I remember when I first joined what is now the Autopia Forum, it was called "Truth in Detailing" ...
That's not exactly right. Not to lecture...but Autopia.org was extant from 1999, I believe, I joined there in 2004. It was owned by David Bynon, who ran the affiliated Autopia Car Care web store. Todd Helme was one of the early picture-heavy thread posters, (this was way back when he had a high end detailing business called Bella Machina), and suddenly a lot of Classic Motoring Accessories/Proper Auto Care (CMA/PAC) started showing up in his threads.
David B. didn't like that since CMA was a competitor, so he banned him. It turned out Todd had started working at CMA in some capacity. In...retaliation? Todd started the Truth In Detailing (TID) forum as an adjunct to the CMA/PAC store.
In 2006 (I think), Palm Beach Motoring Accessories, the parent of Autogeek, started this forum. There was also another forum called Detail City, owned by Dwayne McPeeks (I'm not sure he was the founder of the forum, but he ended up with it). In around 2010, David B sold his Autopia holdings, selling Autopia.org to 3D (Tunch), and Autopia Car Care (ACC) was absorbed into Four Star/Premium Finish Care, who was the manufacturer of the Ultima and Sonus lines for ACC.
Somewhere in that time frame, Dwayne came to work at Autogeek, and Four Star sold the ACC store to PBMA (which somewhere along the way became Palm Beach Motoring Group, PBMG). Since 3D owned the autopia.org forum, and PBMG wanted to have a forum associated with the ACC store, they agreed to buy Detail City from Dwayne, and rename it AutopiaForums.com
Autopia Forums was launched with some fanfare and attracted a number of new users. I think the next event was CMA went out of business, and the IP was purchased by PBMG, which included the Blackfire brand. At that point Todd Helme came to work at PBMG, and the TID forum was folded into AutopiaForums. After Tunch got tired of Autopia.org, and after a lot of forum bitching about two forums having the same name and which was the "real" Autopia, Tunch agreed to sell Autopia.org to PBMG, at which point Autopia.org and AutopiaForums.com (consisting of Autopia Forums, Detail City and Truth in Detailing) were folded together into Autopia.org.
Anyway, excuse my verbosity, it's just that Autopia was Autopia, Truth In Detailing didn't become Autopia, TID came along later.
I should mention there was at one time a store associated with Detail City, I don't remember if it was called Detail City or something else, I was never a member of DC, I just used to lurk there. It was a Poorboy-heavy forum.