1. Tell us a little about yourself. (interests, location, age, credit card numbers, etc) 
Ahh where to start, well as most know I live in Perth Australia with my wife, I was originally from the country but moved to the city while young for better schooling (didn’t help... lol) I’m 26 years old but feel 40 after working years in the IT industry. As you could of guessed I love building websites and everything that goes with it, when I’m not playing with the site I’m usually out terrorizing the locals on my new bike, it's a Yamaha R1 and will probably be the death of me. Credit card? Sure it's 4564 587... Yeah right!
2. You have been heading up the FUO website, along with AZZ, for a long time. What are some of the funniest things to happen since you have been doing this?
Heck that’s a tough one, as there are several things that come to mind, first would probably be when I added Alice to the site, for those that don’t know Alice is an AI powered bot that would attempt to hold a conversation with you in a topic, due to AI being pretty stupid at the moment the conversations it produced always bought a smile to my face.Second would have to be thread over track copyrights, it went to 50 posts in a couple of hours. Basically everyone jumped on the bandwagon, the datacenter we were with at the time got "cease and desist" letters sent to them. May not have been funny at the time but looking back it makes me smile.
3. You have recently started running again. Why the absence and why the return now?
Actually I only came back by mistake; when I added DTR2 to the recorder it required a lot of changes as there are some differences from the earlier games, I just wanted to test to make sure DTRSC still worked and had fun doing it. It was like I had just gotten the game again, plus I wasn’t that far off some of my old times which definitely made it easier to make the decision to start running again. If anyone hasn’t played the game for awhile I would suggest giving it ago, you may just have some fun
4. Please give us some history on FUO.
Way back in 2001 AZZ and I wanted to start a team up, AZZ came up with the name and we ran with it, we ended up with some awesome racers and were one of the best teams in gayspy, we had a site back then but it wasn’t much, had some skins and setups on it but that was it. I think we had a grand total about 30 page views a month
, over time as FUO became a more permanent fixture in the DTRSC community I started to tire of playing the game and decided to start focusing on the website. We got our domain name some hosting and we were set to go, the site took off within about 6 months, AZZ came up with the plan of the FAST 10 comp which went well until our host decided to pull the plug on us for excess traffic, mainly from the downloads section as we had about 200 odd files on there. It was at this time that the FUO website really started to heat up as I splurged and got a dedicated server for the site and also to run the FAST 10 servers. With no fear of being shut down for excess usage now I went on a spree of contacting mod creators and getting permission for posting there files, we ended up with over 700 files, I also had the bright idea of allowing members to upload files to the downloads section, doing this has enabled us to have over 1400 files now and constantly growing which if your reading this you already know that
Unfortunately i then went AWOL as I got way to involved in work and had no time for the site, because of this the site dwindled from having 600,000 Page views a month and using 150gb of bandwidth down to about 120,000 page views. Only as of about 8 weeks ago I have started to have time for the site with yet another complete makeover which you guys seem to like. Traffic is back up to around 220,000 page views and climbing. I still have a lot of improvements coming soon.
5. For you, what are the most enjoyable things about your participation in FUO and the site?
This is an easy one, it's the community that is starting to form you guys are great
As of late there are a lot more people being active in the community instead of just coming here for the downloads.
6. Other than faster times, what do you see as the biggest changes in dirt racing now than when you started?
It’s a lot different, back in the days of Spy it was not uncommon to see 100+ people racing and spinning bs in the chat, nowadays Spy is dead and the DTRSC racers are more league based or competing for times in dedicated servers setup for recording.
7. What do you see for the future of FUO and online racing in general?
FUO will go on no matter what, as of the recent drive the site is becoming a lot more community based and controlled. Want a feature? Ask for it. If there is people in the community that will use it I will get it added.
A sneak preview into what is coming soon at FUO.
1) All files will be converted to self installing as I see the biggest
issue is that some of these files can be quite tricky to install if it
isn’t zipped up correctly.
2) FAST 10's will also have a series mode added to it which will run
over 6-12 week schedule with prizes for the winner.
3) More stuff but it's a secret
As far as online racing goes, it's going to get big, not necessarily with the ratbag games but racing games in general, it wont be long until a racing game comes out that you can only play online like some of the FPS games out now. Maybe there already is a game like this but bottom line is that it's not going to be free, more and more games are providing the games very cheap and then charging for server access / add-ons / leagues etc.
8. Since your beginnings in DTRSC, who do you consider as the best ever in the game? (I know that’s a tough one)
Tough pffft! Easy... Wheelspin, he's a fast clean racer and all round nice guy.
9. What tips can you offer for the average Joe that is just starting in online racing?
Don’t run backwards!
Race clean, if you can’t hold a steady line leave space around you.
You will see cars going all over the place, they are not driving like
that, it's what we call Warp/lag it's a feature of this game
Tell your friends about FUO
10. The last question I am leaving mostly up to you. What comments would you like to make to the folks visiting the FUO site?
Thanks, a great BIG thanks!! Without you guys this place wouldn’t be what it is today!
cool
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