tompoland Unbelievable, these people are like a plague of locusts.
Yes, in a way worse (like the Borg)…they could, without meaning to, cause the destruction of forums as we know them. as they move from community> commodity. It should be clear to members of the other forum now, that they simply do not care about coffee, the community or the members. They don’t deal with spam, they have never communicated with the mod team, all they have done is make things worse/non-functional, advertisers banners being a prime example. There is still the clusterfeck of migration to their Xenforo forum system to come!!
I noticed when the mods decanted from there to here, there were a few, lets say, not so kind comments (from mainly previously banned members), but make no mistake, morally, the 3 of us could no longer put up with what VS were doing to members and advertisers. I’m sure people initially thought it was all going to be good, and it can’t be true…but there’s enough material on the web to show it’s SOP for them.
I have said we cannot damage them as a corporate… which is only partly true:
What I meant is the damage we do is meaningless in the scheme of things, but what we say and have done will be seen by others. They will have a blueprint for saving their community. The most important thing, is to do it as we did…really fast (with signposts to the new forum), before the forum is migrated and before all the core users drift away one by one, lost forever. I was lucky in that I have review sites, web sites, a Wiki and YouTube channel which could have their links changed to this forum instead of the old one. Which will help us until we rank higher in the search engines.
The other area of potential damage is their monetisation of the database…they probably hope to get their money back in 3 to 5 years. A forum they assimilate often takes 2-3 years or longer to die (because misplaced user loyalty keeps breathing life into the thing). This means the database can be heavily monetised long enough to get a +ve return, or at least their money back. They probably paid in 45K to 50K for the forum (possibly more, as Tait made a small profit over the very large sum he paid Glenn). If a forum dies within months, or even under 2 years…I would imagine they make a loss. With few new posters, they gradually move down the SEO rankings and fewer adverts are served because they come up in searches a little less. As money is made by the adverts they serve (adblockers don’t affect that, the ad is still served, you just don’t see it).
As much as I hate to see a forum die, it’s the best thing for the other forum. I am pleased to say, after 3 weeks it’s almost dead, where our daily post count is now often 5-8 times theirs…we had 160 posts yesterday to their 18 or so (of which a few were spam). This post is as much information us, as it is members of other forums facing assimilation, showing them there is a free way to keep their community together.
The activities of the Borg upset me, and I always deal with upsets like that constructively
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