SITE OVERVIEW

PNW Riders is an online motorcycle enthusiast community who share a common thread – the passion of motorcycle riders in the Pacific Northwest region. PNW Riders was designed simply to bring together all motorcycle riders to one central spot in order to communicate with one another, share our experiences in motorcycles, and to stick with the original concept of bringing fellow motorcycle riders together for motorcycle rides and gatherings. We all share a passion of motorcycles at different levels, and we all bring to the table different levels of experiences.

PNW Riders is a community where all are welcome!  Since the first day, we have consistently stated that all motorcycles are welcome. It doesn’t matter what kind of motorcycle you ride, all are welcome!

Remember, PNW Riders is YOUR forum and YOUR community. We genuinely feel that the PNW Riders community belongs to each and every rider on the forum.

A BRIEF HISTORY LESSON

Ahh… memories. PNW Riders derived from Washington Riders, which was originally conceived on February 23, 2004 by me, Daniel McIntosh (beansbaxter). Like a lot of things in our lives, this was created by accident. After unintentionally losing interest in various other regional motorcycling groups and organizations for two years prior, I felt something better could happen so the forum came to be, becoming live some seven months later on September 28, 2004. Coming onboard to help create this community was Jeff Gramling (Guff), Jafar Fallahi (Jafar), and Emmanuel “JR” Reyes (jezterr). A lot of things happened those two years prior though, to get things even to the point of taking an “idea” to a live, functional site.

I started riding motorcycle in 1996 here in Washington, but it was the summer of 2002 when things changed my perception about riding. After picking up a new motorcycle in May of 2002, I was looking forward to the upcoming summer as I had a good reason to skip class. As a student attending Washington State University in Pullman, WA, the summer of 2002 was spent riding motorcycles every chance I got. The WSU Motorcycle Club was created and registered with WSU as an official club organization, and we used it as a tool to meet up with other students who rode motorcycles. The WSU Motorcycle Club became very popular, with three of us riding every day nonstop. It was Travis Hudon (wsurc51), Brian Kopek (brikwsu), and I who rode every chance we got, always meeting area riders, many of whom are on the PNW Riders site today, including Jafar Fallahi (Jafar), DJ Maclean (Badoogas), Chuck Cassius (r6fireman1996), Jess Cisco (ninjazx10rida), Bill Anderson (Bill Anderson), and Brian Neely (speedbump).

The problem in the old days was getting everyone on the same page for a ride. You would call up 10+ people to plan a ride at 9:00 and then a few people would say they couldn’t make it until 10:00 so then you had to call up all 10+ people back to let them know the time got changed. After the ride, it was always a hassle emailing everyone pictures of the ride, because not everyone would get them and everyone wanted to see them. Needless to say, a community forum would have made life much easier.

When we all graduated from college and went off on our separate ways, the club popularity dissolved and any level of organizing some rides quickly went with it.

After the summer of 2002, I met Jeff (Guff) at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, WA and I wanted to use my experience with the WSU Motorcycle Club to make something similar happen for EWU. We applied to become an officially recognized student club, and I remember being one signature short of making it happen, and by the winter time, we figured we would wait until a later time to try something. Besides, no one would be riding any motorcycle in Eastern Washington over the winter months.

After a hiatus of life, Jeff and I stumbled back upon the idea the winter of 2004. We helped one group start a small, unorganized, completely dysfunctional EWU Motorcycle Club which didn’t amount to anything but one BBQ in the rain (which we did ride to with Ramona (crazylady)). Between life and school, our time was spent riding every chance we got. I started up a Yahoo! EWU usergroup to try building some sort of local online community but it never got used.

I realized that even if we got an EWU Motorcycle Club going, the same fate of the WSU Motorcycle Club would happen all over again. The riders we were meeting were all graduating and we all had different ideas of what we considered to be fun when it came to riding motorcycles. By this time, I was very active in many Internet online forums, but they were all specific to my make and model of motorcycle, nothing regional for Eastern Washington.

So as I thought about things, I knew we should make something that would cater to Washington. That way, as we graduated and moved off to the various areas around the state, we could all still be under one umbrella site. The best I could come up with (there wasn’t much available) was Washington Motorcycle Riders so I purchased the domain name www.washingtonriders.com on February 23, 2004. Even after buying the domain name, it sat dormant not knowing when I would use it or start to build a website around it.

The summer of 2004 was spent riding, riding and riding. That’s all we did. Living in Spokane, and coming from Pullman, I knew a lot of the area riders through the colleges but that was it. I met Eric Staggs (Fighterama) through the old EWU Yahoo group I had once created and never used and met other area riders through him. Through all the group rides I did that summer, it was meeting a local Spokane motorcycle chapter called R2X that changed things.

After riding with R2X, the idea of a website came up and the ball went off and rolling. The rides and riders of R2X were great, yet they were a local group of riders and Jeff and I always discussed the idea of doing a state-wide group of riders. The R2X riders were awesome, always a lot of fun, and the mass project that I undertook to build their website and forum forced me to take my website design and development skills to entirely new level. I spent a lot of hours working on that forum to get it going, and when the site was finally live, it was awesome for the intention it was designed for.

Building upon that experience, I felt the time and experience was there to start something up of my own. Using my own resources on every level, I started working on things and it was on September 28, 2004 that the Washington Riders site became live under the domain name www.washingtonriders.com.

Times were very rough trying to get the Washington Riders forum active. The first couple months were just telling everyone we knew in college and whom we rode with. At the Friday opening of the 2004 Cycle World International Motorcycle Show in Seattle, I handed out over 1500 paper flyers, with only one person signing up from that. It was a difficult time starting a motorcycle forum during the winter months.

The original Washington Riders forum started on a shared hosting server using the free phpBB forum software. The problem with phpBB is the high frequency of security exploits. On May 14, 2005, while traveling from Spokane to Seattle, I received numerous calls alerting me the forum was down. After once again patching the forum software (this had been done numerous times up to this point), I decided it was in the best interest of the forum to move toward a paid web software solution. The additional cost was justified by better security and better software. That same day, I purchased a license and migrated the database and forum to vBulletin.

With activity on the forum picking up immensely during the 2005 riding season, it became apparent that Idaho and Oregon riding sections only made sense. A lot of the motorcycle rides were branching out in those two states. The Eastside section of Washington was always driving in Idaho and credit goes to John Byrne (Johnny-B), whom was moving to southern Oregon and brought up the idea of Oregon Riders.

On June 1, 2005, the domain name www.idahoriders.com was registered with intentions of adding an Idaho Riders motorcycling club section to the forum. The next day, on June 2, 2005, the domain name www.oregonriders.com was registered for the same reasons. With Oregon and Idaho added to the mix, on June 28, 2005, the domain name www.pnwriders.com was registered with intentions of moving Oregon and Idaho out of the motorcycling club sections and bringing all three states underneath one Pacific Northwest site.

Thanksgiving week, November 2005, was spent doing a major overhaul to the forum, migrating the forum to a virtual private server, and making the change to the pnwriders.com domain name, giving Washington, Oregon, and Idaho equal representation under one umbrella PNW Riders site.

The increase in traffic on the forum also placed increasing demands on our hardware and bandwidth, forcing a change to be made. On June 30, 2006, PNW Riders was moved to a dedicated server, allowing faster access and more resources for the forum now and the growth to come.

WHY WE DO IT

We get asked this question hundreds of times, but we have yet to come up with a reasonable answer. We don’t make any money. We are constantly being harassed by disgruntled users. I guess it is just too much fun! The truth is, we all just love to ride motorcycles, and we wanted to make a one stop spot to communicate online with fellow riders that live in our same region, go on motorcycle rides, and share our motorcycle riding experiences. 

Aside from enjoying motorcycling as a sport, we enjoy the opportunity it provides to create a community with the same shared interest.  In doing this, we’ve met people who otherwise we would never have met who have enriched not only our riding experience but our lives as well.  The forum transcends motorcycling into an experience of community that we feel everyone can enjoy and benefit from.  And those that don’t will probably die a wretched death in a fiery blaze of motorcycle carnage.