Once upon a time, a motorcycle journalist and his friend set up an online discussion forum for motorcyclists and called it visordown.com

The forum software they were using was vBulletin which is very fine indeed and the site became a great success. That success led to Ben Cope selling advertising space on the board and serving ads. as well as setting up a supporter scheme to suppress those ads. and presumably putting some of that revenue into the hosting and software costs (although there was a rumour that some of those costs were being met elsewhere).

Then a publishing house called Magicalia bought visordown.com to complement their motorcycle magazine, “TWO”. Initially things got off to a bad start with TWO including some content from visordown.com in an issue without asking for permission to do so.

It also appeared that visordown’s free and easy, say what you like attitude was being clamped down on by its new owners.

In the meantime, vBulletin announced that the latest version of their software – version 3.7 – was being developed with user blogs (basically extended user profile pages) and user galleries to make what was already the best message board software even better.

So when an announcement was made a little while back seeking testers for the new version of visordown.com and when the board was turned off yesterday for an upgrade, I was quietly pleased.

And then they re-opened the board today. It’s been moved to a different server now running different ASP board software. A server that appears to be common to the rest of the Magicalia sites all running the same board software. No doubt that decision makes sense to a large company running a number of message boards: one set of architecture to support. Of course that throws aside the history and treats visordown.com as a new site rather than an established one.

And the ‘new’ board software is, frankly, rubbish compared with vBulletin. It also appears from all the server error messages I was getting this evening when trying to post new threads or reply to existing ones, that the server or the software (or a combination of the two) cannot cope with the traffic that visordown.com generates.

I expect that the regular users will soon get fed up with the board issues and the lack of features they were used to before.

Let that be a lesson to us all…