For several years now I have been an active member of RDTiburon.com. It was THE place to go if you wanted technical information about RD platform Hyundai cars (1996-2000 Elantra/1997-2001 Tiburon). Not much off-topic discussion at all. No tolerance for disrespect of the members, and a good moderating/administration team. They encouraged grown-up level conversation and discouraged spoon-feeding of information that had been posted repeatedly before, encouraging new members to search for themselves. It was a place for adults to learn about RDs. It felt like a club, not small or exclusive, but moderately tight-knit.
Traffic was declining for the last couple of years, and tomorrow it will be gone. The owner of HyundaiAftermarket.org is a big supporter of the online Hyundai tuning community, and genuinely wants to have the best site out there, so that there will be at least one REALLY good site. He is going to be merging the databases (members, threads, DIY articles, etc) from RDTiburon.com with Hyundaiaftermarket.org. Effective tomorrow afternoon, former RDTiburon.com members will be members of Hyundaiaftermarket.org if they were not already.
In the beginning was FXtreme.com. The Hyundai Tiburon FX was the inspiration for the site name, and it was THE RD platform message board. I am unreasonably happy to say I was an active member there. Traffic started declining, some of the better members got distracted by life for a while, and bandwidth costs started eating the owner up. It sunk, and was absorbed into Hyundaiaftermarket.org. There was Team Shark Racing, which fell apart while I was living life instead of spending time on the message boards. It was absorbed into Hyundaiaftermarket.org as well. In the interim, HyundaiPerformance got started, turned into the best forum, was bought by some jerk who only wanted to sell ads, and it now sucks and has low traffic. Also in the interim, RDTiburon.com started up. The people at RDTiburon.com were a splinter cell from the larger Hyundai tuners' online message board community.
Tomorrow, the splinter will be grafted back into the community. It is sad in a way, but I think it will probably work out for the best. Still, I will miss it.
*sigh*
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Damn I was a member there and still own my 300+ WHP turbo tiburon that I thought up and built using help from other members on that forum. It will be sorely missed by me and I regret not frequenting it enough in the last few years. Browsing forums will never be as fun or enjoyable to me as it was on RDTiburon. Farewell.
Post a Comment