On Christmas day 9 years ago, we registered the ride44.com domain after a couple weeks of discussions with the other founders of our community.  It took us just a couple days to get the first version of our forum installed.  Over the next few weeks (some while in a hotel on a business trip), we perfected the site with a new theme among other customizations.  With these things in place, we were off.

Ride44 became the place where many mid-to-lower Willamette Valley motorcyclists could meet up, make friends, plan rides & visit with each other.  We, like many others, met some of our now best friends through Ride44.  There are many connections made across all of our members that still stand today.

We have been debating for a couple of years whether or not we continue supporting the Ride44 forum.  It's no secret that activity on the forum has all but died over the past few years.  We decided to keep it going because it was low enough effort.  Upgrades were easy enough due to my early efforts at making it more like a professionally maintained software package.  At some point, the ability to upgrade to the next version was made much more difficult due to the upstream software being largely rewritten. We never found the time to do the upgrade & the longer it went, the more the board activity dropped off.  Last month, the hosting provider forced us to use a newer, still supported version of PHP.  This broke some things on the forum (some of which you've probably seen).  Unfortunately, we're not seeing the value in putting forth that effort with the lack of activity.  We’ve now spent more time on this than folks have spent browsing our forum in the last few months.

So the time has come for the Ride44 forum to come to a close.  Because the errors prevent posting anything, we have closed down the forum effective immediately.  We would like to thank all who have participated and enriched our lives.  We have always said, get out, meet others and ride.  This forum has helped many do this and for that we are thankful.  We will keep the Facebook page  alive and if you would like to reach us, you can do so there.

The old forum will remain available to retrieve any data that you may want until March 1st, 2020. You can access it at http://www.ride44.com/oldforum .

wileycoyote and RickRick