FILE UNDER: petrolhead culture & community
In one of the most dramatic shifts of web community power i’ve ever seen, the core membership of Audiworld packed their bags and busted out into another brand new forum under the name Quattroworld.
Audiworld was originally started by Audi enthusiasts back in 1999 (thanks for the correction, Matt), and it turned very successful over the years—so successful that it was eventually purchased by parasitic Internet Brands, a company known for taking over forums (especially car forums). Since the takeover, IB had been desperately trying to change the format from an older open source code of KAWF to a newer, more common Vbulletin forum system.
Result? Vbulletin was completely rejected by the users of the forum.
The transition was a mess, a sloppy forum, ruined historical AW posts, and a core member base set irate by the destruction of the long standing, successful, and active Audi community. Quattroworld started itself like a makeshift emergency center, immediately launching KAWF forums which heralded a return to original AW form—and the core members piled into QW. The result? Audiworld appears all but abandoned, a mess of new members which may even be ‘hired’ by IB (people do hire forum posters online, to help promote new forums), and a core base which has left. Within 48 hours, the number of users who joined Quattroworld was close to 3000. Those 3000 undoubtedly contributed at least 80% of the posting done on Audiworld, if not more.
Verdict: the community prevailed in the end, held together like glue by an outdated, but extremely usable format which works, and allows all of Quattroworld’s users to maintain the forum architecture they grew accustomed to for so many years.
Audiworld is dead. Long live Quattroworld!
IEDEI 