Guy asks a question, it gets answered, and we're beating a dead horse? I thought that one of the strengths of this site was that if someone asked a question, rather than tell them to do a search, we just answer it? Guess I was wrong.
Oh yeah, I was supposed to get all that from a single emoticon post with no text, my bad. I messed up. When he asked what other national sites were out there, I took that as a question, when in fact it was nothing of the sort. Here, I'll fix it: NAM is the greatest site of all time. MA came about because NAM was too good--everyone got together to make a site that's slightly worse to restore the world's equilibrium. But it didn't work. MA is perfect too. Ditto MINI2. MT is also good. MU is totally unbiased, they love all tuners equally. (By the way, I have no problem with a site being biased. Like attracts like. Just because it's not for me doesn't mean it's not necessarily good. That's why I included it instead of ignoring it). There, that pretty much fixes it, you can ignore my previous post now.
:frown2: just chimps flinging their poo again :lol: And....BTW.....NAM was the place to be in the beginning! EVERY mod started there, and EVERY pioneer modder started there! There is still tons of info there, if you can wade thru the crap piles :arf: Edit: guess I should say every 1st gen.............
That would be totalMINI. They suffered a hard drive failure on March 11 and of this writing are still down. Backups are your friend!
Each site has their personality. MT is very rough and tumble. It too started when MINI2 was sold to Vertical Scope, just like totalMINI did. This was all about 3-4 months before M/A started. MT and TM are based in the UK and have a bigger following in Europe than M/A does. M/A is somewhat between those two personality wise. Not as hard core as MT, not as touchy freely nauseatingly sweet as TM.
So totalMINI sold too? If that's the site I'm thinking of, where Rakey and all the disgruntled original crew went after MINI2 sold out, I am slightly shocked, I thought the whole purpose at least initially was to get away from the corporate ownership model. I haven't visited that site in forever (obviously, since I couldn't remember it's name :mad2. MINI2 was so good in the beginning, it had the best gallery on any car site I've ever seen regardless of make, you could literally pull up a car with the exact specifications you wanted in a minute, then they blew it all up in the name of progress. Go figure. Also forgot to add Motoringfile, which everyone knows about anyway (but Dave didn't mention that one in the question he did or didn't ask), still a great site.
totalMINI did NOT sell out. They were / are an offshoot of MINI2's sellout. totalMINI is currently down. They had a hard drive break with no backups. From my understanding, reading info on their FB page and knowledge of how all this works.... They have a dedicated server, but not a managed dedicated server, making them responsible for updates to operating systems and software as well as doing their own backups. They were not performing the backups. So when the hard drive went south so did all their data. I made the same mistake quite some time ago with The Great Data Debacle of 2010. You want to talk redundant redundancies! M/A is now on a RAID 10 set-up with 2 striped 3 drive arrays that are mirrored. We also have an hourly backup of the server stored offsite. I'm working on a redundant DNS now too.
I think Nathan meant that MiniTorque was also started when MINI2 was sold, in the same manner that totalMINI also started when MINI2 was sold. It's just the wording that could create a misunderstanding. Edit: Nathan replied while I was posting
Yep, I misunderstood the wording--makes sense now. It didn't make sense that TotalMini would sell out, got it now. Ahh, the great MA data crash, I remember that, and the mad scramble to recover as much as possible. Hope TotalMini gets it back together soon.