Hi All,

You may have noticed the website and forum has been slow or completely down in the last few weeks and days. I’ve been working on finding the issue and trying to keep things online. It looks like it was a bot that had found the website, and was accessing the site excessively that my web host shut down the site to control the traffic to their network. In layman’s terms, there are programs on the internet that access websites to map the information. These programs are called Bots, and search engines like Google or Bing, and other resources send these bots out to gather information and map the internet. Some can do it hundreds of times a minute and access all the websites on the Interent. Occasionally something can go wrong and a bot can access a website excessively. We think that’s what happened to my site, causing my server to temporarily shut my website down. We tried to install a script on my website to limit that particular bot from overloading the website, but we’ll see if it helps and happens again. What’s interesting in our research on who and what is accessing the website, we found Google has been downloading all the thousands of Ferrari images I have this website. I think this is part of the training these search engines are feeding their AI programs. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but there is nothing I think I can do about this if I keep this website open to the public.

Even though the traffic to this website has fallen through the years and migrated to Facebook, Youtube and other social media platforms, I still feel it is essential to keep this resource alive and accessible by the internet. Whether the data gets mined by bots or AI, it is still important to have a direct source to this rare information that we all gathered over the past 25 years. Even if AI plans of repackaging it and calling it it’s own, people will still be able to find a direct human source for this information.

I want to thanks everyone for their patience and their support through the years of this website, and understand I will try my best to keep this resource alive for as long as I possibly can!

Tom Yang