jason’s blog

Some sites are built on features, some on content, but a rare few are built on their community. Audiworld was one such site. Having used the forums to help purchase, maintain and eventually sell it – it’s sad to see their new owners not value their community. What happened yesterday was such a simple technical change – they moved from an old, depracated forum software to the industry-standard vbulletin. However, all did not go smoothly – posts were truncated, the format was not kept, and what ended up existing after the conversion was just-another-vbulletin-forum.

The community revolted, and quickly a new forum was set up and the core userbase moved over. Quattroworld now maintains the look-and-feel of the original forums, and a large userbase has already created accounts and started posting. One forum is already filled with 16 pages of posts in as many hours.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I highly doubt the Audiworld owners, Internet Brands, will back down. Will the hardcore userbase be enough to drive their revenue down enough that they will notice? Will quattroworld be successful or just a niche forum for a very small audience…and eventually disappear over time. It will be interesting to watch.

For now, there’s a lot of hate on Audiworld. The new owners that forced the change, the loss of years of data that the community contributed to, a backlash from some of their moderators, all add up to quite a mess. It’s even been talked about in the niche auto press.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Autos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.