Welcome to The Parc Fermé. To quote Big Chris in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels…”It’s been emotional”.

It’s here…or at least close enough to go live. I still have details to work out and I am sure some of you may find a few issues that could use my attention as well. Still working on re-branding the podcast and creating all the logos, social media account conversions, analytics, RSS feeds and much more but I reckon it is close enough to open up to the community. Best way to find glitches is let folks trod all over it and find hiccups.

The site isn’t too much different than the old one so hopefully I wasn’t setting huge expectations for dancing ponies, bicycle-riding bears and a unicorn named “Paul”. I did try to clean it up a bit and make it a little more readable. So what are the changes? well, for those of you who care, let me make a few notes for you:

Comments

The change from Formula1blog to The Parc Fermé has been an arduous task. There are still niggles such as the migration tool for the Disqus comment system that we used not working properly meaning that not all of the comments on posts transferred. Had to actually send them a message asking why…no response. I don’t have time to wait for the folks at Discqus to get around to answering me so I went with an all-new comment system and paid $100+ for add-on’s for it so lets hope it is better and works well. It’s called WPDiscuz.

Forums

The Forum didn’t survive either and maybe, given the lack of software development and anti-spam features, that’s a good thing. I’ve added the most-used Forum software to start afresh and it is embedded in the website to take advantage of the spam properties and user registration. If you haven’t registered, you may need to in order to participate in the Forums.

Analytics

I’m still trudging through all of the Google Analytics accounts, properties, Adsense codes and site metrics and while I can’t say that I am 100% sure our site traffic is accurately being tracked, there is a side of me that says that can be worked out over time.

Podcast

We’ve taken a holiday hiatus on the show and also knowing that we have to change the intro’s, outro’s and more, it seemed like a good time to take a break. The good news is that we will still have our Race Review shows, the off-weekend shows and Paul and I are planning an all-new show that I think you may really like. I’ll leave it a bit of a mystery for now but we’re excited about it for sure and we hope you will be too.

New Features

We have also been talking about video and while broadcasting our podcasts live so some folks can see two heads talking doesn’t appeal to us much, we do think we have an idea that may be more interactive with you so stay tuned for that in 2018. We hope we can find the time to make this happen as well as a new podcast series. Cross your fingers, they will take time and that’s something none of us has much of these days.

During our discussions, we thought that offering new features was a good idea and way of engaging you even more. Stay tuned because we may be asking you to help us out. Help us build our own community with us.

Moving On

We are changing. Whether politely asked to or not, we are changing and I think it is a good time to do so and for that reasons, we can actually thank Formula 1 for poking us in this direction.

The fact is, 13 years ago I said I had two choices, make some sort of F1 news site to sell or build a community. I chose the latter and I wish I could say that was because I was smart but in the end, it was a gut feeling.

I wasn’t prepared for what was going to happen and it is all because of you that we have built a fabulous community. A massive community that, quite honestly, I had no idea was this big. I honestly didn’t. It wasn’t until we announced the F1 C&D letter and need to change that we realized just how massive our community is…and global!

Because of that, it is our sole focus with our new change. YOU! You are the sole reason we’re going to keep going and move onward and upward. Everything we do will be focused on community. Engaging you, chatting with you and being the friends we have all become. Newcomers can join that or they can find another home. Choice is theirs. Decorum & Civility is the rule and a collegial community is everything. Anything short of that gets shown the door.

The F1 Fan Underground Community

We didn’t set out to become the F1 fan underground community but that’s what we’ve become and we are excited to continue building the F1 fan speakeasy as it were. The drivers and teams have a community in F1 as do the sponsors and journalists, track owners and paddock club. Now, the new and veteran F1 fans who respect each other and respect civil discussion have a community too. It’s here…at The Parc Fermé. Now let’s have a beer together and discuss Formula 1, shall we? You bought the second round with your Patreon support and now we’ve got the third round my friends, it’s called The Parc Fermé.