The AEVA national council has been deliberating about moving this forum into the main AEVA website for a couple of years now. The main motivation behind this is for consistency of logins and passwords. Currently we have two online presences - this forum and the main site. Both sites call for different log ins and passwords. A secondary motivation is so that the main website can be seamlessly linked to the forum, highlighting interesting articles, events or conversions, while also allowing discussion to take place thereafter. How much interesting content winds up here when it could equally inform the punters on the main website?
The newly integrated forum would still be accessible to the casual web browser. They would be free to read and post in the forum.
There has also been open discussion about making it a "closed shop" where only financial members of the AEVA can post. This is not current AEVA policy, nor is it expected to become policy, without extensive consultation and a vote by all forum users, AEVA members or otherwise. So put your pitchforks down!

Having a high quality web presence is extremely important for any organisation, especially one such as ours. We don't even have a twitter account or a YouTube channel, and if we do, no-one knows where to find it. Hell, our website doesn't even contain any information about electric vehicles! There area few of us who regularly put content up on the main site, but like all volunteers we can't do everything all the time.
It goes to the heart of what AEVA hopes to achieve. Are we an old man's tyre-kicking tea party or are we a credible force for changing the way Australia moves itself? Are we an enthusiasts club or a policy-directing association? Getting our outward appearance right is critical to achieving the change we want to see, and a high quality on-line presence is a large part of it.
So, if we can preserve the content of this forum and integrate it with the main site as seamlessly as possible, why, or why not?