What corporates can do when they monetise a forums data

Funny Video about guess who, the comments are interesting too.

Below another forum they absolutely destroyed, funny reading the owners reasons for sale and VS reassuring messages

https://www.newbrunswickhunting.com/threads/announcement-newbrunswickhunting-com-acquired-by-verticalscope-inc.5505/

Just had a little peep at CFUK, saw a post trying to warn members about Verticalscrote. I’m surprised so many people (including an advertiser) don’t seem to get what’s really happened, and going to happen to that forum.

They really ought to read this thread…. because that forum dying, is absolutely the right thing to happen. I think VS activities in destroying communities need to be tempered by people realising how easy it is to do what we have done. Especially when free platforms exist to run forums that are not businesses, and won’t be sold out from under the members. VS only want the 11 years of posts. It was very saddening to see a post extolling the good old days and some Christmas globe. Especially when the destruction of that forum really started the day Glenn (1st owner) sold it a few years ago, rather than give it to the members. I was rather shocked when Tait told me how much he had paid Glenn for the forum…and I’m not easily shocked.

I hope more CFUK members wake up and smell the coffee in the new year, and join us here. I suspect there are still some people who don’t understand why we jumped ship.

tompoland 11 hours this post has been on CFUK … not a moderator in sight.

I think they are being all-inclusive 😆

The paid admin probably has 40 forums to manage, perhaps more…they do need to keep their costs down. I notice they did the important things, for whatever advertisers are left, they have removed the banners links to the home pages of those advertisers, and they now point to seemingly random pages on the site. Other advertisers have been prevented from renewing.

As usual, they communicate with no one…absolutely don’t care, they bought the database of posts, not a forum. Those still posting are simply trying to breathe life into the corpse of CFUK and helping line corporate pockets. It’s unfortunate, because although we can’t damage VS, as they got what they paid for, an internet billboard full of words that act as a net for the search engines, it doesn’t show others what happens when a forum is taken over.

I look through the internet, littered with dead forums, the main visitors being 1 post wonders who join (because a search led them there) expecting a community, and find a ghost town. Forums which seem to survive are those that are either business backed, or where historic data is of some value. If more communities do the same as us, or don’t set themselves up as a commodity that can be sold in the first place, the better it will be for the future of forums.. It’s why I set up a donation link to freeflarum.com as they made this possible.

It’s very difficult for people to believe what the VS agenda actually is and how they make money….but it’s definitely not by providing a community with a shared interest….which is what a forum is all about. It’s why I have not posted on there since we left…I don’t want to give them any more traffic.

I think when they finally migrate away from Invision (which they clearly don’t have the skills to administer), to Xenforo, their standard platform, that will be an interesting time.

This site after only 3 weeks has 3 times as many posts per day than CFUK, it shows how many people realised CFUK is not where they want to be any more.

P.S. dead forums do eventually go down in the search rankings, some of those I found have not had an admin even visit them for months. There is no spam because spammers find forums by inputting keywords. If they are low down in the rankings….they don’t come up. Once our forum is fully crawled by the googlebots, we will start getting more spam.