Seen this site yet? Taiwan Fun.com
It’s Taichung based, but you can give ratings to the establishments listed on there and write your own reviews, a pretty cool feature.
Amateur design (even worse than “This month in Taiwan”) – actually so bad I refuse to keep the magazine in my apartment out of sheer disgust … crass house ads, brown-nosing pub/restaurant reviews … In short, what a shameful waste of trees.
I visited the website you mentioned and tried to find information about the “September issue”, “September activities”, and other current data, but couldn’t find any.
Am I looking in the wrong place or what? Please advise. According to the local news reports, today is September 1st.
I notice Taiwanfun.com now has a community feature which looks remarkably similar to Forumosa.com… it’s not very active though.
Is the site worth much besides that?
Taiwanfun.com actually originates from what was once a Taichung-based magazine and now is a group of magazines; Taiwan Fun for Taipei & the north, Compass for Taichung and FYI South for the south. The magazines are written by expats and Taiwanese in equal proportions. They have reviews of new restaurants, teashops, art places and articles about interesting places, new music and movies etc. They also have pretty good directory , ‘what’s on’ and free small ad sections. They are definitely a good resource.
The website (which has island-wide info as well as info related to the various local magazines) is also useful and has the small ads, part of the directory and some of the articles from the magazines. There are some broken links if you want older information though.
I haven’t seen the forum yet - last time I looked it wasn’t up yet.
The magazine (Compass), is pretty useful to keep up on new places for fun. Also reminds me about some of the older ones I haven’t been to in a while. Excellent for those just arrived in Taichung, some useful addresses, tel numbers, has a pull out map of the city etc. Website isn’t so useful but nice to look at.
I like this magazine, but the cover bothers me. “Taiwan,” “fun” and the map of Formosa with a symbol around, all superimposed over one another. Seriously, the mag has a large distribution, blow a few bucks and get the cover redesigned. It’ll probably pay for itself with a bit more advertising…
It’s up now. I went over there and made a post the other day. It seems pretty dead though. In fact nobody has even posted there for a few days. Anyway here’s the link: taiwanfun.com/phpBBen/index.php
I popped over to Taiwanfun’s forum (taiwanfun.com/community/community.htm) and discovered the front page had been hacked by Brazilian hackers. There is a (hopefully Photoshopped) picture of a baby with funky face piercings. The text is reproduced below (the Portuguese at the bottom means ‘Karina, have I told you I love you today?’). The unkind might say that it is more interesting than anything else that has happened on that page recently. Actually, the guys that run the site are pretty busy and I think don’t have much time to promote the forum. I still hope it takes off before long.
[root@gct-taiwan root]# uname -a;id;uptime
Linux gct-taiwan.com 2.4.20-19.7 #1 Tue Jul 15 13:44:14 EDT 2003 i686 unknown
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),1(bin),2(daemon),3(sys),4(adm),6(disk),10(wheel)
7:50pm up 3 days, 11:24, 0 users, load average: 0.08, 0.03, 0.01
We are: hellsink, BiSoN, M47R1X
Contact: hellsink@mail.com
Irc: BloodBR in irc.brasnet.org #bloodbr
Grettz: zEDeA, Smurf_RedHat, extreme_boy, spabam, T3cHn0_M4n, ^BiA^, SgA3
Karina eu j
The magazine is very useful, but so many phone numbers and addresses of listed bars, restuarants, etc are wrong and never updated. What a pity ! Can somebody ask the editors to do a check ?
I think the taichung compass magazine is great. I mostly use it to see what new restaurants have opened or what’s new about town. The only problem is that so many places go under six months after they’ve opened. It must be a heck of a job keeping track of them all.
The download version of compass is cool. The pages look exactly like they do in the mag and you turn the pages by clicking on them.
Taiwanfun may not be perfect - always room for improvement - but it’s the best of its kind.
My biggest gripe is with the kiss ass reviews of restaurants. They have no credibility. They should say if a restaurant clearly sucks. I’ve been to places recommended by TF and the food has been bloody awful - and I tend to think any old shit is ‘nice food’. As a result I just don’t trust their reviews at all. TF understandably doesn’t want to piss off advertisers by saying their food isn’t fit for pigs, but I think they should hold off on the “mouthwatering” superlatives when they are undeserved.
Ok, will do that, however, about a year ago I e-mailed the magazine several times - no reply and nothing happened. Is Doug a member of Forumosa ?
Looks like taiwanfun has closed shop for good, although the website is still up. Those who remember it are also mostly long gone from Taiwan and/or forumosa. A site that is truly gone and forgotten (I mean Taiwanfun, not this site).
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And the award for deepest gravedig goes to…