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Jeebus...how did I ever miss this thread??

NABR was AWESOME back in the day. No, not for everyone, but it was where a lot of people who fueled this industry at the time, bounced ideas around with peers who could be trusted to NOT screw them afterwards. There was a code of conduct that you adhered to, and if you didn't, you got booted---it didn't matter WHO you were. Many people who thought that they were beyond reproach found out quickly that if you were shady--you were gone. It didn't matter who you THINK you were. People who were thought to be a "DSM God" by the masses were booted out the door after being found guilty of F&^%ery.

It was ruled with an iron fist, and BS wasn't tolerated. I can see why in today's world it can be seen as "mean" or "toxic". There was no coddling, there was no "Oh, here's the answer to your question that took you 5x longer to type out as a post than it would have taken you to type "how do I "X" on "Y"" on Google with 10K+ results".

That said, a lot of people who were long-time, core members on there also (to this day) can call on one another at 9pm on a Sunday night after not being in contact with one another in years, and BS as if they were still great friends.

No, it wasn't for everyone, but it was fantastic for many years.

The downfall was both the OG members leaving the market segment, and the attempt at integrating new blood into the forum to keep it alive. Towards the end, there was a drive by the admins to open up membership, and it didn't work out well as a lot of the newer members couldn't toe the line, and quickly got booted.

Chris now has probably the closest thing that exists today, in comparison to the black hole for information that is social media. Be thankful that he's "a benevolent god" in this realm, and keep supporting this site.

On a side note, I went out with the guy who has the NABR data a couple of months ago while he was in the area. I'm not sure that releasing that data from the restricted forums would be possible (it wasn't just "tech", but a lot of personal stuff as well, between members). It's been a bit, so I should probably reach out to him again in the near future and see if there's even a chance some of that stuff can be used in an archive once pruned. It's sad to see all of the good info go to waste entirely, but I'm not sure it's possible to prune out the things that were shared in confidence at the time.
 
> I’d like to sincerely thank you for your contributions here.

Thanks.

It’s rare to hear that expressed.

> people not sharing ideas and solutions as if those concepts will somehow become watered down or taken for granted.

That’s not what was going on in the NABR inner circle.

The problem NABR solved was threefold:

The first is that as soon as you get any sort of success, people automatically start f***ing with you.

Like, I had my own personal troll who followed me around from site to site, taking shots and trying to represent himself as an expert in my field. This very site made him a “wiseman”, FFS, when he couldn’t be trusted with anything more technical than a bicycle pump. This dude set out to chase me off the Internet, and you know what? It mostly worked. At NABR, when I got called out, I could trust that I had overlooked something from a technical perspective, and I could either hit the books or do an experiment to either prove I was right, or learn I was wrong - the point being, I didn’t need to worry about being trolled for the sake of trolling. And vice versa, if I had the data to prove a point, I knew it would be taken seriously, because nobody there had some bullshit vendetta and so had to automatically gainsay everything I posted.

It was such a *break* to be able to stand on the merits of the discussion alone. I had already proven myself to get in, that was no longer an issue. Dealing with that moron was *exhausting*.

The second was that a lot of guys on NABR were vendors, and copying/fraud was a real concern. There were products developed on NABR that were copied within *weeks* of release, so you only had a month or two to recoup your R&D costs and get yourself established before the ripoffs started. So it’s understandable that they wanted to keep the sausage-making while the thing was in development under wraps.

And the third was quality and trust. Everyone there had a literal track record to point to. They were known entities. You could back down your skepticism a little, and you could take them at their word - or the “NABR Mafia” would take action (and some guys who did shady shit got punted).

It’s hard to express how much stress was relieved when you didn’t have to worry about being trolled, scammed, or if the guy talking to you put up a good front but had the technical skills of a slime mold.

And that’s not to say that NABR was a giant circle of love - it was an Internet forum, we fought all the time (especially over politics) - but you could be yourself, without the public face mask, and trust that everyone else was doing the same.

But like the exclusivity both provided the value and resulted in the downfall, the openess of forums like this place are both the value and the Achilles’ heel. The fact that it is wide open means it has the potential for longevity, as there are always new members. But because there’s no way to legislate quality or vet expertise, it’s impossible to generate much more quality than the mean level of knowledge and experience - and there’s precious little reason for those on the right side of the curve to hang out, as they gain very little, but are subjected to so much harassment.

Look at how many posts in this thread are people who were compelled to throw rocks at a forum that they weren’t even part of and which was effectively dead a decade ago.

I generally don’t participate in forums any longer. If I want to put info out, I’ll write a book or make a YouTube video. You can yell at my book all you like (and I don’t have to hear it, and I already got paid) and on the video, I can delete bullshit comments with impunity (although I haven’t had to do that yet, other than spam.)
Your troll was likely my troll as well, too many coincidences.
 
Haha, tuners was completely different back then, so was life

Dawn of being connected with everyone and no one, so we all found entertainment in our communities. Off topic sections would link you into a different world you didn't know about. At one point I think the appearance/interior section on this site was deleted because every day some one would ask what body kit they would get. Every one would get upset when some one posted they had a 98 eclipse and needed help but never specified 4g63 or 420a

These (vehicle) platforms are dead. Im sure these same sort of high tech sharing and stealing happens in the new platforms, the gtr' etc. Focus goes where attention goes, attention goes where the money goes
 
These (vehicle) platforms are dead. Im sure these same sort of high tech sharing and stealing happens in the new platforms, the gtr' etc. Focus goes where attention goes, attention goes where the money goes
Not only that, but the birth of social media networks has completely changed the idea of what an online "community" actually is. The "online community" as we knew it 15-20 years ago is gone - it has shifted into a bunch of scattered groups on various social networks and some remaining forums like this that have survived. It's nearly impossible to create a strong, centralized online community these days, where you can implement and uphold standards and create the same type of camaraderie as we used to see at a larger scale. It still exists here and there, but it's way different now. It's all part of a big marketing machine now, where you have to sift through a bunch of fluff to get the good stuff - wait, I guess in some ways it's still like the old days. 😁
 
Reminds me of something read in the early 2000's about going through a paradigm shift from people being the consumer to being the product. Everything changed when we were no longer the consumer.
 
Not only that, but the birth of social media networks has completely changed the idea of what an online "community" actually is. The "online community" as we knew it 15-20 years ago is gone - it has shifted into a bunch of scattered groups on various social networks and some remaining forums like this that have survived. It's nearly impossible to create a strong, centralized online community these days, where you can implement and uphold standards and create the same type of camaraderie as we used to see at a larger scale. It still exists here and there, but it's way different now. It's all part of a big marketing machine now, where you have to sift through a bunch of fluff to get the good stuff - wait, I guess in some ways it's still like the old days. 😁


Its not just social media, internet churn destroys most data

For example, sources of information and data become useless links. News outlets and media outlets have short term memory. If you try to google an event or topic from a few years ago (lets say a house catches fire in your neighborhood) the story is deleted shortly after its ability to be new news becomes irrelevant

Wikipedia sources and articles now largely have to stand on their own a information as their links become harder to find and purged from internet data churn.
 
Its not just social media, internet churn destroys most data

For example, sources of information and data become useless links. News outlets and media outlets have short term memory. If you try to google an event or topic from a few years ago (lets say a house catches fire in your neighborhood) the story is deleted shortly after its ability to be new news becomes irrelevant

Wikipedia sources and articles now largely have to stand on their own a information as their links become harder to find and purged from internet data churn.
This is true. Websites disappear every day when the people who created them forget about them or lose interest in maintaining them. And the ones that don't disappear will sometimes purge content when they do a redesign or just arbitrarily delete content to save disk space, since disk space costs money. Remember when content was largely static, and could easily be referenced?

Strangely enough, I recently came across a link to our site from some Angelfire site that someone posted and likely forgot about long ago. Didn't even know Angelfire was still around. I know Geocities is gone.
 
This is true. Websites disappear every day when the people who created them forget about them or lose interest in maintaining them. And the ones that don't disappear will sometimes purge content when they do a redesign or just arbitrarily delete content to save disk space, since disk space costs money. Remember when content was largely static, and could easily be referenced?

Strangely enough, I recently came across a link to our site from some Angelfire site that someone posted and likely forgot about long ago. Didn't even know Angelfire was still around. I know Geocities is gone.
Eventually vfaq is going to go down, and then users searching this forum will have to start over with tech articles. A few of the vfaq site links were geocities or angelfire
 
Eventually vfaq is going to go down, and then users searching this forum will have to start over with tech articles. A few of the vfaq site links were geocities or angelfire
Wish we could get some members here to recreate some of the articles that the VFAQ links to here in the Tech Articles section, proactively, with the article owner's permission of course. Why wait for them to disappear?
 
Wish we could get some members here to recreate some of the articles that the VFAQ links to here in the Tech Articles section, proactively, with the article owner's permission of course. Why wait for them to disappear?
A part of me says we should just start archiving what's there and then work on permission/recreation in case it disappears, as it's probably on borrowed time at this point.

Funny side note, I bought the "new logo" NABR stickers for my car eons ago when the forums were still a thing, but I've still got the old one on the car. I was certainly nobody noteworthy during my time there, but it was easy to learn a lot. Today with Grammarly, maybe more people would've survived the hazing?

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A part of me says we should just start archiving what's there and then work on permission/recreation in case it disappears, as it's probably on borrowed time at this point.
When you say archiving what's there, but not recreate it, what do you mean exactly? How would we archive it without recreating it? My thought is we'd work on recreating certain articles and posting them here, with permission, so that if they disappear, we wouldn't have missed the opportunity to recreate them.
 
Just open the individual pages outside of the frame, save them along with all their images, and then worry about migrating the data/pictures later- Basically, do a quick and dirty so if you had just to put up a mirror of the original site, you'd have all the content to do so (you could even keep the original frame, assuming that the paths are relative and not full.

Once that's all archived on a machine somewhere, moving it into a howto article here (or whatnot) is basically a copypasta data entry gig (which you could do from the original source, my thinking is about ensuring the time required to do that process doesn't entail more of the existing articles falling off the internet in the meantime).
 
Just open the individual pages outside of the frame, save them along with all their images, and then worry about migrating the data/pictures later- Basically, do a quick and dirty so if you had just to put up a mirror of the original site, you'd have all the content to do so (you could even keep the original frame, assuming that the paths are relative and not full.

Once that's all archived on a machine somewhere, moving it into a howto article here (or whatnot) is basically a copypasta data entry gig (which you could do from the original source, my thinking is about ensuring the time required to do that process doesn't entail more of the existing articles falling off the internet in the meantime).
Gotcha. That would be easy to do in terms of saving the pages. Posting them here later might be a little tricky with the formatting, but it's doable. So who's interested in doing that? Maybe we can save the pages to Google Drive or something, so that it doesn't get lost on someone's laptop.
 
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