BossAreaForum

BossArea.com used to be an awesome site to learn about Boss pedals.

I was confused when that URL started redirecting to the weird ad-revenue-oriented site GuitarLessons.org, a less good looking site managed by someone name Florence Munoz... but at least it still contained all of the text info from the old site and you could search by model number.

Now that site appears to be owned by someone named John Holloway, and the page search feature, and along with it the great BossArea content, seems to be gone. Which leaves me digging through the Wayback Machine to get at BossArea content. It's tedious and ugly compared to when the site was fully functional. I am extremely grateful to the Internet Archive for storing this priceless information, but shouldn't we have a comprehensive site like the old BossArea without having to dig? There's ToneHome.de for Ibanez, and Ralf Metzger has brought together some great EHX info. I know some people have posted information to Fandom/Wikia, but that place is a cesspool of advertising, and I think this community deserves better.

Here's my question: Who owns the old BossArea content? Are they on this forum still? It's marked copyright "BossArea" but I don't know who that is or how to contact them.

I want to make a new BossArea-like site, and use information gathered from the Internet Archive of BossArea.com (with copyright attribution), while adding information on newer models. I don't intend to make any money from it, I just want this to exist in the world. I have registered a domain and want to start building my site.

Does anyone on here have any leads?

(A bit about me - I'm a musician and pedal enthusiast located in San Francisco, California. I own 189 pedals, 69 of which are Boss, 43 of which are MIJ compacts. I'm also into Roland gear, synths in particular)

Welcome to the forum! I just sent an e-mail to the original owner of BossArea.com - he is also registered here under the name formerly_bossarea, but he hasn't posted anything yet.

I directed him to this new topic. And I also copied your text in my e-mail and sent him your e-mail address (I hope you're fine with that - otherwise please tell me so!). I hope he will get in touch with you soon.

I think it's really sad that all this information is lost. A few weeks ago I simply wanted to look up at which month the production of a certain BOSS pedal started, just to see that "bossarea.com" does now lead to a website that has absolutely no BOSS pedal content at all.

Pepe wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 08, 2025 9:53 pm

I think it's really sad that all this information is lost. A few weeks ago I simply wanted to look up at which month the production of a certain BOSS pedal started, just to see that "bossarea.com" does now lead to a website that has absolutely no BOSS pedal content at all.

Had a similar experience recently whilst trying to look something up

Would be great if all that information could be saved and made available again (including all the pedals released since the original site's demise).

I also checked the site out of curiosity and this was before reading this thread here.

It was a wealth of info.

I was reading about another site which did get closed down a long time ago, that triggered my curiosity about the original bossarea.com site

Well this one here came out of the original site so the knowledge is still here, and that is what matters.

Well I'm glad there's still demand for a site like this.

Pepe - thank you for reaching out, and yes, feel free to share my contact info.

I haven't heard anything back from formerly_bossarea - people's areas of focus drift with time, so I definitely get it if he's moved on.

I'm pretty busy myself right now - I'm going to wait until the end of the month, and then start building my site. The worst thing that can happen is that he asks that I take it down, and revives his own site, which is what we want anyway

I have received a reply from Borge last month and I think I can share excerpts here:

Sure, you can publish the old files on your site. No problem at all. I re-wrote a lot of the pages in 2018 and might have updated texts for some pedals too. I did that because some of the original pages were direct copies of Boss catalogs and I wanted original descriptions.

No need for any copyright notice. The texts are so old by now that we can regard them as public domain.

Good to hear he's still around and the information from his site can be resurrected.

I've still got the DC-3 and PW-2 I bought from him about 10 years ago.

Look forward to seeing your new site SugarKeys.

That's wonderful news! Thank you all so much for getting in touch with him and letting me know.
I'll make a point of grabbing updated text from late 2018 when populating descriptions.
I should have some time to get started early next month.

Maybe you can also implement the serial number decoder? I don't know how long the one that we have to use now is going to be alive.

Everybody keeps saying that the internet does never forget anything, but that is just not true in so many aspects. If there is anything that you really love, you have to make a copy of it yourself - despite the luxury of having the Wayback Machine.

That's a wonderful idea, building in the serial number decoder. I'm just learning WordPress and that sounds like it'll take a bit of coding, but I can probably figure it out. I'll add that to the to-do list.

I've set up the site, and started adding content... 3 pages down, about 200 to go

www.bosszone.info

(you know, because BOSS uses the .info suffix, and a "zone" is kind of like an "area"...)

Don't share this too publicly just yet, because there's not enough information there yet for it to be truly useful. But I thought I'd give you guys a sneak peek.