Vertical scope has vacuumed up almost all the once great forums for hobbyists out there who are fans of a particular passion. Their log in is a pain in the ass with their password security partly because they used the "other big" forum software that will remain nameless They didn't patch or update frequently enough so the hackers made a total mess of these sites for a period of time which caused the personal information of thousands of their members and their accounts to become compromised. They lost a ton of users right there.
Then there is the problem of the monetization of every single f*$@^!@g thing with key words, banner and pop-up adds and the worst of all that evil "vigilink".
The other thing was instead of directly hosting the images, they forced or recommended people to use services that hosted photos like fotopuket who mid stream decided to change the terms of use and break every single link so none of the images worked anymore on threads. (Very annoying for technical threads by the way). Forcing the users to "upgrade" and pay for their photo hosting account or none of the images would work anymore. That and their damned watermark that makes it impossible to see details on hosted images.
All because the forum owner didn't want to, have to or need to pay for the bandwidth to cover the in-house hosting of those images directly. Some did and made it clear that any images you upload become their property but that causes a host of other [legal] issues in any case.....
One of the reasons
@Chris I came over here was because of the above issues. I decided the hassle with these other sites wasn't worth it anymore and my posting/interest or visiting them has dropped to near zero since.
Pirate, Jeepforum, Wrangler the list goes on to who sold out to Vertical Scope, a Canadian IT company and within days of that happening, the support, personality and friendliness of those sites went down hill immediately. If you don't log into the site to see a quick article, the adds and vigilinks make it almost impossible to even surf those forums anymore.
I guess the payout for the original owners was worth it, I heard rumors of how much the guy from Pirate and the guy who started Jeepforum made when they "sold out" but personally, I think they took away a lot from the appeal and joy of forums to where I literally never went on any of those boards for several years afterwards. I downloaded all my technical posts and content I had added to those sites and stored them on my own computer and in some cases went back through and deleted them on those sell-out sites I was so upset... <My .02 Cents>
I remember when I first found your site
@Chris talking to you about this very topic and that I hope you never become a "sell-out". It's why I donated to your site and will do it again for the JK forum (and CJ forum if you ever start one <wink-wink>...
RR
