I was informed by Vortex that the domain raretrade.ru is paid until June this year and after that it will be discontinued.
As far as i know the forum was founded in january 2010 and is owned by ingram. Therefore I like to thank him in particular and all other people how started this website (who are mostly gone since years).
I became de-facto administrator of this page in 2013. Nobody asked me for it. I helped fixing a technial problem and optained the password. Because nobody else was around I took care for the website the next 9 years to keep it up running.
I think it is the right time to close the forum. There are no new member registrations, old members left and the forum discussions are nearly dead. I think it refers to the current state of the hobby "bootleg collecting". It was a fun time, but the hobby isn't intersting for new/young people anymore in a time when cellphone-sourced-videos on youtube have better quality than 70% of my old VHS-transfered video collection. I miss the feeling to hunt for specific videos, discussing trades and sending postal packages around the world. Young music lovers will never understand, what I'm talking about: Concert videos are free available now for everybody everytime. So i would summerize, that it was a great hobby, but technical progress eliminates the circumstances bootleg trading came from.
sooo.... whats left?
1.
Vortex came up with the idea to move to a Discord channel. In my opinion that makes sence since the most active part of this forum was the shoutbox the last years.
2.
I think about archiving the forum and copying it to my phpRecDB website (maybe something like www.phprecdb.com/forum). It will be fully functional, but I understand it only as knowledge resource and not as continuation of this website.
I like to thank everybody for keeping up this small community for over a decade
Added by Vortex:
Here's the discord invitation link for those of you who is not ready for this small community to die: https://discord.gg/hp49RxvS
As far as i know the forum was founded in january 2010 and is owned by ingram. Therefore I like to thank him in particular and all other people how started this website (who are mostly gone since years).
I became de-facto administrator of this page in 2013. Nobody asked me for it. I helped fixing a technial problem and optained the password. Because nobody else was around I took care for the website the next 9 years to keep it up running.
I think it is the right time to close the forum. There are no new member registrations, old members left and the forum discussions are nearly dead. I think it refers to the current state of the hobby "bootleg collecting". It was a fun time, but the hobby isn't intersting for new/young people anymore in a time when cellphone-sourced-videos on youtube have better quality than 70% of my old VHS-transfered video collection. I miss the feeling to hunt for specific videos, discussing trades and sending postal packages around the world. Young music lovers will never understand, what I'm talking about: Concert videos are free available now for everybody everytime. So i would summerize, that it was a great hobby, but technical progress eliminates the circumstances bootleg trading came from.
sooo.... whats left?
1.
Vortex came up with the idea to move to a Discord channel. In my opinion that makes sence since the most active part of this forum was the shoutbox the last years.
2.
I think about archiving the forum and copying it to my phpRecDB website (maybe something like www.phprecdb.com/forum). It will be fully functional, but I understand it only as knowledge resource and not as continuation of this website.
I like to thank everybody for keeping up this small community for over a decade
Added by Vortex:
Here's the discord invitation link for those of you who is not ready for this small community to die: https://discord.gg/hp49RxvS
![[Image: raretrade.ru.png]](http://ratm-bootlegs.com/phpRecDB/misc/sigs/raretrade.ru.png)