Yes FinalGear devotees, we not only have this (now rather dated *hint hint Viper*) homepage, we also have forums!

Chock full of threads and posts by others like YOU making the site a very handy resource. We have sections on Fifth Gear (RIP), Top Gear and a few other interesting shows. Not to mention all the shows that the hosts do when they aren’t making episodes of some our very favourite series. Heard a tune in one of the episodes you really like? We have a section on that too!

Even with so many (expected) sections, we have threads on food, entertainment and tons more, guaranteed to waste your semi-precious time from work or home or simply taking the train (wtf?) to work.

A lot of you already know about the forums, but you’d be surprised as to how many don’t, so those of you who don’t have no excuse not to sign up.

You guys sure love your Top Gear, don’t you? We managed to break our server today due to the metric assload of traffic (we broke all of our old traffic records, even with the downtime), but PacketCollision and Quiky managed to sort it all out, we hope.

So apologies for the downtime, but we should hopefully be good from here on out. Now go watch Top Gear — it was a great episode!

UPDATE: Things are looking quite good. The drop in traffic plus the tweaked server settings seems to have done the trick. Oh, and for future reference — if the site ever goes down again, make sure to check the site’s Twitter account as I’ll post status updates there.

I’m proud to announce that a little over 24 hours ago, our forums passed the one million post mark! Thanks to everyone who has participated on our forums. To the rest of you, I hope to see you help us toward the two million mark. There’s lots of great stuff on our forums including stuff in future Top Gear episodes that I don’t post on the front page (as many people don’t like spoilers).

You may or may not have heard of Garage419. For those who haven’t, they’re an online automotive review show. Here’s a one of their episodes:

Anyway, until now they’ve relied on YouTube comments and their own video commenting system to gather feedback from their viewers. However they recently approached us with a proposal for us to host their forums. They’re big fans of our site and especially our forums and were looking for an existing community to become a part of. We happily agreed as this means more exposure for us via promotions on their site and in their videos and it benefits them too by spreading the word about their great little series.

So, starting today, you can discuss their episodes, make episode suggestions, and more all via a new section on our forums.

If you tried to contact me over the past week, your e-mail didn’t come through. Please resend it. It didn’t occur to me that our e-mail wasn’t working due to the server issues, otherwise I would have disabled the form and posted a message saying why.

Just re-send your message now and I’ll get it. :)

Just a quick note saying everything is back to normal server wise as of a day or two ago. Nice and fast as before (if not faster). Thanks for your patience during the past week.

This is just a quick note to let you know that the site (including the forums) may be offline sporadically over the next couple days. One of the hard drives on our server failed, so we’re only running off one drive at the moment. Backups are currently taking place and we’re moving the site and/or forums to temporary hosting until the new drives arrive on Tuesday. We’ll then reload everything on the server (might as well since it’ll be offline for the drive swap) and we should be fully back online on Tuesday or Wednesday.

During our downtimes (or anytime really), feel free to join us in our IRC channel: #gear on irc.finalgear.com. If you don’t have an IRC client such as Chatzilla, you can connect using Mibbit (bookmark that link).

Thanks for being patient and for using FinalGear.com. :)

UPDATE: All fixed now. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Hmm, looks like our static.finalgear.com subdomain that serves all of the site’s images and CSS is down meaning that the site and forums probably look like crap to you right now. Sorry about that, but I’m too big of a server noob to know how to fix it. We’ll have to wait for Quiky to come back to his PC. Hang in there meanwhile.

This is just a reminder that I don’t post spoilers on the front page, so if you’re wanting to know where they’ve been and are currently filming, make sure to check out the spoilers section of our forums. Lots of great stuff there right now!

Our contact form has apparently been broken since January 9th or shortly thereafter. I had just figured no one wanted to e-mail me, lol.

So simply put, if you e-mailed me via our contact form during the past 2 months, I never got it and the e-mail is unrecoverable. Sorry, but you can always e-mail me again now that the form is working. ;)