The AUSubaru.com.au Forums

Was curious after reading the moderators section tonight.

What is the history behind the BYB / ausubaru? Fouding members etc?

Obviously there is a huge amount of knowlege that has been built up over the years, and we are lucky to have this site, but as a newbie (to the site) with just 30+ posts, would be interesting to learn of the history of those before me (us) who are well into the 1,000s?

sven

Post counts are not a real safe way to identify weather someone knows something or not, remember there are the ones out there that have answered the same question 100 times already and wish the poster had used the search function prior to posting. That said since the last board outage where all data was lost some of those questions wont appear when a serch is done.

As for the history of the BYB/ Ausubaru Messagboard i will leave BYB-01 to field that question.

I heard the data from the last incarnation of the board was actually retrieved, I hope we can access it again one day!

I joined the ezboard around December 2000, have over 5000 posts between it and the new domain, doesn't mean I know anything though - been around soobs for 10+ years which is nothing in the face of the guys like Brett, Dave etc...

I think I was about the 20th member on the ezboard :P

I think I joined at a similar time. If I remember correctly it was mainly brett, grant, ben, dazz.......ummm timb and some guy who called himself bear69. Never met that bloke though.

Ahh, good 'ol bear69. Such a happy fellow. Ben put me onto these guys not long after he found it. I've only had 4 Subarus and 11 years experience to date.

Bear69 wasn't till much later though - post EZBoard days?

I do remember JW from the original EZBoard though.

Roflmao. Those were the days.

how long has the vBulletin boards been goiing/when was the changeover?

2 years ago?

I remember the old EZBoards too, although I only posted a couple of times on there.. in early 2001 both before and after the purchase of my wagon (which I still own)

I was on the EZ boards for a bit. this site goes back 7-8 years at least

I joined about 2 months before EZBoard was retired, was very young, inexperienced and probably irritating.

Since then I have owned 4 MY's, a Sherpa, an L series, a Justy I never managed to collect, and now a my 2001 Outback.

Have done many a conversion, modification, upgrade, engine/gearbox/cv replacement (and spent far more time under a car than I care to remember) mostly aided by the knowledge and assistance of the VERY patient people experts/genius's on here.

I owe many thanks and at least a beer or 2 to a lot of the people who are/were on here and do my best to repay the favours payed to me over the years.

*raises glass* CHEERS TO AUSUBARU/BYB THE INTERNETS GREATEST RESOURCE

Jordan.

History lesson.

I did my computer course back before Windows 2000 was out and I had the website up before that. I don't remember an exact date of when the forums started but it would have been around 1998 or 9. There was only 2 boards to choose from back then. Ours and the the USMB which we had basically copied and set up for Australian users. We ran as "sister" forums for a lot of years.

We started out with ezboard. It ran for quite a few years like that. The BYB web address was about 60 characters long and hosted on the free space you get with a dial up connection.

The ezboard had a donation set up that ran for a few years with the users paying for the cost of ezboard. Eventually we got sick of paying it and I jumped in the "deep end", or so it was then and registered www.thebackyardboys.com and bought some webspace. 25MB back in those days.

We ran some bb code that I downloaded from some where for a while. Then I found YaBB and we ran with that for a few years until we got sick of it being hacked. During this time we did a sponsorship drive and had advertisers paying for the costs of webhosting.

Our webhost then went broke and we lost pretty much all our data for over 12 months. We also lost a lot of regular users. The owner of offroadsubarus used to frequent this board a lot around about then and he pretty much took our design and users and ran with it while we were down.

Stinky put his hand up to set us up with Vbulletin and it has been this since. It now seems very reliable and touch wood we haven't been hacked since.

Sponsors are non-existant now really so all costs are just paid for by me. I have left their banners at the top just so we have some thing different to look at now and then.

Perhaps we should do a sponsorship drive and raise some cash to spend on the site. If we could get $1000 or so together we should be able to get some thing pretty decent put together.

Even just fixing the Tech manual would be a start.

Hit wise we used to have a grand total of 15-20 per day originally. Last month we had 1,112,250 hits. 37075 hits per day. That is down a lot on what the board used to get before the last crash.

We have 613391.31MB of web space left to play with. In other words plenty of space to make it bigger and better.

AUS ubaru came about as a name to get more/different users to come and play. It is one word, pronounced the way I have typed it. Purposely one word so we can't get in to trouble from Subaru.

Well, it's true what they say ..... you learn something new everyday.

Thanks Brett.

thanks for the lesson; most interesting

I found the ezboard about 6 months before it went under. Thru word of mouth, I was told it was restarted as it stands today.

Thankyou to the pioneers

BYB-01 wrote:Perhaps we should do a sponsorship drive and raise some cash to spend on the site. If we could get $1000 or so together we should be able to get some thing pretty decent put together.

What do you have in mind Brett? With over 300 active users $5 each will get a fair amount raised even considering many of those users will not pay.

I love this site and want to do what i can to help out. I don't have a lot of time or money to contribute but neither do many others, if we all can help in some way... Kind of like an annual "working bee".

I just bought a http://www.AUSubaru.com sticker, that will help to promote the site to new users in my area... what other ways can we all help to support OUR forum?

Thoughts

BYB01 wrote:Perhaps we should do a sponsorship drive and raise some cash to spend on the site. If we could get $1000 or so together we should be able to get some thing pretty decent put together.

Even just fixing the Tech manual would be a start.

I'm in. $? its the least I can do to help out. I built my wagon with help from this board so its my turn

hi guys
Id be up for ether. As this site has helped me heaps.Even reading other posts. Best way to get information about our cars. hehe even if some ???????? seam dumb. I have lernt not to post sompin if ya drunk
dibs

I would like to thank everyone thats had something to do with this site. I have learnt alot about subarus from here.Its a pitty the cost of freight is soooo dear or i could help you guys out will lots of parts as they cheaper on my side of the ditch.

yeah i agree, i would def put some coin in on a fund raiser we all have learnt so much from this place and made new friends over the years!