Welcome To Blues Travels

VWvortex and MotiveMag

Blues Travels is about a lot of things, as can be seen by a quick scan of either sidebar. Yet, if you spend any length of time at this site it becomes readily apparent that this site is also about my love of Volkswagens. It should therefore come as a surprise to no one that as a proud owner of a Volkswagen R32 I belonged to some of the more popular online Volkswagen communities.

Sadly, I must report that if you are a Volkswagen owner, and you are looking for a nice Volkswagen community to be a part of, I must steer you away from VWvortex and MotiveMag. My own experiences at these two Volkswagen communities was just not very positive.

My problem with these two communities stems from the fact that so many of the threads in the forums found therein are mean spirited and vicious. Moderators in these communities are far from objective and do little to quell the dysfunctional behavior of the many bullies that dominate the forum threads. Typically, it is the newcomers that are on the receiving end of most of the verbal attacks.

Spend any length of time in these communities and you will notice that contentious threads are allowed to continue ad nauseam, as newcomers are regularly eviscerated, picked on, called names, have profanities slung in their direction etc. More often than not this happens for no other reason than someone expressing their displeasure with some aspect of a VW car that just so happens to be a fan favorite of the forum. I have personally experienced this. And it gets worse. Much worse.

When I got my VW R32 in 2004, I decided that VWvortex might be the perfect place to go and talk about my car. After being at VWvortex for about a week, it was not long before I was on the receiving end of some brutal, juvenile verbal assaults. While I admit to giving as good as I got, I didn’t pick fights. True, I didn’t shy away from fights, and on occasion I even admit to descending to the level of ad hominem attacks myself, but that is not my nature. Once it became clear to me that defending myself was unproductive, and once I realized that the assaults were allowed to continue unabated by the moderators, I decided that leaving was my best option. I no longer enjoyed being there. After a while, it was just no fun. So that’s what I did. I left. That was a couple of years ago.

Recently, with the advent of the 2008 VW R32, I decided I would return to VWvortex to see how things were going. I lurked in the forums for a few days reading some of newer posts when I stumbled across a thread about EIP Tuning. Now what many of you may not know is that I love EIP Tuning. EIP did a fantastic job on my R32 when they installed a Cold Air Intake for me. The guys at EIP were nice, professional, thorough and simply terrific in every way. I could not have been happier.

Yet, here was this thread at VWvortex slandering EIP Tuning, and clearly trying to put EIP Tuning out of business. This was the stated objective in the thread. The allegations being bandied about like so much confetti were horrific and damaging in every way. To add insult to injury, the thread was left totally unchecked. Anyone reading the thread could see slander all over the place. Anyone wanting to join in the fun could post whatever they wanted to post about EIP. It didn’t matter that EIP was not able to defend themselves and I won’t even repeat some of the things that I read.

Were the allegations true? Who knows? I doubt it. But that is really not the point. The allegations were based on here-say, without a shred of proof being offered. The allegations were so bad that I really felt EIP Tuning needed an lawyer. If I were an attorney, I would have personally seen to it that VWvortex was shut down.

What bothered me most about all of this was not the tone of the thread, which was bad enough, but the fact that the moderators of the thread actually told me that EIP was getting what they had coming to them. The moderators at VWvortex were actually allowing the thread to continue in an obviously calculated move designed to inflict harm to a mans reputation and destroy his livelihood, and all out of sheer petulance.

In America a person is innocent until proven guilty. Moreover, a person is protected by law from slanderous allegations of criminal conduct where there is no proof of such. Both of these rights were being ignored and I just could not stand by and let it happen. Naturally, having had such a positive experience with EIP and seeing the injustice being perpetrated, I chimed in to state my concerns and I defended EIP. In short order I was set upon by all the forum bullies.

Moreover, VWvortex moderators forbade me from defending EIP Tuning. In fact, they banned me from the site precisely because I was defending EIP Tuning. I was told not to say another word in defense of EIP, and when I did I was banned. Gone. Apparently it was OK for EIP to be attacked by anyone, whether they had a personal grievance or not, but it was not OK for anyone other than EIP to come to their defense. I could not, and can not, believe this could happen in America.

After some 30 pages or so, the thread was mercifully closed, or locked, but by then the damage had been done.

Over the next few days, even more allegations surfaced regarding EIP, and these were patently false. This time around forum thugs were saying EIP Tuning was closed, kaput, out of business, and that the VWvortex community had shut them down and put them out of business. The cyber-equivalent of “high-fives” were all over the place. The self-congratulatory display was nauseating. Of course, EIP Tuning was not out of business. I called them that day and they answered their phone as always, dismissing the thread at VWvortex as untrue. But that did not matter to the moderators at VWvortex. Oh no. The thread was allowed to continue.

Interestingly, I received a letter from Rich at EIP Tuning in which he stated he was looking into the matter. Well, a few weeks later, VWvortex had been “taken over” by MotiveMag. Whether or not VWvortex was actually forced to shut down as a result of the slanderous tone of those two threads I will never know. All I know is that MotiveMag took over VWvortex in some capacity, effectively absorbing it.

After learning of the cyber-takeover of VWvortex, or whatever you choose to call it, I decided to join MotiveMag in hopes that my experience there would be more pleasant. Well, that experience proved to be just as disappointing as my experience with VWvortex. I suppose that when MotiveMag took over VWvortex, all VWvortex members came with it, because after one or two postings at MotiveMag about the 2008 R32, I was the target of yet another assault. It seems that the same closed minded, intolerant assholes that populated VWvortex are now haunting MotiveMag hallways.

All I can say is this: In the 3 years that I owned my R32, I met some cool people. However, I also encountered a large contingent of some of the most childish, juvenile delinquents I have ever had the displeasure of meeting. Being around this pseudo-elitist mentality for so long, I was in danger of becoming just like the very jerks I hated.

As an aside, could it be that this is the reason why VWoA decided to revamp the new 2008 VW R32? Could it be that the suits at VW corporate were desperate to put distance between their flagship sports car and this underclass of hoodlums that glommed on to the 2004 R32? The more I think about it, the more I think this is a very distinct possibility. And if owning the slow, heavy, plodding 2008 VW R32 puts distance between me at the riff-raff that populate the forums at MotiveMag/VWvortex, I couldn’t be happier!

Bring on the 2008 VW R32! I am ready to grow up!

Good riddance to that crowd of losers.

PS: If the folks at MotiveMag and VWvortex do not like this thread let me just say this: How does it feel to be on the receiving end of some unflattering comments from one of your members?