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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.

Project Salvage : Restoring 20 Years of Kiting History. Over the next few weeks I’ll be working to restore the content that was once available on Flexifoil Forums / Kitecrowd. I’ll be attempting to restore nearly 20 years of kiting history where there were nearly 2 million contributions made by thousands of individuals. Why? It’s something personal for me, my first years of Kiting the Flexifoil Forums provided so much wealth of information. With kitecrowd, foilzone, arcusers, racekites all disappearing there’s been a significant amount of knowledge erased from the internet. Include the loss of Yahoo Groups and the amount of human effort that has been extinguished is actually quite mind boggling. This is my contribution to trying to retain some of that history and maintain its availability for others going forward. The current situation… The website went offline some months ago so I’ve gone in to this completely blind with the acceptance that it could result in a dead end. My initial assessment is that the database whilst a complete mess is recoverable, and the file system indicates that all the attachments etc are also recoverable. The original copy of the software itself that was being used however is not, this is something that I’m still assessing going forward. So given the situation I am confident at this stage with some considerable effort the content can be restored and live on the internet once again.