Felt this thread deserved a bump, especially for anyone in any doubt about certain corporates and their activities. I did a search on much more recent posts…this thread popped up…only 3 pages, but definitely worth a read.

https://www.ar15.com/forums/General/-ARCHIVED-THREAD-What-happened-to-pirate-4x4-/5-2444381/?page=1

A few standouts are:

I checked out the websites mentioned above and, it proves that what we have done not only works, but was the right thing to do.

A forum below was mentioned on a posted on page 2 of the thread I think as a site dedicated to drag racing which simply filled with porn. I checked it out, because it’s hard to believe they would let that happen, but it seems ad revenue talks.

https://www.yellowbullet.com/search/559777/?q=sex+porn&t=post&o=relevance

The forum above is basically a cess pit now.

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I thought I would give this thread a little love today. I actually truly believed we couldn’t hurt a big corporate, and we can’t really, but we have caused them some irritation. They contacted the previous owner of CFUK expressing some concern…said owner contacted me and said why have we set this up…I told him in no uncertain terms why.

I suspect their admin is getting an arse kicking due to the loss of forum traffic on CFUK. When looking through various forums that talk about Borg acquisitions, it does appear that resistance is not futile. Not all forums die and some are successfully assimilated. Of course some do die….and their remnants can be found for those who look. Some I couldn’t find, my assumption, when the cost of running the forum exceeded the ad revenue…a forum is simply closed, much like a drone is scavenged for parts.

These dead or dying forums have one thing in common, a team of mods that said no…we’re off and we will start our own forum. The old forum looked big, but wasn’t…it purported to have 29,000 users, but it didn’t. No user was ever deleted, ever, even spammers, or accounts that were made, but never even answered the validation e-mail. In my time as a mod and with access to quite a bit of the admin panel…I realised the old forum only ever had around 80 real regulars and around 200 or so regularis-ish members, we now have most of those!

When a forums traffic drops, then it’s ranking drops, it makes less adwords money….usually a significant traffic drop takes 4 years, so they get their money back and make a profit. On the old forum the same traffic drop has happened in 4 weeks. Their posts are pretty much 85% down on what they used to be. For example today we are set to have 8 or 9 times as many posts as CFUK ( as we have had for the last week or more).

This is a serious traffic drop, and it’s been noticed….it might be that they actually don’t make very much from CFUK, or even get their money back. We’ve done well, and we’re not even properly picked up on the search engines yet…although I noticed some scamp had placed a pointer to our great forum on reddit 🙂 Hopefully these unknown agents are also popping our name/link on all the other socialmedia sites I don’t use, like facebook, snapthing, instawhatever, Ticky something….

Today we have done 171 posts and on target for almost 200 posts, the last time I checked they were on 20!

To the Borg who tried to assimilate us…I can only say

Sure, they assimilated a few, but we escaped….to make our home here!

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    DavecUK said owner contacted me and said why have we set this up

    😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

    Errrr…. Because?

    • LMSC replied to this.

        MediumRoastSteam 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

        Errrr…. Because?

        you and I …..

        Giphy - Episode 8 Nbc GIF by Law & Order

        😂

        Jokes apart, I’m glad we started this. 😊

            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.

              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

                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.

                      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

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                          Rob1 Nicely said - my thoughts exactly.

                            @DavecUK I left a message for you in donations a couple of days ago, just wondering if you got it or if it’s not working for me?

                              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.