Come to The Maxref and Maxref Support Forum Eulogy

The same old forum is still around until the end of April. It just moved - along with the rest of Delphi Forums - to a different URL shortly after the last time Frank updated Maxref.

About a dozen years ago, Delphi Forums pioneered the online message board industry, both developing the technology and running the forums. Things were expensive back then. I've heard that people paid up to $35 per hour to use the forums. Perhaps that included ISP and long distance costs at a time when local dial-up numbers were as common as feathers on a dog. Broadband you say? They were much too busy upgrading to 14.4k modems...

And we whine about our choices!

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If they got long distance calling for less than 15¢ per minute the were rightfully proud of the accomplishment...

And we still whine about our choices, don't we?

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Well, in the late 90s, the Dot Com Boom happened, and Delphi Forums found themselves so profitable that they didn't need to to charge users for forum accounts any more. Even then, they were so profitable that they were bought up by a larger, less profitable company to turn their revenue around.

Then the Dot Coms Bombed, and even the profits from Delphi Forums and other smaller online businesses couldn't keep the bigger company afloat, so they sold off their subisidiaries a piece at a time to make ends meet. Thus Delphi Forums' technology division - now named Prospero - was sold to one buyer, Delphi Forums' domain name was sold to another buyer, and the forums themselves were sold to yet another buyer.

Delphi Forums changed hands more than once after that, and struggled to make ends meet themselves, making Delphi Forums' staff and members more than a little nervous. The latest twist, and possibly the most reassuring development I've seen so far as of late last year is that Delphi Forums has been purchased by Delphi Forums' old technology division, Prospero.

As opportune as that reunion has been - and I've seen improved service at Delphi Forums since then - it's unlikely that Delphi Forums will ever be reunited with its original domain name. So instead of Delphi.com, they became Delphiforums.com. In addition, one of the forum upgrades of recent years required that the forums be located in a subdomain named "forums". Thus, the domain name is now forums.delphiforums.com.

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