ModBot's shouts are human-operated by someone who won a bet with me many years back. I shall not reveal who, but it's not me.

By the way I've just started up a new site about possible future developments/events/technologies which might interest some of you. It updates daily, I've got the first 60 articles picked out already.

^ For empty domains that may never have had any content or search engine ranking, those are extreme rip-off prices too. thephilosophyforum.com is at least as good a domain name as any of those, and I suspect you guys didn't pay thousands for it.

The problem with sharing a backup of PF is legal issues. If we share it, I wouldn't be surprised if the one thing the owners bother to do is sic lawyers on us. Also it's a couple gigabytes of SQL which isn't very easy to make use of except when presented in the format of a forum, which makes lawyers ever more likely.

You have a copyright to your own posts, so those aren't an issue... but anyone else's are.

It is really depressing to look over there.

To work decades for a $20,000 pay off makes no sense except as a desperate act when in need of a quick payout. — Hanover

It wasn't work, it was fun, and I never expected it to have resale value. But when I realized it did, and that it could buy me 2 more years to try to figure out how to reinvent myself, and I hadn't been as actively into it lately anyway, and I had perhaps a month in which to get that deal done before running out of money... couldn't pass it up. Not that it was an easy decision or one that I don't regret sometimes considering the outcome.

Anyone could do the math and realize that the ads wouldn't cover the cost of labor or server space, much less lead to recovery of the initial investment. — Hanover

It probably could've brought in at least $200 a month in ad revenue without being exceptionally obnoxious. And hosting costs might've been mitigated for a company that owns a bunch of forums and shares resources. But yeah there wouldn't be much left to pay for their time.

I think what has happened is, it has a huge amount of custom code which got built over the period of a decade, now that major problem appeared the new ownership doesn't have the skills to fix the problems. — Wayfarer

Actually it has almost no custom code. They just can't seem to keep parts of the database from crashing, for some reason, perhaps suggesting they've stuck it on an overloaded web server. Well, perhaps the main problem is that if it does crash they don't bother to look in and fix it for weeks.

If they ever reported any software issues to me, I would -- as the software developer -- of course quickly fix them. They haven't, so if they're having any software problems they don't seem to have any desire to fix them.

I doubt they've recouped their investment since the transaction and the slow upkeep doesn't bode well for site activity in the future. Is there some ulterior business model at work that doesn't involve ad revenue? — Nils Loc

Don't underestimate the possibility that rich kids can be incredibly stupid and wasteful with their investments and then quickly get tired of them and move on to the next exciting thing, too. Even if they had an ulterior revenue source, squandering the ad revenue was still stupid.

The only way a computer is going to guess your password is if it's a really bad password, and password crackers have the same chance of guessing your password whether they have the database or not. Hashed passwords do not help the guessing.

And libel lawsuits can happen whether justified or not. I'm not a lawyer but I'd think anyone involved in any official way with this site should be very careful not to actually accuse Porat of a crime for which he was technically found innocent, or this site might be targeted over it? But lawyers feel free to correct me.

Obviously I'm not suing anyone.

A different bidder, who didn't win the bidding, told me that he felt PF would make $350 a month from a single banner ad per page. The site gets a lot of traffic, advertising is a very practical plan. If they market the site better than I did (not hard) and grow the traffic, that number would shoot up. If you look at his linkedin page and his company, advertising is what he does so obviously that's his plan.

Frankly there's a lot more money to be made honestly with PF than dishonestly -- the user data has negligible marketing value except for maybe the posters who used their real names as usernames. And if he were able to get the passwords (which he can't) it would be stupid to use PF's database for hacking people when that makes it much easier to trace back to him and costs a great deal more than if he hacked a database or purchased a black market database. Hackers do not purchase websites, they don't need to.

If I were him, I'd probably limit you to one PM a day.

I'd suppose that from his point of view it's slander to bring up an incident for which he was found not guilty to make the implication that he was guilty. I doubt that it qualifies legally as slander, of course, as long as nobody actually outright says that he was guilty.

Fact is, on 99% of the internet, forum admins will delete any posts that attempt to encourage people to leave their site. I was banned from a forum once just for talking to a friend of mine who was involved with a "rebel" alternative forum even though I didn't complain nor promote the alternative myself. Forum owners panic to try to stop an exodus, it's natural even if I don't agree with it. I've let him know in no uncertain terms that I disagree with it and that I think he needs to understand PF's culture of transparency, but I think the wisest course of action is to stop publicly antagonizing him. He's unlikely to moderate anything else.

It seemed likely that Distortion wasn't going to be able to keep footing the $300+ monthly hosting bills much longer with the bad financial situation he's in which had already forced him to beg for donations a couple months ago (and he was behind on payments again already, I know because I get the automatic emails his host sends to complain about non-payment), and I was a month and a half from bankruptcy myself, and there were no donations to PF for the last couple months (donation fatigue from Distortion's hosting drive presumably), so if I'd kept PF I would've had to put ads on it anyway and I didn't want to be the one to do that. If it has to be monetized, let people who monetize forums for a living do it. I'd been doing very little with PF in recent years anyway, it was coasting on momentum, it was probably only a matter of time before it went into decline so fresh owners with marketing skills may yet keep it going in some form, even if not the old form. I wish it had been to a buyer with less controversy, but it was the appropriate time to move on.

13 years is a long time. Nothing can go on forever without change. At least this way it goes on in some form. And if you want non-profit, well, it looks like jamalrob has created that here and I hope he can keep it going as many years as I did.

To clarify the licenses thing: I provided him with the licenses to use the copies of the WSN scripts which PF uses, that's just a natural part of selling PF.

the old PF did not peak for many years. — The outlaw Josey Wales

Maybe so according to the notion that more = better, but the most fun times I had at PF were in '02-'05. For me, the discussions were more fun precisely because there were few enough people that I could actually read a whole thread instead of having to skim 10 pages super-quick. And it was possible to get a good back and forth going with someone. Why bother to post if there are going to be too many replies to engage with?

Libel against another website's owners is not a good way to get started. I suspect they have lawyers. And I find it very far-fetched that they're after anyone's password, especially since they'd expect passwords to be hashed.

Wuli was Mr. "existence is demonstrably paradoxical". If you've read one of his posts, frankly I think you've read them all. As far as I know he just drifted away the way most people do, he was most active around 2005 or so.

Ah, you mean VM.US. That account was deleted, not banned. Deletion doesn't leave a record.

I'll wait until he deletes an account that wasn't created specifically for the purpose of criticizing him before I draw any conclusions. At any rate, I get the feeling that Eric is just a business guy who won't be around much once people stop talking about him and Nik will be the one interested in running PF. That would be a good thing.

Please tell me the username so I can check it out quickly. I'm doubtful they have the technical skills to rewrite my forum script to remove the ban record.

I see no record of anybody being banned by the new management. All bans this month are by StreetlightX. Who do you think has been banned?

He meant to keep me on as an admin from the start, but he failed to communicate it and I assumed the opposite.

Pretty sure Nik is a real guy, not a sock puppet. Mr. Porat's company supposedly has 7 employees according to something somebody found.

As for the deleted threads, I've let Mr. Porat know that I feel he's failing to understand PF's culture of transparency of moderation and is endangering his investment by such actions. But he feels he's being slandered. Will have to wait and see if he can be convinced to address his past productively.