GTAM: The fall of an Internet forum

Hi.  Welcome to the Internet.

As the Internet has grown, it’s gone from geeks talking about computers, to everyone and their mothers talking about everything and anything.  Including their mothers.  A very popular use of the Internet has been forums. If you like paintball, there is a forum for that. If you are pregnant, fat or have cancer, there are forums for that too. Everything has a forum.  Car forums are one of the most popular it seems, and yes so are the ones for motorcycles.

What you wish you were doing.

Now if you are in the GTA, or pretty much Ontario, and you have a motorcycle, you’ll probably end up checking out GTAmotorcycle.  A forum which seems to link up a lot of the Canadian motorcycle scene. The membership pretty much revolves around sportsbikes. (If you know anything about Canada, you know that Toronto is a poseur city, so riding a sportsbike makes you instantly cool.) You would think this would be a great forum but it’s not.  Useful? No. Helpful? No. Interesting? No.  I could make a whole blog about the things it’s not actually. Is it because it’s small? No. It actually has a lot of members, however if you look at the userlist, many of these users have not logged in since 2008, 2007, and beyond. I would think that currently, there are only about 100 or so active members. Out of these active members, most of them are pretty useless when it comes to the motorcycle community. Here you will find your share of poseurs that buy sportsbikes and sit in front of high traffic areas all day (like coffee shops, bars, nightclubs, etc), women riders (trying to prove themselves), squids (riders without gear, cause it’s hard to look cool with gear on), and noobs (newbie riders that don’t know anything).

Bro! All these chicks must be checking us out.

I am sure this forum was decent at some point in time, but lately what has been happening is that the above people have been joining in droves and have made the forum stupid by talking about, and asking stupid things.  Most of the more knowledgeable and senior riders/users have been having a great time talking shit, and enjoying a laid back tit for tat type of thread structure until recently.

The admins of this forum, Paul Rogers and Cutekill, with their drove of brainwashed mods, have been regulating this forum in such a way that terms like “Nazi” have come back in style.  It’s not that easy on this forum to not be banned for gain an infraction, which leads to a ban.  On other forums you can get away with having a different opinion, calling someone a name, or even disagreeing about something, but not on GTAM.  Since April 2009, personally I have racked up over 50 infractions and over 5 bans.  The last one being a permanent ban.  Do I care?  Not really, but you know sometimes you just want to rag on a noob or something, so you have to find another uncensored forum like SlickKids.com.

Anyhow, the problem is with forums like GTAM is that, everyone has a common interest, it’s 90% guys, and guys like to talk shit.  Specially when it comes to a manly hobby like motorcycles.  One of the problems is that having a girl admin, and a few girls on the forum, they get offended by things that are man things.  In real life as a guy, you can fart in front of your guy friends, but if you were to fart in front of a girl, she would get offended.  This is like GTAM.  You can joke around with your guy friends on the forum, but some girls will get offended and complain, and the girls mods and admin will swiftly step in to give you an infraction or ban.  Paul, where did your balls go?

Hey ladies. I make this bike sexy. Of course I am from Mississauga..

Good question.  Paul has no balls.  Forums that get big will usually quickly sell out on their members.  The people that made the forum so big now no longer matter, because even if they leave, more people will join. So what do you when you get big? Sell advertising, and make sure the advertisers see you as a happy family friendly forums where boys, girls, moms, and dads, can join and ask stupid questions about motorcycles.  Many of these people sign up, ask a stupid question, and then never log on again.  Between the girls complaining, and Paul trying to sell ads, GTAM has become less of a motorcycle enthusiast forum, and more of an interactive FAQ for retards and families.  Not to mention the girls removing all balls from this forum.

Lately GTAM has been a source of controversy as well.  There has been bannings of many popular controversial members, such as D, ressurection, myself, and many many others. As well as infractions handed out left right and center.  If you don’t agree with how the forum is being run, you are to to leave, as it is not open for discussion. Just today another forum member LINK66 was asking for his account to be deleted after he was banned for joking about hitting his favorite mod. LOL is no longer for laughing my friend. Also it seems like a few of the mods have had it with how the site is being run.  Another recent controversy has been a member named R1Timmy.  R1Timmy fell off his bike during a vacation in the US, and was reported to be critically injured. The GTAM community scam artist wanna be even co-oridinator Suzuki_Girl (who supposedly hasn’t been able to co-ordinate anything worth shit) set up a fundraiser with the admins of GTAM for R1Timmy because he was injured so badly, and wrecked his bike, and had hospital bills to pay, and etc sad story.  It ends up that this guy turns up at the fundraiser practically uninjured, his story and injuries were 90% made up, he pocketed the money from the fundraiser, Suzuki_Girl probably pocketed some cash, GTAM got some publicity.  At the end of the day, everyone was pissed off that out of all the bikers that have gone down seriously, or have died during this season had no fundraisers.  Imagine giving your hard earned cash to someone who you thought was laying in a hospital bed all messed up, and meanwhile he’s doing great and attending his own fundraiser walking around?  To make matters worse, R1Timmy won’t respond to the allegations of this being a scam, Suzuki_Girl is lying and backtracking about her involvement (also deleting her own threads and messages), and the admins of GTAM are banning users that ask questions, and deleting posts and threads from people that are wondering about how valid this fundraiser was. Generally the admins spend a lot of time deleting peoples posts and threads if they don’t agree with them, but this came to new lows.

The GTAMotorcycle Forum Logo. Look familiar?

With this much drama, does it really seem that this is what the motorcycle community needs or wants?  There is lots of talk about the forum going downhill, people leaving, and advertisers wondering if it is a good idea to get involved with such a train wreck.

For now, an irc chat channel on DALnet unfortunately named #GTAM has been a popular places for members fleeing the communist GTAM forum.  This includes all your banned favorites, and people that believe in free internet speech. Perhaps when the GTAM is done being a piece of shit #GTAM will be the new hotspot for the GTA’s motorcycle enthusiasts.