A review of the past 5 years.About 5 years ago, a kid by the name of Tim Warburton was surfing the internet and couldn't find any really good sites that had information on threewheelers, so he decided to make his own. Thus "3WHEELERWORLD" was born. Tim started 3WW on a free website service called "Angelfire". 3WHEELERWORLD served dual purposes at this time, to show pictures of threewheelers, and to act also as part of Tim's personal webpage. When the site first started out, there werent a whole of visitors to send in pictures to the site. So Tim frequently checked out ebay, and the cycle trader in search of cool looking threewheelers. If he seen some, he saved the pictures and added them to the picture pages. About two monthes later, Tim added a guestbook to the site. The first signature is on April 20th, of 1999 by Bobby It reads: " Nice page Tim, thanks for keeping 3-wheelers alive. " Other memorable entries into the Guestbook are Jim Stackhouse (Tri-Z_Jim) at entry #17 making him the oldest active member. The Supercross King himself Jeremy McGrath signed the guestbook at entry #60. Not long after the site was started, Tim signed up for a free message board from the now dead "InsideTheWeb" message boards. A simple board layed out much more like the guestbook then what todays current forum is. A new post about once a week was the average, This included wanted/forsale messages, and other off-topic posts. The board sported a blue and white theme, speckled with advertisements since it was a free board. Tim was a pretty active member of the ATVConnection chatroom and often posted the link to his website in there and gave it to anyone who had a threewheeler or was interested in them. Within the following 6 monthes Tim continued to add cool pictures he found to the pictures page, he added a specs page, And found out about some rare threewheelers called the "Tiger", "Cagiva", "Polaris Scrambler", and others. The board started to pickup with the posting and by now had about a dozen people who posted to it atleast once a week. The board soon became known as the deffintive source for technical information on threewheelers with its regulars and visitors of the site. When HondaATC first got the internet, his personal friend showed him this cool threewheeler site he found from a guy who went to this chatroom on a site called atving.com Billy spent alot of time in the atving.com chatroom talking to Tim and the other people there while at the same time checking out Tim's cool page on threewheelers nearly everyday. Billy had only ever rode the Big Red 200 and ATC110 his dad bought new, and the YTM200 his friend rode that his father bought new also. He was always amazed to see the awesome looking threewheelers called 200x's, 350x's, 250R's, and even the ones that seemed kind of strange called the "Tecate" and "Tri-Z". Influenced by Tim's website, Billy bought his first sport threewheeler in late 1999, it was a 1984 200X. Billy started his own webpage and named it "HondaATC's page of ThreeWheelers". He setup a chatroom for it and for a while him and ThreeWheelio shared the same chatroom for both of their sites. They even held weekly trivia contests with questions about threewheelers. Around this same time, a regular in the ATVConnection chatroom created for Tim the current 3WW banner that is used on the site to this day. Soon after this, Tim got caught up in school and other activities and didn't really have a whole lot of time to work on the site. The site had enough people on it now that they were sending in pictures from old magazines, pictures of them riding, and extra information for the specs page. Pretty soon there was such a backlog that it would take a long time to get caught backup. It was at this time that Tim posted a message on the board that the title read "Adopt 3wheelerworld". Billy happened to be in ATVing chat one afternoon and said hey to Tim, and Tim asked if he had seen his post on the board, and Billy replied he had not. He checked it out and volunteered to try and get the site updated and eliminate the backlog of information to update the site. He also began the start of a "New Layout" for the site. After Billy spent alot of time working on this new layout and converted several pages over to it, being new to the world of web design he neglected to check browser compatibility and realised that this page couldn't be displayed in Netscape and other browsers. At this point he was really fed up with it and was ready to can the whole design and all the pages he had converted (80+) but he was talking to Howdy (Who was now the moderator of the message board) and had mentioned the problem he was having. Howdy didn't have any real HTML knowledge at the time but he took a crash course and learned very fast. Howdy is the main one who got the layout to look how it is now, and to work within all browsers. The forum 3WW ran on now was called "Boards2go" which was a replacement for when the provider of the old board "InsideTheWeb" went out of business. Soon however, the board would takes its first step towards a real forum which was an ezboard. When the site switched forums for the 3rd (And not final) time, they moved to the popular at the time "ezboard". This new forum would provided all kinds of features not available previously. These features included, the ability to register your name, a profile, multiple moderators, edit your posts, the ability to see who/how many is online, And alot of other things not previously available. Not long after having the ezboard up, the forum had the most amount of people ever on at one time which was 21. HondaATC also had a few people who didn't care for him much. During the first few monthes of 2002 the site started having problems with the longtime freewebhost "Angelfire". This was mainly in part due to the amount of traffic/hits and the people who viewed the site. The site would be down for several hours a day, and sometime even days at a time. Angelfire claimed we were using to much bandwidth and new changes to their Terms Of Service that prevented us from operating the site way it had been. Angelfire would be charging an astronomical amount of money a month to keep the site operating at the capacity it was. It was therefore decided that the site would have to close, and on April 1st of 2002 a link was posted on the board with an explanation and a link to this page. After finally moving away from a freewebhost to a real one, and getting a domain the site continued to grow even more by getting higher listings on many search engines with the new credibility of the site having its own domain name. The first webhost was a disaster and proved to be less then worthless with more downtime then the old Angelfire account, the Team considered moving the site back to the old angelfire account. Instead however they took the wiser decision and found a better webhost which still services the site today. The next problem occured when the EZboard started to get outgrown with now more then 500 registered members of it. They also began wanting to charge you for service, much like Angelfire had in the past. HondaATC decided it was time to upgrade the board to a forum on its on webhosting account like they had with the website several monthes previously. He checked out a couple different types of forum software, and decided on one called "phpBB" he also bought a domain, and a new hosting plan through a different hosting company then the site to accomade what he knew would become a very large user of bandwidth due to the nature of how forums work. He also added a couple mods to the forum like the ability to add attachments. After the board was all setup and had been tested by some veteran members of the site, HondaATC posted a message on the ezBoard to let everyone know the forum had been switched over. Unfoutenetly during the switch less then half of the amount of members were brought over to the new forum during a conversion. All the others had to re-register. This means the new forum started out with about 300 members and has been rolling on ever since with at the time of writing nearly 2700 users. HondaATC started to get behind on his updates for the site and eventually got so far behind he was in worse shape then Tim was when he passed on the updating to HondaATC. The Site hadn't been updated in nearly a year other then a few readers rigs and other misc. things. Most of his time was spent moderating and reading the forum. He decided one day it was time to make a decision on what to do with the site, whether it was to leave the site as an archive and continue focussing on the forum like he had been, or if it was time to get back in the drivers seat and update the site how it use to be. Like in the days when Tim had just started the site and it was updated nearly every week with something new and cool. After a couple pages of discussion about the site, it was decided that the site needed to become the main concentration again, and so it was done. And with that being all said and done, that is a pretty accurate (Hit or miss) sum of the major changes and happenings of the site since its introduction on January 5th, of 1999 by Tim Warburton. We hope that through the Grace of God and the members of the three-wheeling community we will be here another 5 years to continue to serve and help bring together other people who love threewheelers and everything assoiciated with them. The 3WW Team Howdy, ThreeWheelio, HondaATC |
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