Here's the text we had for Santa Pod last year
:
The E30 Zone concept was created by Steve on Monday, 24th March, 2003 at 4:01 pm, on the BMW Car magazine forum, (but not yet named).
Quote from original thread:-
"I noticed a lot of E30 forum members recently wanting to post pics on the forum. Thought it might be nice to make a webby where we can host all these pics and have a full spec of the car as well.
I will host anyone's pics but it will be mainly for E30's, if you're interested, send me the pics + specs and I will sort it. I'll also host any tech advice, project car or anything E30 related."
This created a lot of interest, as many members had found a lack of E30 sites in the UK.
Quote from original thread:-
"what you got planned for this website? a decent UK based E30 site would be superb. Its doing my head in trying to read German lol."
Quote from original thread:-
"yeah trying to get as much info as possible, having the same problem finding decent E30 sites also. I'm thinking about calling the site E30 zone"
Voila, the E30 Zone name was decided and the site was starting to take shape with the help of the some of the members of the BMW Car magazine forum, some of which are still active members today : Ant, Ste, Gareth, Lizzie, Duncan (remember notthezone?), M3GTR (Paul —a Zone Racing) and yes, even Jonb !
On Friday, 4th April, 2003, at 11:50 pm, the E30 Zone went live ! Still very basic, but starting to look good and attracting a few more members —a Bootyman, GaryMorgan and Buster to name a few.
It wasn't long before the Zone started to take off with E30 enthusiasts submitting their E30's left, right and centre.
And very soon, the Zone needed a bit more than a few photos and links. By the end of May 2003, the Runboard forum was added.
With the forum now added, the Zone needed a team to run the site —a Ant, M3GTR, Lizzie, Duncan, E30Adam. The forum and site grew rapidly and new team members were taken on —a Bharat and Caesarbob.
It wasn't long before the very basic html site had out-grown itself and a new site was built.
With the new site up and running, the Zone added even more members and the team was finding it very hard to keep up with the information being submitted as everything at the time had to be added manually to the site.
Runboard, the forum hosts, added a few more options to the forum, which made it more workable, and the forum had an overhaul, as did the site, with some new images, colour scheme and new banner .
By this time PeteE30Touring, Iain (HartgeH27), Paul325i, Ian332iSport and Andrew (Demlotcrew) had joined the team.
By December 2004, the Zone was no longer able to support all the members. The forum hosted by Runboard was very limited and unable to cope with the demand from E30 Zone members and the decision was made to completely redesign the Zone.
Keeping in mind the limitations in Runboard in the background, for many months now a new Zone (Version 4) had been under construction, with the team often working on it until the early hours of the morning.
On Monday, 14th February 2005, at 8pm, version 4 of the Zone was released, unknown to members that the new site was coming. This was a whole new world to the E30 Zone, as the new site was dynamic (database driven) with its own PHPBB forum, that had many features we so desperately needed.
With the new site established, new members were joining every day and it wasn't long before the hosts were sending us bandwidth bills in excess of £450 !
A new host was found, as a member of the Zone at the time provided us with a package with unlimited space and bandwidth with his hosting company.
The Zone was going from strength to strength, but on 9th May, 2005, Steve decided to call it a day, and handed the Zone to E30Adam.
Adam restructured the team dropping Lizzie and Paul (M3GTR), and adding Jimbob, Malcolm (Tylerma), Neil (320Touring), Simon and Brian (Moore) to the team.
After a year of running the Zone, Adam stepped down and handed the Zone back to Steve.
At the same time, unknown to us, our current host at the time had sold his hosting company to another company. They still provided us with free hosting, but their server could not handle the Zone and kept turning us off, until another member on the Zone stepped forward and offered us free hosting. This was short lived too, as he also under estimated the size of the Zone.
The Zone was moving home every 6 months. It was a big site to keep moving about but there was light at the end of the tunnel. A long term respectable friend of Iain was approached and he agreed to provide us with a commercial hosting package for the Zone.
A deal was struck and the Zone moved to its new home, and hopefully here we will stay. But it also means that the Zone has to fund itself, as it is no longer viable for the team to put up the money themselves.
After the site had been moved to its new home, Steve split ownership of the Zone between a consortium. This was done to ensure there would always be someone around to make a decision and run the site.
Since then the Zone has been registered as a club, and more moderators have been taken on. E30Mark, Ziggy, Chris-W, d6dph, BillgatesE30, Gortour, old_skool_2002, and Daz (our php coding guru), to cope with the ever growing forum which averages 30 new members every day, 20700 members in the database and 45000 hits a day and attracts its fair share of "larger than life" characters !
The Zone is run by a highly dedicated team who all have full time jobs and help in their spare time for free. Without this team the Zone would not be possible.
Nearly ****ed my degree up too Rog! 
God I love them!!!
