Team Doorhandle

Back in the middle of March, Audiworld announced a move from Kawf to vBulletin, which is now owned (along with huge number of other internet forums, including Audiworld) by Internet Brands. The decision to eat their own dogfood ended up costing them considerably.

The migration probably happened for a variety of business and technical reasons, but it was dead on arrival. It left archives horribly mangled and difficult to read due to discrepancies between vBulletin's post format (one above the other) and Kawf, in which the discussion often consists of brief one-liners in the subject field which (in the original forum software) appeared indented and threaded. Gawker's car blog Jalopnik noticed the commotion and made a curt post about the mess.

If at first you piss off your users...

Adding insult to injury, Audiworld had tried this before, failed, and heard an earful from users about it. This time a group of long-time enthusiasts led by Josh Decker registered quattroworld.com, ordered up some hosting, and installed Kawf. Hundreds of Audiworld users flocked over and started posting like crazy. The insiders actively engaged users in discussions on policies and features; in some cases, turning around requests in a matter of an hour or two. It wasn't all pretty; malcontents started bumping years-old threads and posting frequently in Audiworld forums, mentioning quattroworld and calling people over. Audiworld reportedly started deleting some or all of those messages.

Josh and I spoke on the phone a few days after he launched the site; all of the quattroworld forums were setting up FAQ "threads", which relying on people to not post anything except high-content posts in one or two specific threads. I was hoping we could partner- use the existing wiki at Audifans to help Quattroworld users out. I told Josh it would let him check something off his to-do list very easily. Unfortunately, Josh wasn't interested in anything except us giving him a copy of our content.

Netcraft may confirm it...

When Josh and I spoke, he quoted some impressive page hit counts and such. But Josh's early bravado now seems more muted; he correctly notes that Audiworld has a large number of pages in Google's index (Quattroworld has 220) and a large number of links from other sites, both of which will make competition tricky. Josh is also correct that Alexa stats are virtually worthless for ranking; Alexa users represent about 0.006% of our hits. What Josh skirts: a quick look in a bunch of the forums shows very little activity. It's too early to declare Quattroworld "dead", but it will be interesting to see whether they retain their users and pull in enough donations and ad revenue to survive; both require active, involved users.