Pretty cool to see some of the "old timers" showing-up! Hard to believe how much time has gone by. Seeing join dates of 1999 is pretty crazy.
In a couple of months, DRN will be online for 19 continuous years, I would have never guessed it would still be here. Yeah, 5 years longer than Facebook, 7 years longer than Twitter. Needless to say, they grew a little more than we did, but hey, lol. DRN was the first modern era dirt bike "forum", while character-based bulletin boards were still the norm ( rec.motorcycles.dirt :).
We've celebrated members having kids and now those kids are grown. Friendships made. We saw members get married. We've seen folks go through tough times and come out on the other side. We've mourned when members passed. It really was just like a big family with all the good and bad that brings.
After all these years, the internet left us behind. Social media took-off, the mags started paying attention to the web (some shouldn't have), venture capitalized sites, etc., and our moderated forum fell out of favor with new generations of riders. It's a world of knowledge in 140 characters. The world changed. We didn't, for better or worse.
Folks would get pissed when we wouldn't let them trash the place-up with language and/or negative/destructive tirades. We did the best we could to make DRN a place for everyone including kids. We weren't going to be responsible for exposing young new riders to the negative side of the internet. There was no way we were going to be just another forum for people to trash each other, troll or spew a bunch of bad info in their quest to be a message board hero. In the end, that's a big part of DRN's fall from the biggest, to where we are now; a 150,000 page archive of useful dirt bike info.
We never collected user info to sell, we never sold email addresses, we didn't use the forum as a customer pool for an online store. We just wanted to provide a place for folks to hang out and talk about the sport we loved. Yeah, advertising had to happen, there's got to be revenue to pay the costs of operating the site. While it's against the ad agreement to discuss earnings, I can tell you that the ads cover the monthly server/bandwidth costs, barely. Add in software/development costs (not to mention man-hours) and tax (on ad revenue) and it's been a break even thing at best. But it's been worth it. Every bit of it. As long as I can afford to maintain it, it'll be here.
As they say, if you aren't continually trying to expand or evolve it, it dies. That may be true, but we never compromised, we weren't in it for the money and it was exactly what we wanted it to be.