. The one that comes to mind is Ellen (Tadashi). Ellen sold her first S2000 only to discover the buyer as a member of the Registry. Ellen was able to contact the new owner via pm and provide him with some of the papers and stories that belonged to the car. This is the Registry at its best.
Where do we go from here, now that we’ve got 1,000 participants? My estimate is that we now have about 1% of the number of S2000s still on the road. Not a lot, but enough to do some analysis. Just for the fun of it to look at where we live, what colors we drive, which clubs we belong to and any other of the things that tie us together in the community. I’m going to do this over the next few days and post my results sometime next week. But, I hope we don’t stop here. I hope the Registry continues to grow. The more participants we have, the more valuable it becomes. If you haven’t participated yet, please do. I can’t wait to get to 2,000 participants, and I can’t wait to add your info and make another friend.
–ralper
NOTE: S2KI welcomes the opinions of its members on the S2000 and on all topics related to the S. Should you feel the creative urge to pen a few words then by all means do so and PM Energetic, Aashish2, Onehots2k OR GavinSSAP1 OR send us links to what you would like us to write about and we will feature you (or your community) on the S2KI Home Page.