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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:
What corporates can do when they monetise a forums data
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.
JahLaza I got it, but I was just waiting to group it with any others that come in….but I shall send a paypal ff req out in the next few days.
Ah cool,great cheers👍
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capuchin 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.
Well at the moment it’s free and certainly even if it was on a paid server, it wouldn’t cost 50-100 per month, I have already found one should freeflarum ever say we’re too big, affecting other forums and have to move. Hopefully that won’t happen as I keep it lean.
The one thing I know is I’m not going to sell it…but when I can no longer run it, or no longer want to admin it…all the above stuff can be dealt with as it’s handed back to the members. At that point people will know how successful it is, how much if anything it costs to run, how they need it staffed and owned. Sadly life has taught me that some people are easily corrupted and you can never tell who they are, not geting political,<politics on> but there is a shining example in Westminster </politics>. It takes a lot of resistance when a company like VS says here’s 50-60K for your forum. I know I will tell them to get stuffed and I have to make sure it never goes into an ownership structure where people say…thanks and ride off into the sunset
So you guys can open that complex can of worms when the day comes……at the moment I’ve done my best to ensure the forum has little if any value.
- There are no prebuilt migration programs for flarum to other systems that I know of
- there is no url, we share the freeflarum certs and url
- there are no images or documents held on the forum (why do you think Tait was so desperate to have everything held within the forum database).
- The forum has no paid advertising (and soon may have no commercial directory)
- I’ve already shown every member of this forum, just how easy it is to set up another one and move the entire membership to it, for “completely free”
- We have given VScrote a bloody nose and word gets round, so I don’t think anyone’s even going to be offering to buy us.
- I couldn’t care less about SEO, so thread name changes, tag changes, peoples name changes…I don’t care. All these things affect SEO and thus value.
- I have not formed a company…in my experience, corporates need to pay a company, see accounts and suchlike
One thing I completely forgot to mention, because it should be obvious, if a profit making corporate or business entity owned this forum, it would be rapidly shut down by freeflarum as it breaks the TOS.