I used to check in regularly to see if anything was happening but honestly, I haven’t seen anything new but spam and blatantly paid for posts from the one-hit wonders. Some of the posts I saw a couple of weeks ago were really bizarre, like weird spam from people just trying to start a fight, and people just posting pictures with thread titles trying to make jokes…..(those are what I assume are paid for posts). I’m surprised people are still posting there genuinely, it’s sad to see it in the state it’s in. There are still, a couple of members there to faithfully answer questions about machines but most threads now get 0 replies and a few dozen views. Now I’m going once a week if that, clicking through the garbage for about two minutes and seeing the same old stuff “my [machine] is leaking after a descale” or “my grinder has stopped working, help!” with no responses.
What corporates can do when they monetise a forums data
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Rob1 I’m surprised people are still posting there genuinely, it’s sad to see it in the state it’s in. There are still, a couple of members there to faithfully answer questions about machines but most threads now get 0 replies and a few dozen views. Now I’m going once a week if that, clicking through the garbage for about two minutes and seeing the same old stuff “my [machine] is leaking after a descale” or “my grinder has stopped working, help!” with no responses.
It’s managed to move to a place in 2 months, a lot of other forums they buy reach in 6 years. The problem with CFUK is the number of members remaining with 3 essential things a community needs.
- A genuine desire to help others
- Willingness to participate and share not just their hobby but a bit about themselves and their interests
- No hidden motives (be they monetary, or otherwise)
Coffee and equipment is interesting, but along with that is, discussions of note (Ukraine, Energy prices, Cooking), laughter, Life, entertainment, reminiscing (shooting the shit) etc..). These things are common to all of us and often discussed over a coffee. It doesn’t have to be political and it doesn’t have to be confrontational…just interesting. e.g. at the moment energy prices are really going to affect me…hence I’m thinking about Eco features on Espresso machines.
VS Admin is a paid employee, doesn’t actually care about coffee, the discussion or the way it’s allowed to go. When we left in December 21, there was a fairly instant change to the Vibe, within a month or so it was dead. VS for their part did exactly what I knew they would. The only forum they didn’t migrate to the standard platform was the Vbulletin main forum, because they also own the Vbulletin forum system (what’s that all about)!
I’m not naive enough to think for a second our success is because the 3 of us are so wonderful, not at all, it was because members with those 3 attributes decided they needed a place where they could be part of a like minded community. This was the core of what made CFUK what it was, and it’s now here!
P.S I suspect VS know their money is no good here….the thing that Ukrainian guy on the Island said to the big warship springs to mind.
SiblingChris Funny you should say that…….lol lol
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Checked out the dead forum after a very long time. I stumbled on to a piece on enlightenment on the coffee lounge. That thread fast descended into a pathetic comic farce. I was sad for a moment but I had a good laugh in the end.
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dfk41 Dear Sir,
I am currently a member of coffeeforums.co.uk Username dfk41.
I no longer wish to continue my membership and withdraw my consent for you to use or disclose any of my personal information. I therefore require that you delete my account and all of my details from your servers and confirm when this has been completed.
The sad (from our perspective) thing is that they’re actually right with their response. We aren’t entitled to require them to delete “my account” and/or “all my details”. We can ask for that, but not require it. We can “require” them to delete personal information …. usually. But even that is not absolute. There are caveats about “other legal grounds” for processing, and “overriding legitimate grounds” for continuing to process, and several more.
I find it hard to think of circumstances, in relation to a coffee forum (or almost any other forum, for that matter) account to have such grounds that it would exempt them from the basic right to be forgotten, but even then, it only applies to removing, or anonymising, personal information, not the whole account.
As might be imagined, this is all based on specific laws, and as such is festooned with definitions about which we have to be careful, such as what is and is not considered personal information, and it is even more obscure when it coms to the exact technical interpretation of “anonymising”, and “pseudo-anonymising”, and so on, at which point it’s a matter of case law as well as statute. That’s why I said “usually”. It’s not an area with many absolutes.
This, of course, is why they should be deleting email addresses, IP’s etc in the profile, and why they would replace a forum name with an anonymised name, like a random number, but while we probably can require them to do that much, we can’t require them to do much more. They even covered themelves nicely with the bit about notifying them of exactly what is meant, and where to find it, if we consider there to be other data that would be subject to the right to be forgotten. Something could have, for instance, been manully placed in a given post’s text - tell them what/where, and if it qualifies, no doubt they’ll delete it.
Overall, what they seem to be saying is that they’ll delete what the law requires them to, and nothing more. There’s not going to be much anyone can require of them, beyond that.
For anyone wanting to look it up, it’s Article 17 of the UK GDPR, which is the post-Brexit modified UK version of the original EU GDPR.
Oh, one more thing …. my advice, for anyone that cares, is never, EVER put anything on forum that you want to remain private and not be subject to commercial exploitation, and perhaps as important, use a throwaway email address when you sign up for forums, etc. Preferably, a different one for each forum.
It will help keep you anonymised, but if you’re really serious about keeping basic personal info out of commercial use, you need to go a hell of a long way beyond that. Look up, for instance, browser finger-printing. Keeping yourself truly anonymous in this day and age is next to impossible unless you are prepared to take quite extensive and extreme measures to do it. It might (would, IMHO) be justified if you’re living in a dictatorial regime and doing something likely to get you jailed or otherwise disappeared, or I guess something highly criminal, but short of that, it’s going to be a gigantic PITA, and unless you’re extremely careful, probably futile.
There is also a school of thought that says that the best way to remain ‘hidden’, is in plain sight. To be a short and unremarkable weed in a bed of big flowers. If you start going to the extent needed to really disappear from online notice, what you’re really doing is painting a big “study me” target on your back for state actors like intelligence agencies, who are likely to wonder what you’re up to that justify such extremes. So if anybody opts to go that route, you’d better really know what you’re doing, and do it very rigorously, 100% of the time. This privacy thing is a flipping nightmare, but an embedded aspect of today’s online life. Sadly.
A little paranoia is not a silly thing in this era of unrestrained data mining. And the point of having throwaway addresses if you’re doing something silly and otherwise hiding in plain sight is very astute.
As you noted, best not to put anything online you’d feel uncomfortable owning face to face.
And remember, anything posted online is there forever, lol. Brave New World indeed.
Depressing - but so important I’ve highlighted the following quote - says it all about Vertical Scope.
"Another thing you should read about VS. It isn’t a forum platform. It’s a data-collecting agency that uses the forum as a front to generate traffic. Read the privacy policy and user agreements. Once you log in, it has permission to access your memory, HD, browser history, and scan your network for its configuration. You also have zero rights to what you publish as it instantly becomes copyrighted property of VS. Technically, if you cross post something on a VS forum, and then copy and paste it here, you have committed a federal crime. Once you agreed to that checkbox, you also gave up your right to legal recourse. If they want to take legal action against you, you have agreed that you can’t use the courts, you have to use arbitration…. THEIR arbitration to settle. Clicking a checkbox on VS more or less signs away every right you have pertaining to your activity on that site.
It’s a money and data farm. You log in, it scans your everythings, and populates the page with ad banners which make them money. Then later they take the data they’ve collected and sell it. The average human generates something like $23 worth of saleable data every day. They’re not offering you a forum, they’re letting you offer up your data for sale.
It should be noted that many forums do this, just not as purposefully as VS does. Back in the day, VBulletin caught on to the trick of offering a product (a forum platform) that they could monetize. VS is a from-scratch, ground-up data mining operation that later had the smart idea of making forum platforms as a way to get traffic. In the case of VB, their purpose was to offer a platform and they modestly monetized it. In the case of VS, they wanted to get in the data/ad game and they made a forum as a vehicle to do it."
Perhaps Vertical Scope should print this at the top of all the forums they own. Then those souls who were exercised by GDP issues on another forum might take note.
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Bit late to the party on future planning [also my first post, oops], but to add: in the unfortunate case that FreeFlarum shuts down one day (hopefully far in the future) Flarum as a software is pretty light to run. That should make hosting it affordable, and we know that the community is able to raise money.
Something like https://opencollective.com/ (which is a website that allows entirely transparent fund raising and expense receipting - also one of the ways Flarum itself raises money) would likely be the way forward, and is also a format for community finance which I hope becomes more common. I miss the days of forums everywhere. A charter committing a forum and its database to never being sold, funded by users would be another feature, perhaps.
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lineupChocolate If the worst happens, and we need to move to a paid host, we will find a way. This forum will never be sold by me to any purchaser, and I always keep my word. I am pretty sure VS won’t try and buy us, because they truly hate me and the other mods for what we have done/said.….🤣
I have also built a Linux platform/with screen at home in case we need to self host, I have installed everything but am missing something as I can’t seem to get flarum to run (yet). Hopefully at some point, someone with a bit more skills than me will help me. If I get that up and running as a just in case, we simply need to make sure we point the DNS to my home IP as it’s not static…this can be a dynamic process that happens automatically. In that case we would only need a domain name.
I have tried three times now to get the other forum to delete my details, with three different arguments. I received very aggressive responses each time. So I have given up. Mark @DavecUK comments on what has happened. We are grist in the digital mill as far as the new owners are concerned. I decline to even sneak a look over there, they won’t get one more click from me to support their traffic stats. Let’s hope Coffeetime develops into a more positive place than our old forum.
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EasyRawlins Well from what I’m seeing, it’s already doing pretty well, good and wide ranging stuff and truly (from my perch on the other side of the world in Oz) I don’t believe that it’s being run with the same money-driven motives that it seems CFUK devolved to. I did visit the old forum once, to change my email to a junk address, lol
CafeNoir yesterday I made sure I logged off CFUK and cleared cookies.
It is interesting to see the user names selected. CFUK are so obviously paying for people to post. Folks come on, after all having recently joined and start topics that they hope will lead to discussion. Just now, you had to go down the New topics page an awful long way to find a username that you recognise. They are also resurrecting old threads and sales threads. Once you get over the shock of what happened with the sale, from one bloke who did not give a toss about the forum to a corporation who do not give a toss about the forum, then it is hard to have ANY sympathy
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There was a new poster there, from Canada, who caught my attention. The poster posted about the Behmor.
- The temperatures quoted were in F, but the poster suffixed them with C. So it read like: when the roaster gets to 360C… and that was consistent.
- The post was odd at best, saying how the person is now using manual mode etc - in a very strange way! it was just too weird.
- Maybe yes, maybe not, I do wonder whether it was a paid poster.
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VS bought up Proboards (forum software) as well last October.
If they keep on, soon you won’t be able to run a forum without it being run on VS (or one of the other big 3) software. Think about it harder…if they own the software, they almost certainly own the stats that comes from it and control its development. There are a lot of other things they can do as well….this is not good for the forum communities. When any company owns too much of the chain….of any activity, it’s never good..
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Are you sure VS owns vBulletin? I can’t see anything related to this. I do see, however, VS owns Proboards.
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MediumRoastSteam Are you sure VS owns vBulletin? I can’t see anything related to this. I do see, however, VS owns Proboards.
I think you are correct, Internet Brands own Vbulletin and VS own Proboards. The point really is there are a few large corporates buying all the forums…well the database really. Monetise it..the forum survives or not. If it doesn’t make enough money it’s closed. It not run as a community and they have no interest in the subject matter of the forum.
I’ve seen some forums owned by VS that have descended into cess pits, I linked to one. They don’t care as long as they get new fish and posts to keep their traffic levels high. If they don’t, they will fluff the forum and have paid post creators. They try and find people from the forum to run it so their paid admins can pay even less attention to the forum. For many of the forums, there are so-called “members” who are just taking advantage of the members (,mainly new ones) to sell stuff, or hidden businesses. Often these sales are under the table and not good deals at all. Limited commercial activity is allowed if the forum needs posts. If its becomes busy that is all heavily policed…to make more money.
I have edited the post, don’t want misinformation on the web.