Back in 2004 a few weeks after the bike was released, a Yahoo Owners group was founded, I don’t really know who it was that started it, all I know was that one day, while searching the web for info on this bike I came across that Yahoo group and immediately joined to find out more about the availability of aftermarket parts.

It was through that Yahoo group that I met the first 2 XT owners, one being Mick, (Buck) who at the time used to live 5 minutes down the road from me, and the other being John Clark (JMC) from Hemel Hempstead somewhere...

John was telling me that the yahoo group lacked a certain speed of search and info, and being very spartan, email based, suffered a delay between questions and answers, but he told me he was working on a project...

A few weeks later he contacted me again and he told me he started an XT660 forum which was not yet called XT660.com but he asked me if I knew anyone else with this bike, to ask them to join too, and of course he also asked me to join as well.

The forum was built on a very early version of a pseudo bulletin board called ezboard, amazingly enough this is still available to view despite the fact that has been closed down for over 5 years, if you are curious to check it out, you will find it under this link: http://p206.ezboard.com/XT660/bxt66020943

That worked well for the time it was, but it lacked graphic support, it was horrible to operate and kept crashing and stalling and would not allow all the features that we have now in our current forum. I believe the biggest problem was that interfaces such as sponsor links or private messages and emails were near impossible. Nevertheless with that simple enough platform, we began gathering an increasing number of people from all over the world, some of which have followed us from day one, through our many changes and developments into what we are now.

What the forum did then, was more or less what it does now, providing owners with the latest info, guides to modifications and aftermarket parts. However what JMC did, ahead of anyone else, was to provide help to cure a problem that was affecting every owners of these bikes and that Yamaha was reluctant to solve. That problem was low revs surging and a faulty ECU which nobody knew about it being defective.
John Clark managed to obtain some inside info from some sources, probably a Yamaha dealer friend of his, about the fuelling fix via the dash and even obtained an internal leaked memo that showed infact that Yamaha UK had full knowledge of the faulty ECU containing instructions to their official mechanics to replace only if customers complained about it.

JMC did not see this as a fair deal and began divulging these info to our community and soon enough the voice got around and people were pouring in from everywhere to get their “fix” and to learn more about these otherwise wonderful bikes.


After a few months of mucking about with the EZboard, JMC finally decided that enough was enough and transferred the forum and all his registered users onto the more powerful vBulletin.
The forum, to start with was open to all, I didn’t personally see that as a good idea because having seen the danger caused by random visitors in other forums I was always of the idea of this XT660.com to be an exclusive area, one in a realm of it’s own, and for that reason I was convinced that it should be only open to registered members and not viewable to all.
I was only a member at the time, had very little saying in the matter but I had my very strong ideals as to how it should be run and we often clashed but it was always a healthy change of opinion that meant we had all one priority in mind and that was to offer not just a chat based board but more of a service to a community.

With the bike being only a few months old there was nobody in the market who was making cans for them, for example, it was unheard of high flow filters and all the trickery we have at our disposal today.
And let’s not forget that we all had our day jobs, which meant we could dedicate a limited amont of time and effort to this project, it was not something that was there to earn us a living and therefore it was done in our spare time.
JMC’s idea was eventually to start selling XT aftermarket parts and modifications but that project required a lot of money and investment, and it included the risk of diverting our main interest from a being free information service, to a business venture. When things like that happen your goal is to make a return on your investment.
On the other end Off The Road was already a well established company to providing parts for the XT and it would have been very difficult to compete with.

The rest of the story, which most of you know was that JMC was offered a good job down under, he closed down the forum, sold his bike and decided to move to Australia offering the forum and internet domains up for sale.
I certainly couldn’t afford the asking price, so I started working on opening a new XT forum to continue the work and the untimely void left behind by the sudden closure of XT660.com.(Over 600 users left without a clue)
Less than two weeks before JMC was about to depart from UK he contacted me by email saying that as a parting gift to me, he would leave me the 2 internet domains XT660.co.uk and XT660.com and also that he would rebuild a new version of of the vBulletin forum on my own website.


Finally... XT660.com mark II went online once again on 09/05/06 and here we are now with over 14'000 members worldwide, and counting, in fact I am going to have to update these figures from time to time. Of course it goes without saying that this has not been solely my effort and that I was blessed to have been able to know people who have become the foundations of this forum, people like Kev, Miguel and all the other moderators that just like me, appreciate the very essence of what this forum is all about and have been of great support both to me and to the registered members.


Thank you all for being a worthy part of this project and rest assured that the fun continues to go on and the show is not over until the fat lady sings.