I just tried to delete my C!@£$% F!@£$% account and it’s not possible. Legally they can’t do that, but I suspect they are betting no one will have the time or resource to be able to pursue the action. Anyway, goodbye to them.

    EasyRawlins Anyway, goodbye to them.

    Their “improved” software…what a laugh, is only improved for them to monetise the crap out of the forum. Looks terrible now, really busy on the eyes with all the flashing adverts.

    Contact me

      It’s quite incredible the way they pitched the forum software update and what it is now. Can’t imagine anyone staying on there now really

        dutchy101 It’s quite incredible the way they pitched the forum software update and what it is now. Can’t imagine anyone staying on there now really

        You mean, they simply gave it a load of marketing spin which was extremely misleading. Some people will stay, especially some members with a financial interest….

        It might do our membership and traffic/posting the world of good though….which then makes it easier to find us in the search engines 🙂

        Contact me

          I tried to have my profile deleted on “the other forum” citing GDPR concerns and received this. A very long “no” … welcome to the Hotel California. Never seen anything as aggressive … I speak as someone who owns a 1.1 person database. We always delete if requested.

          We are writing to confirm that we have reviewed your GDPR request to delete your account from coffeeforums.co.uk/.

          When GDPR applies and the conditions relating to the right of erasure under GDPR are satisfied, we are required to remove personal data about you – in other words, information from which you can be identified and relates to you. As the GDPR sets out, it may be possible to identify you from your name, username/online identifier, and other information about you. We are not required, however, to remove or redact posts that contain information from which, on a stand-alone basis or if combined with other information, you cannot be identified. Your profile data and posts have been anonymized on this basis. If there is other information that you believe could identify you on the basis specified above, please specifically identify the applicable posts or messages by including the post date, time, number, the url linking to the applicable post, and the reason why you believe this information could identify you.

          Regards

            EasyRawlins This is the email I sent them……got closed within 48 hours, though interestingly enough, I had cause to accidentally try and log on from a different browser which had saved my log on details, and even though my forum name had been changed to 4 numbers, Chrome logged me straight in and I could do everything. I accessed my account, removed my avatar and my control panel allowed me to rename myself as well……so I did!

            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.

            https://www.suddencardiacarrestuk.org/2024/02/thank-goodness-for-madeira-cake/

                4 days later

                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.

                  Rob1 The intent from day 1 of its existence was monetisation. So, the current state is not surprising and rightfully so. I am surprised it survived so long.

                  It is, however, sad the long timers and others still post, reply, hang-in there as if they don’t care.

                  Glad, we moved. 😊

                    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.

                    Contact me

                      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.

                        LMSC Oh dear, you’re so right. Out of morbid curiosity I went for a look incognito. I’d assess it as being sort of an utter waste of time for a budding enthusiast or anyone beyond that level. But that’s just me.

                          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.

                            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.