Hey, where'd everybody go...?

As you've no doubt noticed, the website you probably expected to find isn't here any more, so I felt it only fair to give a little explanation as to why.

The site came from humble beginnings back in 2003, when normally-aspirated Impreza owners were offered a safe haven from turbo snobbery with a single section on the (now also gone) car-torque.net forums. This quickly showed there was a need for a place to talk about issues with the Sport, so I took the plunge and ImprezaSport.net was born.

It was always my intention to keep the site free to view for members, so I tried covering the costs of the site with advertising, and later with Plus Membership, but unfortunately neither ever managed to contribute as much as the site cost to run (webhosting, domain registration, forum software license etc.), particularly as the popularity of the site grew.

In the last few years the popularity of the site has dwindled somewhat, but the actual data usage has continued to rise - probably largely due to the increasingly intelligent internet spam bots registering constantly. Things came to a head late in 2012 when the site started hitting its monthly 20GB data limit about half-way through every month. The site itself was very quiet, so I really couldn't justify doubling the webhosting bill for a larger data allowance - I began to consider closing the site down.

Finally in early February 2013 I was contacted by my webhosts to say that the site had been compromised with malware, so they had been forced to block access until I could remove the offending files, and upgrade the forum software to the latest version. To do so would involve more expense as the software license has now expired, so I'm afraid it's just brought forward the inevitable. From this point forward, the once great resource that was ImprezaSport.net is no more.

I still have the forum database so if anyone is interested in purchasing the site as a going concern, let me know (you would need to buy a new forum license, or convert to a different forum).
In the meantime, there is group and a page on Facebook, which could pick up where the site left off:

Facebook Page    -    Facebook Group


Thanks for your support over the years, and sorry it had to end like this!

:Mike:

Feb 22nd 2013
Copyright © 2013 ImprezaSport.net