I pretty much stopped riding dirt bikes and went to the street. So much easier to hop on the bike in the driveway and ride rather than load up and drive 40 miles to ride. I'll get back to the dirt soon.
Life, kids and other social media outlets that people prefer to argue without moderation I guess :)
I miss the good ol days but the only constant in life is change.
Glad this place is still up and running if only for historical reasons. DRN still has a vast amount of technical knowledge from past threads that can help people out.
Glad to see there is still some activity around here. I don't ride as much as I used to but when I do I really suck wind! Was out yesterday and was too sore to walk after only an hour on the bike. I keep telling myself that I just need to ride more but my body is falling apart. I won't stop though!!
Getting a trials bike has allowed me to ride even on days when my parts are too beat up to handle an MX bike. Plus crashing at 3 mph seems to hurt a lot less.
I think the lack of participation parallels the decline in economic prosperity. Dirt biking is an expensive hobby. Because of lack of money I haven't had a dirt bike in 8 years. I just ride my 100cc street bike now.
I retired from motocross in '08. It was not intentional, it just worked out that way because of injuries, job loss, etc.
I have a street bike and a dual-sport bike. I ride somewhere between 13k and 26k miles per year. I'm currently at about 21k so far this year. I very much prefer dual-sport over strictly street. I still have my mx bike. It looks good setting over in the corner of the garage.
Ha. I havent been on here in a long time either! I have also been riding more street than dirt. I haven't been to a vintage race at all this season, for the first time in 16 years...all though it has more to do with my life situation than anything.
In the vintage world in the mid atlantic, there seems to be 2 trends...some clubs are allowing classes through the 90s.... afterall vintage is relative...everyone wants to ride what they rode when they were 16 and we are all getting older. And in the clubs who are not moving forward with the years, cross country has become bigger than mx.
Was just thinking about this site I joined in 1999 under a different name. Then Okie allowed me to change it. At least I think it was 99, maybe 2000? Yeah, life happens. Still have my Dirtrider.net swingarm stickers unmolested. They won't fit on the 74.5 GP I have, lol. At 58 I still get goosebumps about riding and the Midwest VMX scene is pretty hot right now. Anyone is the Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, or Michigan area should check out some of the races. Even people coming in from Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, etc. Always was a great site here. Sad to see all the hacking on this page though...
I stop in from time to time, see some familiar faces here and there.
Started a little company called Seatconcepts about 10 years back, keeps me busy, no time to ride!
I dragged the old CR250 out of the corner of the garage last weekend. It probably hadn't been started in two years. I dumped in a splash of fresh gas and it started on about the eighth kick. I rode around the neighborhood, did a couple wheelies, and put it back in hibernation.
First time I have logged in here in a long time. I was also caught up in the other social media sites. As of about 3 weeks ago though, I have removed myself from all of them. (I still have a dormant twitter just to test things for a website I manage.)
As for riding, nope, no more dirt for me. As many of you who were connected with me on Facebook know, I traded my old CRF450 for a vintage flat track bike a few years back and restored it. Then I promptly sold it for a wad of cash to finance a new camera and a couple other toys.
Now I have a nice spot in the country with a couple of acres and may eventually get a TTR or something similar to play with in the backyard. Until then, just waiting for warm weather to get out the old sled to go play on the backroads. 1977 KZ650... first need to put a clutch in it.
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.
Been a member since 2000, Didn't post much but was on here a lot back in the day. Started to raised a family, moved to drag racing and restoring muscle cars, bought a yamaha warrior then raider and rode street for several years.
Just bought a wr450 excited to get back into riding but my body will say otherwise.
I remember battle of admins and having contest with Thump at badlands and Dave, someone nicknamed me "Pit sally" and we had a bunch of edited photos making fun of each other. Good times
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