We've listened and made some important changes

And I'd like to tell you about them

I've made a lot of mistakes with the new Visordown, which is quite frustrating really, as I thought I'd be bolting-on more sections to the site that you'd find useful and grow to love. But, by not fully explaining the new site, mishandling some important issues, such as privacy and underestimating how much you liked certain things about the old site, we've made a tough transition even tougher. Many of the bugs have been resolved and this post aims to clarify changes and outstanding problems.

Privacy is the main thing I'd like to talk about and I'd like to make this clear:

- We will never, ever, pass on your email address and personal information to any 3rd party.
- We do not have rights to anything you contributed to Visordown before this launch onto the new site, other than to keep publishing it on Visordown.

We've had lots of heated debate about the Terms & Conditions and quite rightly so: I appreciate all the feedback you've given me and it's because of this, I hope that now we've addressed the issues.

There were also some tech issues with your personal profiles: I take the flak on that, sorry. We’ve now ironed out those problems and it's easy to opt-in or opt-out as you see fit. It should always have been this easy.

A bit more about privacy :-

I'd like to make it clear that neither Visordown nor Magicalia will ever pass your personal information to any 3rd party, and any emails with information from 3rd parties will be sent from us at Visordown.com. On the old Visordown, we had an “admin” mailing list, which I used to send out BugSplat, and with the new setup we have other settings so you can control what sort of emails you receive from us. In 7 years of Visordown, I've always kept true to my word, where other biker sites have made their data available to the highest bidder.

About competitions

The single exception to our not passing your data to another company is where you enter competitions that specifically say something like 'By entering this competition you agree that Yamaha* may retain and use your data submitted as part of this competition' *or whoever sponsors the competition.

This would be a clear statement on the competition-entry page and would not affect any of your settings elsewhere on the site.

A bit more about copyright :-

As I said, any contributions you made to Visordown pre-2008 do not fall under the new T&Cs. Any new forum content that we publish in TWO magazine will only come from Visordown’s TWO forum. If we ever wanted to print other content in TWO or elsewhere we would be sure to confirm that you were happy for us to do this.

Just like on the old site, content published on Visordown can be viewed outside of Visordown via web feeds such as RSS etc.

All this has impacted on Visordown's reputation as a trustworthy site. We've changed the Terms & Conditions by updating the wording on the 3rd party opt-in and we’re now working hard to move Visordown forward. Yes we need to make it pay - that's normal and has been the case for years - but we're keeping the same ethos; listening to what you have to say and adapting with you.

I want you to help me grow Visordown to be stronger than it ever was and judging by the 150+ user Bike Reviews you've already posted, you're up for it as much as I am!

Thanks for taking time to read this,

Ben