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Restoring 15 Years of Kite Reviews


.Joel

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Project Salvage : Restoring 15 Years of Kite Reviews.
RaceKites was an example of a collective human effort coming together to build the largest, dedicated online repository of kiting reviews.  In 2019 RaceKites went offline, today I would like to share that the sum of all that knowledge is coming to Extreme Kites.  

Alan Short, the owner of RaceKites was responsible for building and maintaining the platform for nearly 15 years containing over 1500 reviews.  I’d like to acknowledge the thousands of hours Alan put in to the RaceKites community, and his immense generosity in providing that content to Extreme Kites.  

RaceKites as a platform in my opinion was one of the most important online resources available when looking to purchase that never ending ‘next’ kite.  And even when you weren’t, it was still a bloody good read!  With most of the manufacturers either having packed up or moved on from Land Kiting it’s increasingly likely that someone new entering kiting is going to purchase a second hand kite.  Restoring this incredible resource to the Internet gives those individuals access to the information we had years ago when we were making those decisions for ourselves.  

Bite off more than you can chew, then chew like crazy!

Over the next few weeks / months I will begin importing the RaceKites content to Extreme Kites.  Right now I’ve revamped the Reviews section a bit, with a bit more to go and then that content will start to flow in and become available to everyone again.  Similar to the ‘Recovering 20 Years of Kiting History’ news I’ll be using the comments area below  to keep a running update on the progress.

Thank you again for being part of Extreme Kites, thank you to the wonderful human being Alan is and hopefully today’s news brought a little bit of happiness to your day.

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Thank you Alan for the huge effort over the years. :hatsoff:

Thanks .Joel for bringing, and restoring, the kite world together. :good:

 

What a mammoth site this is going to be if you like power kites!! :yahoo:

(someone might think I like emojis) :yes:

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Alan is a top bloke.... I contacted him a few years ago  to ask if I could reproduce some race kite flags .not only did he give me permission.. he also sent me the pdf files for the logo...  it's fantastic all the useful  information  well be preserved .. well done 

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Just a small update :) 
Reviews have been imported quite successfully, a handful of these will need manual cleaning up so I've created a little label that just has 'pending cleanup' on there.

On the bottom of all the reviews imported from Race Kites there will be something similar to what's here:
Screen Shot 2020-09-24 at 11.48.32 pm.png\


I'm estimating I'll have the reviews accessible to everyone over the weekend, just a few small things left to clean up which I'll do after the kids go Zzz each night.

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Reviews are done the Community Forum is next :) 

https://www.extremekites.org/reviews/


The next step for the reviews section is to manually go through each review and flag all the relevant options (Manufacturer, Kite Size, Foil/LEI/Arc, Fixed Bridle/Depower, Year Released etc) and once that completes all the reviews will tie in to the rest of the website where they'll show along side discussion topics and a new Newbies Q&A section to help people get started.

There's also some amazing 'How To' guides which I'll get to cleaning up as well.  On the topic if 'cleaning up' if you do find something that didn't convert properly just hit 'Report' at the bottom and flag 'Review Cleanup.'  It'll get a little purple bar on it.

review_cleanup.png


There's a new 'Content Curator' group which @bakersdozen is part of and I'll share more on that as well, it's essentially just helping out clean up and reformat old content.  I'll be post about that shortly, and that'll be my reach out to ask a few people to help with curating the content on Extreme Kites :) 

Hope everyone gets some enjoyment reading some amazing content.

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It was nice to see an email ping into the inbox that a review of mine had been reviewed... all those years ago in midlife crisis land - Racekites was THE community and I was one of the early joiners and became one of Alan’s moderators... great to see all the content hasn’t been lost. High point in my kiting was co-organising the 24hr at Hoylake that broke a distance world record and had kiting catapulted into mainstream BBC national news... 

Nice work here... well done! 

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