Some of you might have noticed some subtle changes being made around our community. In the last month Lash sold the site, we moved it to a new server and have been working with the team to get organized. HondaJim and Ken have stepped up to help lead the community and are now Administrators. cmurphy84 & marylandmike have joined the team as moderators. I know you all are probably curious as to who I am so I'll first provide an introduction and then move on to our plans for WT.
I started my first forum nearly 9 years ago when I needed to exchange information with people about a project i was working on. I found it fascinating to see how a website could bring together so many like minded people and quickly my other project became 2nd inline to my new hobby of watching the forum grow and providing new feature based on members feedback. As the years passed I stumbled upon various forums that were started by hobbyists who no longer had the time or finances to keep them going and needed a new owner to take care of them. Unfortunately this is very common and thus I began to adopt forums. In 2005 I got sick of my job (if you have ever seen the movie Office Space, that was just like me) and I decided I wanted to try and work with forums full time. Unfortunately forums don't generate that much income so I had to cut my expenses and that's where the journey began.
I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina where living was cheap and I could have a steak and beer for $5. Over the next 4.5 years I traveled around the world working from my laptop and living in places that were cheaper to live then the USA. I made it to 6 continents and had a blast seeing all kinds of crazy and different stuff. I got to go shark cage diving with great whites in South Africa, I rode a motorcycle from the state of Rio De Janiero to Sao Paulo in Brazil, went SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef, had a blast in Thailand (and rode a bit there) and last but not least, I met my wife (she's Brazillian) along the way. Needless to say, looking back, I am really glad I choose to leave and go wonder around the world and work on starting my own small business.
At the current time I don't have a bike. I grew up riding dirt bikes and in college had a little 250cc commuter (which helped my GPA because I could park close to class). I like to ride and have rented bikes in Brazil, Thailand and Uruguay to see those countries. Although I would love to run out and get a bike, we have a 10 month old baby and my wife would worry. I don't want to put that stress on her at this point in our lives. Maybe in a couple years when she's not so sleep deprived I can come home with a surprise!
As I adopted more forums I was able to achieve economies of scale to lower the cost of operating a forum. I work with the members and enable them to lead the communities since often I was not a subject matter expert on the topic of the site. It's my philosophy that I am here to support the mod/admin team who are passionate members from the community. It's my goal to enable them with the tools needed to manage the community so they don't have to sit around waiting for me to take care of things. The team here at Wrist Twisters has been empowered and provided the tools needed to manage the community moving forward.
I know that their was some fallout in the past and some members have moved on. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about the past, we will focus our energy on moving Wrist Twisters forward in a positive direction. We feel the internet is a big enough place for all of our communities to coexist and hope our members will find the community that suits them best to call home. Some of the policies in the past regarding domain name restrictions have been lifted and we hope that others can appreciate our desire to be open. This is not an open invitation to abuse our site with spam but we feel it's important to be less restrictive and coexist in an amicable way.
Our plan for Wrist Twisters is to get back to our roots. jetblast started a site where a certain level of respect was required and plan to move the pendulum back that direction. We plan to develop new features based on your needs. We have already cleaned up a lot of the back-end systems and
added tapatalk per Woody469's request so you can access the site from your iPhone, Android or BlackBerry.
We will not solicit any donations to keep the site alive because the costs to run the website will be paid for by advertisers. Guests will see more ads and members will see less ads. Although many people hate ads this is the best way we can ensure our members that their time and knowledge investment here will not dissolve because we are unable to pay the bills. For those who absolutely hate ads, I would suggest an ad blocker add on to your browser and you won't have to see any at all. Never the less we will work to keep them discreet and never show pop-ups or pop-unders.
I have heard repeatedly calls for the owner to be active. I want to set everyone's expectations upfront that I probably won't be chiming in all that often on the public forums. I do plan to be active working with the mod & admin team to make sure they have the tools to manage the community as they see fit. I am here to be the forum expert and they are here to represent the community and be the subject matter experts. I know this won't resonate well with some but please have faith in the management team as they will be the ones running the community, not me.
I know this announcement was LONG and probably pretty boring. If you read it all, thanks. Just know that we are going to work hard to return Wrist Twisters to the respectful community it once was and we look forward to coexisting with all the other motorcycle communities out there (there is certainly no shortage of them). If WT remains the community you want to call home, great. If not, then we hope your time online will be pleasant no matter where you choose to spend it.
Kind Regards,
Andy R