If you watch Bangers & Cash Restoring Classics on Thursday 21st November at 8:00, you will see my yellow Coupe Turbo Plus at Autosportivo in Bedford. They were restoring a Fiat Cinquecento for the show and my car was there waiting to be trailered down to me as I'd just bought it. U Channel HD. Don't miss it!

What are the lads like in real life ?

They seem clued up, but turned up to 11

Paul

I only met Ant, the owner. He's a nice enough guy and easy to get on with. They have a huge stock of used parts for the coupe.

Thanks Monty

They sell the parts in ebay

Paul

I've been blocked on their social media for mentioning Joe's collection of Coupés. Great bunch, lol

Viewed from a business perspective social media is just another sales channel. Why would you allow someone to promote a competitors business?

I think that's a disgusting, old school attitude, and one of the key problems with the Coupé 'scene" that led to the state it's now in.

I've had work carried out by PowerItalia, FCSS and FCPerformance many times over the years, and all have spoken highly of eachother. Motormech never seemed to get involved with the old forum wars either, and both Roger and Joe spoke of them without any sort of ill feeling too.

It doesn't sit right with me that Autosportivo seem to promote themselves as this Coupé specialist (I'm sure they are BTW) while completely ignoring all the history, specialists and pioneering work that has taken place in the UK Coupé scene.

To publically deny all knowledge of any other specialists is absurd. It's a shame as their channel could have injected some life into the car's following again. Feels like a big miss to me.

I don't disagree with you in principal but not speaking badly of someone is a different kettle of fish to allowing your marketing effort to be used to the commercial benefit of another business. Business is business as 'they' say.

I think this is where the forum scores; the participating parties have no commercial interest or if they do it is declared, well understood and the forum remains a non profit seeking entity.

I'd agree, if the cars we were talking about were a lucrative money maker. As it is, I'd like to think most of the 'specialists' look after these cars do so out of passion for them. It just doesn't need to be so cut throat and I really don't think posts on social media that mention other garages by name of the owner, rather than a direct reference to the garage (I did this on purpose) will cause any real harm. The other thing is, these guys are (to my knowledge) carrying out basic maintenance and mods to Coupés. They can't map them and I doubt they'd be interested in nut and bolt restorations, or major projects taking months and months of ramp/garage time so none of the other specialists are 'competition'. Keeping them on the road and the following for them is a group effort, like it or not. What's that about a rising tide lifting all boats? Maybe I'm just naive...



I think this is what killed the forum. How many of the old 'tuner' threads were lost due to bans or removed content? There were dozens of excellent threads covering all sorts of discussions around tuning engines, 4wd conversions, suspension components from other cars etc. It was a shame when it all got so toxic but it's an even bigger shame that a lot of it was nuked to 'protect the forum'... and now it's stone dead.

Sorry Trappy, but I have to disagree with your statement that "old tuner threads' were lost due to bans or removed content.

The "Tuning " part of the forum contains over 8600 individual threads going back to 2005.

The " Track days" area goes back to 2011 with 183 threads, and the "Rolling road " section comprises 361 threads showing from 2007.

The stuff that was "nuked" was largely those bun fights in the now defunct Traders area where followers could not accept that their chosen specialist may not have been infallible.

There were of course some people who were banned for such things as scamming other members and for simply being totally obnoxious and refusing to abide by the standards required of forum members.

Quite apart from that, the demographics have changed due to the coupe no longer being the cheap, disposible means of reaching 150 "leptons" on " my private road", other cars have taken over that role.

The few coupes that remain are generally cherished by their owners, whether they are kept standard or modified to the owners particular needs. Both are equally valid.

Facebook has rather taken over the instant and ephemeral needs of people and forums the stuff that people need to refer to not just right away but months and years in the future.

Edit Right now there are 302 guests on the forum

Money can be made in surprising places. In India there used to be a situation akin to mafia wars over who got to collect the "night soil" read shit, from the city housing domestic toilets! I believe there is a saying in the north of England - "where there's muck, there's brass" If one has a large collection of used vehicles bought for comparative peanuts and the vehicles then become sought after... I'm not saying that is what they have done but it is one possibility.

There is a forum user on here that stated their wife worked another couple of years rather than take retirement so as to fund a restoration of his Coupe by a 'specialist'. I hope the specialist was passionate in his work.

By 'tuner threads' I was referring to the Traders sections - I couldn't even remember what it was called it was so long ago! There were a lot of really good threads in there that detailed a lot of the pioneering work that was taking place at the time. A lot of it is still referred to in other sections but with every now banned member's name listed as 'Anonymous', it's impossible to search within an individual's posts to dig deeper. It is a great loss whichever way you look at it, especially for someone like myself who is still looking to modify my car further, and a lot of the leg work that was done back then would be incredibly useful.



You can't seriously believe we have 312 guests against 4 registered members online right now?

"Anonymous" does not mean a member was banned.

The intoduction of GDPR in 2018 meant that we had to remove inactive users.

That is an ongoing thing: users who have not logged onto the forum for 3 years are deleted. The next cull will take place at the beginning of January 2015.

The posts of these ex-users are not deleted: they stay intact in their respective threads and are identified as being posted by "anonymous"


Yes I can, the forum software does the counting. Right now there are 1 registered members 604 guests, and 1 spider. on the forum.

edit You have a pm Trappy.

I've repeatedly requested my old account here be deleted (twice to nukemydata@fiatcoupeclub.org , both ignored) and yet the old posts are still visible with my old username intact, just with "Unregistered" below it.

Is there really a way to have it properly deleted and the username globally changed to "anonymous" ?

Apologies, I wasn't aware that nukemydata@fiatcoupeclub.org actually existed, or I would have investigated further.

PeteP, can we do anything further with this?

It's on the forum rules page linked on every page:
https://www.fiatcoupeclub.org/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/boardrules/v/1

I suspect that the difficulty in actually complying with the GDPR within the limitations of the forum software means that it's just ignored, as it seems are messages to nukemydata@fiatcoupeclub.org

Sent you a PM, ExCoupe.