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MediumRoastSteam 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Errrr…. Because?
you and I …..
😂
Jokes apart, I’m glad we started this. 😊
What corporates can do when they monetise a forums data
LMSC you and I …..
That’s a great song by Queen, from A Day at the Races album. Pretty sure when I was a teenager, my mum took me to the music shop and we bought that. 😊
Well, when I started getting into this coffee malarky about 9 years ago CFUK was the only UK coffee forum I could find and I have to be honest, the people on there helped me massively. From buying my grinder to fixing my Gaggia after blowing it up a few times. I even went to one of their meet-ups. But as you say, over the years it has gone down hill and even recently, when I asked admin to change something on a post, I never got a response or the request being sorted out.
So, I went a hunting and found COFFEETIME! and I now have absolutely no reason to go anywhere else. So, thanks Dave and anyone else who have taken it upon themselves to set up and help keep this forum going. It is very friendly, extremely knowledgeable and more importantly… patient, forgiving and tolerant of numpties like me. So, if I meet anyone interested in starting their real coffee journey, this will be the first place I will direct them to.
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Just sent my email to privacy@verticalscope.com to delete my account etc.
Meanwhile a few ‘subtle’ additions to my profile on the old site:
I sent the privacy email at least a week ago. I’ve yet to hear anything back…
Sent one a couple of weeks ago, heard nothing, could be quite a while if ever.
Interesting, they’re obviously getting cheesed off with our requests, as they replied to me next day. We’re obviously having an impact 😝
I sent my privacy email on the 29th December and have not had any confirmation from them.
I know everyone has been sending the privacy email to VS requesting account deletion but I also realised yesterday the T&Cs still say about termination that accounts aren’t ever deleted so if you don’t want it anymore don’t use it, I suppose you could change your user name and email address yourself and remove other profile details if bothered about that, you could even use a new email account make the changes on the forum and then later delete that email account…
SiblingChris but I also realised yesterday the T&Cs still say about termination that accounts aren’t ever deleted so if you don’t want it anymore don’t use it
There’s more to it. They don’t need to delete the data. Let’s face it, once out of your hands, it’s here forever. All they have to do is to make sure they obfuscate and make your data anonymous, so there’s no way anyone can see the data and then correlate it with that being yours due to some PII not being dealt with (e.g.: historic data, data logs, snapshots, audit trails, etc).
To be honest I was never really happy with the old place. The monetisation and advertising on one side and then ‘sponsorship’ on the other. Either it’s run as a business and it makes money from users and traffic and advertising or it’s independent and relies on donations. When you run something for profit you can’t ask people to make donations and sponsor you so you can make more money.
That signatures got locked away behind paywalls irked me, especially when I had links in the signature to help people. Then there was the fact it claimed to have tens of thousands of users yet only a tiny percentage of those were active and posting….but that didn’t stop them using their inflated stats to get small businesss to pay more for adverts.
I just glad we’ve got a place that is not for profit and we’re free to discuss things without worrying we might recommend something that somebody hasn’t paid to advertise.
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Rob1 I just glad we’ve got a place that is not for profit and we’re free to discuss things without worrying we might recommend something that somebody hasn’t paid to advertise.
Absolutely, with no costs, we are our own masters….even if we get too big for freeflarum, to run flarum on a host is inexpensive, and we will cross that bridge if/when we come to it. Even having a commercial directory and areas for specific companies is a cause for concern, and the three of us will be discussing that over the next few days/weeks.
It’s quite likely that it will go and members, who are commercial companies, will simply have a commercial tag against their name. This forum is here to benefit our community…nothing else, and it will be what we make of it..
As for the old place, they have not even migrated it to Xenforo yet, for if you didn’t like it as it is… then it’s like that old song.
If you look hard, you will spot Orlando Bloom (Legolas) on drums
DavecUK To run a forum like this is inexpensive as you say, probably £50-150 a month including admin and legal costs. I say legal costs as you’d absolutely need to make it a cooperative ownership structure to prevent the same pitfalls. That way no one person would have a right to sell or advertise on it, no matter what. The server stuff is relatively easy, you’d want to pay somebody to run the backend (takes around an hour a month), and then have volunteer moderators.
It would be interesting to see if something could be done on blockchain for forums. I was looking into it but was unsure how the structure would work. In my mind the idea was to have a one time only fee for rights to post (token ownership allows interaction) and that way the forum is truly community-owned and lead. I’m not sure if there’s an application that already exists for that (I couldn’t find anything) but seems one of the most logical uses for blockchain. ARweave as the blockchain hard drive is the closest thing I could find, that and some version of tiktok. I don’t see why a forum couldn’t exist on chain, I just can’t find any examples.