KB

Hey there Gran long time no see. Cheers ken

school

The admin team is currently looking at ways to spruce the forum up a little, to give you (our members) a little more interest factor. To this end I am starting to re-introduce member interviews once again. Unfortunately very many of our interviews were lost due to some glitch and I am looking into if they were saved on back ups, however I will still be rolling out new interviews, probably around one a Month. The interview which will be posted up soon is of one of our much loved members, however so I have a continued source of interviewees I would like you guys to let me know who you want to see interviewed. Maybe just nominate names in this thread and I will go through them in the most popular first order. Ken

yes it is bugging me too but we just need to be patient until the software people gives us the fix. Ken

That truly is stunning. Ken

Welcome to RWG, hit up a team member if you want to be set up with a sub forum for mod work. Ken

roast

Yes happening to all of us, we just need to be patient until the boss fixes it. Ken

Thank you to automatico for refreshing my memory, the name of the first board was indeed RWCC And yes Mahler my username used to be much longer Ken

Thank you I have edited the correct name Ken

Great to see you dadog, pop in anytime to chat about old times Ken

As we have many new members on the forums now I thought it might be a good idea to touch on how these sites came to be. The first true replica watch forum was TRC (the Replica Collector) there was in fact a group before this but it was more a notice board than a forum. TRC was not only the first but for quite a few years even after the formation of others it was regarded as the aficionado, the board where all the serious collectors were. The one real draw back for TRC was its sedate pace, which did not prove attractive to those who liked a more up tempo style. To this end a young member of TRC decided to form a new forum called Replica Watch Guide (RWG), this forum took off like a rocket, in fact a visiting TRC Moderator at the time described the RWG experience as akin to stepping off the sidewalk into heavy traffic. For a long time the Replica world existed off the flat out RWG and the more sedate but far more serious collector forum of TRC. Unfortunately things do not always pan out like we want them and such was the sorry saga of the RWG Collaboration 1 watch which was the start of the collapse of RWG. The watch itself was an attempt to 1. Knit the community together more and 2. A special memento/reward for the loyal members, I should point out that by this stage RWG had a VIP room in which the senior members could chat in private with the admin team, so while the watch was being planned on the open forum there was also a behind the scenes discussions that the general members were not aware of. Early in the planning of the watch our Admin (Blade) took over the communication between the members requirements and the dealers. After much discussion on the forum we came up with the design we wanted, the end product which many have seen is exactly what was planned, a redialled Omega Railmaster but to get there was a very, very rocky path. The major problem was that we wanted a clean watch with no brand name markings, a watch that could proudly be shown as the genuine RWG watch with nothing to show its replica heritage and this was a stumbling point with certain dealers (no I will not name them) as profit being profit there was a constant insistence to recycle branded replica parts. What followed turned into a clash of wills with the dealers trying to force what they wanted on us and the members refusing to accept anything but what we asked, and Blade? Well I still feel today that he was caught between a rock and a hard place as by now he had paid a lot of our money to these people to make what we wanted. From there on it was a case of missed deadline after miss deadline until the unthinkable happened, Blade disappeared! From that moment on the RWG admin team and the VIP’s became somewhat a crisis team going around putting out spot fires on the forum, keeping a cap on the gradual creeping discontent within the group that had paid their money for this watch as well as all those who stepped up claiming the forum was basically an elaborate scam site and we also needed to find our way around many hurdles simply because when Blade disappeared he took the keys with him, we therefore also mounted an intensive search to try and track Blade down. A side product to having your admin go missing around Christmas time was that RWG for the best part of the year was decorated with a perpetual Winter theme. The one date that we had glowing like a beacon before us was the renewal of the domain, the admin team and VIP’s knew that if we could not find Blade before this we had no way of paying the fee so RWG would simply cease to exist. Despite our best efforts with less than a couple of months to renewal date we had still made no progress in trying to find Blade and knew it was time to bite the bullet and look to preserving our forum elsewhere. We debated long and hard what our options were within the VIP room, a new forum was obvious but under who’s administration? To this end I turned to the admin of our respected sister board of TRC, once he had decided to take the second board on I worked as the go between with him and my own VIP’s, as without the keys we could not let him into the group. The formation of the new RWG consisted of a 3 point approach, first of course was alerting all our members to what we were doing, second was to move as much knowledge base as possible from the old to the new board and third was to build a forum that our members would not only feel ‘at home’ with but basically a better model than what we were leaving. Unknown to us at the time we had a member (with the help of one of our seniors) going through the PM list recruiting for his own new forum, it was underhanded and it was a banning offence but we lacked the tools to stop him. He went on to form the first ‘For profit’ board RWI, he was also the first forum Admin to openly scam his members out of a lot of money before disappearing. From this bad blood a new forum was then formed ‘Rep Geek’ this was the 2nd ‘for profit’ forum and also the 2nd time a forum Admin went on to scam his members for much money then vanish. Back on the new RWG we didn’t really concern ourselves too much with other forums, our aim was only to build the best we could for our members, which we know is what we achieved. The day for the launch of our new forum was set about one week before the deadline with the old forum, on opening day we had more traffic than any other board has ever seen, the admin team (although a global group) was basically all present, I know I was online at 4am from Melbourne, we spent the entire day welcoming and interacting with all the old, and new, members. Then one week later Blade came back and paid the fees for the domain renewal of old RWG….. Blade did come over to our new RWG, he sent me a PM saying that he was happy with the work we did to preserve the forum, but the reply I sent to him was never answered. At this point we had 2 RWGs, our new thriving forum and a ghost town, we did speculate crashing the other forum as we had the people with know how to do so but in the end senior members who held our respect (Dempsy, Omni, Highflyingclive etc) started using it as a playground so we left it for them and with time others stumbled across it and it slowly became the wild west of replica forums, this was not by design but necessity as they had no way to give moderator powers to anyone to keep the place in check. Obviously many things are glossed over in this brief history but to fast forward a little, it's one year later and the renewal is due for the old RWG again, only this time Blade did not come back. Being the civil types we are here on RWG (the real RWG) when the old board died we set up a sub forum for the members of the old site on our board so they could stay together until they could launch a new forum of their own. This is an important point to understand, if we did not give them a way to keep their people together they would have scattered far and wide and there would have been no point for a new forum. So now we come to the current situation, we have this board that imported all the original members and knowledge base from our home in an attempt to save it and we have the jr RWG started up with no member more than a year old or with anything even resembling what the original forum stood for. Still all water off a duck's back as far as we are concerned, on day one of our forum we discussed the path we wanted to take within the admin area and we have always stayed true to that path and we are very happy with what we have built. We could get upset with petty things like ‘the knitting club’ comment but we always set out with a ‘less is more’ approach and we find that has attracted the more serious and mature collector so if you enjoy the joke, knock yourself out…then of course we could point out that the member who created the comment was banned from every forum under a previous incarnation and for reasons that every rep collector despises and who has been a sworn enemy of our forum long before the RWG jr came to be. Yes there are forums I have not covered Watch Trader is one, they formed to give us a place to sell watches when we suspended sales on the original RWG due to brand name lawyer attacks, however WT closed doors when we started the new RWG, their Admin told me he was just doing a service which was not needed once we started afresh. There was also a forum that spun off Rep Geek after the Admin Julio did a runner with members' money, the forum name evades me at this time. Just a quick wrap; the majority of members travel to all boards and that is the way it should be, one of the founders of the other RWG (trailboss) who is now the admin of RWI is an Aussie who I have shared beers with and would do so again, these forums are in fact hobby boards and as we are provide the same thing we should all be able to co-exist. Yes there will always be a clash with the names, the name is ours we used it for years on the old forum and we used it for around a year and a half once we started the new forum, others can tell themselves anything they want to believe. Ken

Lovebug

at the end of the day it is the love of watches not brands that matters. Ken

dead

So you had a slash and a blast Stu....oh wait I need to read that again Ken

composition

cry

Christmas

putt

company

This watch is travelling triangular shipping yes? If so the signing in the UK is the forwarder, if the forwarder is Chinese (although this should not apply in the UK) there is a chance he just downed tools for CNY which basically ran for the 18th of Jan to the 13th of Feb. I would contact your dealer to ask him for clarification. Ken

Hey welcome to the team Stay out of my office But hey honestly welcome Ken

still the experts are here so you did the right thing. Ken

reprimand