TrackMania Exchange

TrackMania Exchange (mostly known by its shorthand TMX) is a TrackMania-themed website for map sharing owned by eyebo and ckjl. It is also one of the major social networks for the game series, allowing users to share photos and videos, post discussions on the public forums, and direct message other users.

History
TMX started as somewhat of an underground subforum on the original jimmy-forum.com website. The creator, who also stepped down from the role of ownership recently, pablito2, said the following in the post announcing TrackMania Exchange:

''"Hello Guy's ! Today I want to Show you My brand New site That I have been Working on . It is still in early devalopmant, but it work's just fine right now . Basically , it is a site where people can share their own Kitchen Utensil creations !" [sic.]''

As evident from the post, the website was originally supposed to be a place for people to share their own "Kitchen Utensil creations", and it was supposedly very inactive, with the original forum post gaining little to no attention. After that, however, pablito2 ultimately decided that he will completely rebrand the site into something new, and it was around the same time when he discovered and started playing TrackMania Nations Forever. The site was eventually taken down, and after approximately 3 years of it being inaccessible, TMX was back up, and with a brand new domain name (that finally separated it from jimmy-forum): trackmania-nations-forever-maps-exchange.com Later, pablito2 would go on to advertise this site on the TrackMania Forum, and at first most of the forum's users thought the site was some sort of malware, therefore his posts were purged. Discombobulated by such decision, pablito2 would take it into his hands to resolve this issue with the moderators of TM-Forum. After a continuous private discussion, pablito2 was finally allowed to advertise his work further on the forums.

It is assumed that around this time, pablito2 met the now site leaders eyebo and ckjl. They all continued on improving the website, with ckjl putting most of the work at the early stages of TMX. A while later, the home page was finally finished, and it is assumed that due to the nostalgia it brings the community along with the creators, the home page is still unchanged since circa 2008.

Site name
When the site was launched back in 2003, it was originally not called TrackMania Exchange, but rather KUM (presumably Kitchen Utensil Mania). The 4 users who saw the original announcement post were shocked by the naming choice of his creation, as they thought that pablito2 was advertising an adult movie website. As one user's forum post reads:

"what is wrong with you? you can't share that kind of stuff here! nope! not on this site! nuh-uh! not here! not the place! stop it!"

After pablito2 realised this mistake, he quickly renamed and rebranded the site and the domain to be kitchen-utensil-exchange.com. This saved pablito2 from being banned from the jimmy-forum website, as multiple forum moderators privately messaged him to ask for change of the domain name of the website he was sharing publicly, and threatened pablito2 with a ban from jimmy-forum should that not be done.

Impossible maps
After the site's launch, many a player noticed its potential, and the site quickly rose in popularity, reaching a whopping 14 visitors in just the first 24 hours. These players quickly started uploading their maps, so much so, that the server got overwhelmed and the site completely shut down, due to it was being hosted on pablito2's arguably weak Raspberry Pi 1. After the site had gone back up, players could finally continue sharing their map editor creations. Initially, players uploaded serious maps with good author times set by themselves, but soon enough more and more maps started popping up that seemed impossible to complete (not to be confused with trial maps). One of the most popular maps that confused the community at first was the infamous map "Can Finish ;)?" by a now-deleted user. This map completely baffled the community, as they tried their best to find ways to finish this seemingly impossible map. Not many players knew at the time, but maps could actually be uploaded without an author time, a clear oversight from the TrackMania Exchange developers. It took the community almost 3 years to realise that this map is indeed impossible, and it is rumoured that to this day, people think that there is a way to finish it. Others have reported seeing the Brain team on their private server working on finishing this absolute horrifying piece of mapbuilding and construction.