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ADVBikes Terms of Service... Um. What?

LuciferMutt said:
"The other site" is now deleting and/or moving posts to HE that reference this forum and calling it spam, as well as deleting or moving posts that even quote posts referencing this forum. FYI.
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They can’t do much about personal messages. If you have friends who only log on occasionally, it is probably best to shoot them a note, as to what is going on.
 
ZoomerP said:
Look to their ToS if you have questions about how they do business.

I posted a detailed response earlier, but I'd like to get away from discussing other sites. We're here, so let's talk about making this as good of a place as we can.

I'd hope that anyone wishing to mention ADVbikes elsewhere would have the good manners to do it respectfully, no matter the circumstances.
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I saw your full message before you edited it. Fair enough.

I was just annoyed last night when I logged in and saw two of my posts moved to HE that were only quoting references to this place.

I agree with you about making this place awesome though. Let's do that.
 
The big reason for the mass migration from vs was their tos. They started limiting peoples ability to delete the content they created on pirate.
 
ThePanzerFurher said:
The big reason for the mass migration from vs was their tos. They started limiting peoples ability to delete the content they created on pirate.
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On ADVr, they allow people to delete their accounts, their posts stay, but their user names become some generic number. In the last few days, the older versions of some accounts have come back with the original users name. I don’t have any before and after screen shots, so skeptics will not believe me. I suggest going and finding all the deleted accounts and monitoring them, if you want proof.
 
ThePanzerFurher said:
The big reason for the mass migration from vs was their tos. They started limiting peoples ability to delete the content they created on pirate.
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Yup. After migration their purchases into a one-size-fits-all setup VS takes on a absentee authoritarian management style which leaves a bitter taste in members mouths. So people always try and take their content, I’m sure they’ve seen it all and are prepared to prevent these types of situations.

On Pirate there were several steps to their BS after the takeover.
  1. They bought
  2. They added their ads, changed the vendor section and killed the swag
  3. The first (couple dozen?) members to delete their account deleted all their posts with it. This was a vBulletin feature. They realized that and killed the feature.
  4. Members started deleting their entire threads and that was stopped.
  5. Members started painstakingly deleting posts 1 by 1 and VS changed it so you could only do 2-3 deletes in a 7 day period.
  6. Now they just re-own your content to a fake accounts
With an ad every two posts, and you deleting 1/2 a thread that’s 1/2 the ads they can show, and that’s why they buy forums. Ad revenue is no where what it used to be which is likely why their greed dictates why they jam so many onto a page.
 
I've never created a single meme or gif personally. I've been stealing those for years and some of that shit is funny! Is the Pirate you refer to the old Pirate 4x4 site? I'll remember not to post my SS# in the same post as my girlfriend's tits in case I end up not owning both.
I'm very happy to see the migration of members over to ADVbikes. If only we can keep McRib at bay....
 
ZoomerP said:
Austin can correct me, but this is the nut shell version as I understand it.

Irate4x4 is what replaced Pirate4x4 after VerticalScope bought and laid waste to Pirate. Austin started Irate4x4 and still owns & runs it. If you compare Pirate & Irate as they stand now, I think you'll recognize the Old Pirate in Irate.
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In a nut shell yes, but he waited way too long to implement it. By the time Irate was up and running it was a shell of it's former self user wise. I think Irate launched after VS pulled a major change instead of the minor ones they had shoved down our throats for years.
 
ZoomerP said:
You'd know better than me. Iirc, it was around two years after the takeover before Irate was started in response to all of the "community building" VS had done to Pirate.
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Yeah, VS largely left Pirate alone for a few years, and it was still on vBulletin. It was when they made the push to Xenforo that everyone finally quit and Irate came online.

Funny, and this is maybe worth sharing with the folks back on ADVrider, the thing that largely convinced most people to bail is when they migrate, they wouldn't bring the custom emoticons over. All VS Xenforo use the same set of stock smilies. All the little guys you've used for years get left behind and old threads are left with a text placeholder for it.

Obviously it's possible to migrate them, Austin did it at Irate and here. I asked VS whether their reason for not doing it was ignorance or apathy...and their answer is why things are the way they are today.
 
vetteboy79 said:
Funny, and this is maybe worth sharing with the folks back on ADVrider, the thing that largely convinced most people to bail is when they migrate, they wouldn't bring the custom emoticons over.
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icon_emote_ymca-Ti.gif
 
Sorry I'm just being this, I removed all my notifications to test a issue a user was having and didn't get alerted of this.

You got the gist of if though.

Here is a loose timeline of events from what I recall ....
  • Pirate4x4 was running smooth for 15ish years. It was legendary on the web and in the off-road world.
  • Owner sold to explore other things in life
  • Back then none of us were aware what we were in for with VS. General consensus was we were sad the guy sold to corp, but we were still a community.
  • I believe there were a few spin offs set up by members, but they were slow, clunky and at this point people didn't really understand why they should move just because of the owners. So they failed
  • Then VS started slowly adding more and more ads. Not like they did with ADVr where BOOM all ads in one day. They slowly worked their way up and it made it seem ok to us lol
  • VS's servers got hacked, every single one of their forums user's info was compromised. In the mid 10s of millions of people.
  • The vBulletin platform itself was becoming super buggy and hackable, patches and updates were slow or rarely applied.
  • As all the above was happening over a few years, membership activity was plunging
  • Converting a vB forum to Xenforo is a PIA, I imagine thats the only reason it took so long.
  • We finally got word VS was ready to move the site to their platform via our super fake friendly VS admin.
  • By this point in time, we were all very much aware of VS's rep with forums they bought and people were bailing just because of the post about the update.
  • They put a date on when the update would happen.
  • Given the failures of the other spin offs I made a series of posts on Pirate asking if people want a new place now that we knew about VS. The answer was yes and I had a month to get everything stood up. While doing it I had some mods and members over in the sandbox helping test just like I did here.
  • I prepared a long post about the new site and sat on it until 5 minutes before when VS said it was going to go into read-only mode.
  • I posted it, they locked the site down and the post sat there on the front page of pirate for nearly 3 full days while they migrated data in the background. It was kind of epic. If they gave two shits about the site they would have stopped the migration, removed it and restarted..... they were only minutes in.
  • Damn near everybody bailed on pirate that day and has not looked back.

Since then if you look at their 'growing membership' most of them are people that sign up, never post and never return. I find that odd. I think the fact they have any traffic is because of the confusion of between irate and pirate. People here irate and think they heard pirate because it was the legendary site it was. So .. not only has irate4x4 been doing lots of good for the off-road community, related non-profits and fundraisers for injured wheelers .... we're also giving back to pirate :imaposer
 
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If you post something on a forum, aka on the internet, you have made it public. Any FF can scrape it and use it. You can get 11 kinds of butthurt about it, and it will matter fuck all. It might suck, it might piss you off, it might actually be illegal, but it's reality. Act accordingly. If you want to keep something out of the hands of others, keep it in your head.
 
Any toughts how many paying supporters ADVR have had at its best times?
 
I considered trying to nuke my content over there, but figured they made a copy of the DB right away and could trivially restore things faster than I could remove them.
 
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