Life Thread v2.0

VTpaintballer wrote: VTpaintballer wrote: I am sure it is posted somewhere but how is this forum still alive, who took it over? I can't imagine it is still owned by Tippmann. After a short investigation it looks like the owners of Tippmann are still hosting it, as far as I can tell.

Yep, but we're an anomaly. They don't actually run it. We just exist on their platform. The link from the home page to the forum itself is broken (it's missing the /forums.html at the end of the link). It's all owned by some private equity firm now. G.I. Sportz just ported the servers over to their own cloud plan, and things continued running with a few hiccups here or there. They then filed Chapter 15 in 2020, and Ironbridge Capital snapped up the assets under their "Kore" brand.

When the company changed hands, G.I. Sportz stopped paying the former tech support company to administrate the forum. The admin's final act was to make everyone who was on the roles and not banned a moderator. You can even go delete your strikes if you want.

The Tippmann family no longer has anything to do with the paintball side of things. They took their money from the sale to G.I. Sportz and started making real guns again (which they did prior to making paintball guns). They're doing rather well. They only make .22LR and .22WMR rifles and pistols on an AR-style platform.

I find it kind of hilarious that the "25 Years" banner is still in the top left of the forum. It's been 40 years since the paintball company was founded.

But I digress. We still exist because Ironbridge is huge and huge firms aren't watertight, so they pay all kinds of bills that keep the lights on in long-forgotten places without even realizing it.