We’ve always been a community at Canada Moto Guide. It was the guiding principle for Rob Harris when he started the website 22 years ago – that a printed magazine was all very informative and enjoyable, but an online magazine let readers talk to each other in real time. That changes everything.
Right from the beginning, CMG had a forum for readers, first called the Soapbox and then just called the Forum. It’s how I found CMG and I wrote about the good old days back in February. That was when we thought we had to kill the Forum because it was overrun by spambots, but at the last moment, we were able to access the site and deal with all the spam.
Sadly, though, we just couldn’t stop the spam getting in. We could kill it off when it arrived – sometimes several hundred overnight advertising Russian women and generic Viagra – but the software was too old and outdated to set up effective filters. We tried to establish a new platform and migrate everything over because we didn’t want to lose two decades of history, but it just wouldn’t work.
In the end, we had no choice but to start a completely new Forum, using today’s up-to-date software on an entirely different platform. The good news is that we were able to keep and archive the messages from the old Soapbox and Forum and we’ll post them in our archives as soon as they’re ready, but it will be just something now to read and remember.
The new Forum, however, is totally interactive, and it went live late last month. You’ll need to register to use it, as before, but now’s the time to get a cool name and avatar for yourself, if that’s your thing. Have a look here to see what I’m talking about.
When you do go on the Forum, leave us a note to let us know what you think, but try not to spend too much time there. It can be addictive, and it’s summertime outside with motorcycles to ride and roads to explore. Make the most of them!
