

Ask HN: closed million+ monthly forum coz of spammers, now what? - petervandijck

I just closed (after 10 years) http://poorbuthappy.com/, a popular forum with million+ pageviews/month, because of some serious hating &#38; personal threats going on (long story!). HN: now what? The archives are still available. I suppose Google juice will slowly go down and traffic will lessen over time? What else could I do with it? (Do not want to reopen it).
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AdeN
Peter, as a daily user of your site, (PBH), for over 5 years, I cannot
understand this unannounced decision. The site is an unexplained winner, a
freak, or in other words; you struck lucky.

The whole thing has been a glorious mix of debate, idiocy, playground banter,
wit and solid information for a long time. In my view, you could have solved
the obvious problems by simply having delayed registration, anonymous
moderation, deleting rogue users' IP addresses, offensive comments and threads
without explanation. But I know nothing of these things and I pretty much
stopped posting some time ago because I realised I ended up much happier not
doing so.

Many saw the site as a democracy when that should/was not the case.

You have allowed this to become personal, and the trolls fed on that and in a
way, (many ways), made it a success; the whole host of satellite sites you
allude to was sparked by your suggestion. I agree, they are nasty,
dysfunctional, needy people the likes of whom you should have never bothered
yourself. Their efforts will now flourish, (briefly), an essential tool and
meeting-place for many will disappear. You will have gained nothing and the
response from the peanut gallery on going back would be terrible, I suppose
;-)

I fail to see how just throwing it all away solves things, or is it a posture?
I would gladly buy it off you if I knew how to run it, technically.

Tambien estoy en Colombia y te mando un abrazo, amigo...gracias

Alma del Norte

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Mc_Big_G
I'll take it! :) I don't know why you would shut something down that has a
decent rank. When you run a forum, you have to moderate.

Spammers can be reduced by requiring a captcha and/or a question they have to
answer (What is 3 + 4?). If they get through, you have to delete them. The
absolute best way to handle this is to manually approve each user that signs
up and/or ban users with email addresses from certain domains. (Like ones that
end in .ru, sorry Russia). You will learn very fast, just by looking at the
email address which ones are valid users. I've been doing it for years and
only had a few spammers get through.

With regards to users causing problems, it's your forum. Make everyone aware
of your policies and then delete anyone who repeatedly breaks them. Yeah,
they'll just sign up again, but they'll get tired of that and just go away at
some point. You could always ban their IP too. You have to be careful since
you can affect other users that way, but it can work well enough.

Why don't you want to reopen it? What else could you expect to do with it? I'm
not sure what you are really asking.

~~~
petervandijck
I should have been clearer: spam wasn't the problem, it was abusive users,
including abuse against our members on _other_ websites (which is very hard to
manage). I won't reopen because I don't think I can reduce the abuse, and I
won't run a forum that causes this kind of abuse. I guess my question is
pretty vague, just hoping that perhaps someone has a good idea of what to do
next, apart from just keeping the site closed with archives up...? Maybe
that's all there is to do..

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evancaine
I'd keep the archives open on your site. An archive that large and that old
will continue to drive traffic (and ad revenue..?) for some time to come.

This should preserve your page rank a little longer than just letting the site
die and it gives you time to consider your options.

You could find someone interested in running the site where you retain
ownership but share profits from advertising.

Or you could outsource moderation. As others have suggested, re-establish the
rules, then look for a freelancer to moderate the forum for you.

If you've put 10+ years of your life into this it would be a shame to let it
die. Sometimes that's the right choice but why not wait a few weeks/months and
be certain if that's what you choose to do.

~~~
petervandijck
Yes, keeping archives open. It's a shame, really, especially because I had
hopes for the potential of that site.

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csomar
So you don't want to re-open it? and also you have a 1 million page view/month
forum? (I estimate the unique visitors to 500K).

My Question is: Are you ready to open another one? If yes, you already have
the server that handle such traffic and the traffic that will boost your
forum.

Put up a new forum, make an ad, or something that attract the organic traffic
to your new forum and fire up new discussion with a new community.

I'm just giving arbitrary numbers: Let say you have 500K unique per month,
only 10% follow your ad -> 50K unique, only 10% register and become active
member -> 5K, in one year that's already 60K. If 1/6 is active daily, you
forum will get around 50K post per day, that's in one year :D

Good luck!

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imp
Your post in the forums doesn't really mention spammers, but abusive users:

"PBH has run for over 10 years as a great place to get and share information
about Colombia. Unfortunately, during the last few years, there has been a
(very) small minority of people who thought it was ok to personally attack,
threaten and harass, both on phb, on other websites and in real life, other
members that they disagree with. You know who you are. "

It sounds like a different problem than just throwing up a captcha. Have you
banned the users/IPs of the offending people? Can't you just add a "report
user" button by each post and then have users or IPs with X number of reports
automatically banned?

~~~
petervandijck
Tried all of the above. We can control abuse on our own site, but once removed
from the site, these people would start abuse on other sites (against our
members). It went way too far.

~~~
imp
Closing permanently seems like an extreme thing to do. If you've done all that
you can do, then I don't see why you would feel bad about abuse on sites that
you can't control.

Another slightly less extreme option could be to start over clean. Delete all
user accounts and ban any IPs from users who have ever accessed your site from
creating a new account. That way you don't have to close it down permanently.

Overall, I'm getting the impression that you feel personally guilty and
responsible for the abuse against your users on other sites and are looking
for validation from HN that it's okay to shut it down and move on. Maybe you
should freeze new accounts and freeze forum posting for a month and see if you
feel differently after some time has passed. That would also give your users
time to cool off.

If it's time-consuming to run the site, then tell your users that you need a
few select people to step up and act as moderators, otherwise the community
will be shut down. If no one cares enough to moderate, then go ahead and shut
it down. If they do care enough to moderate then write some basic tools to
give them control to monitor abusive behavior.

~~~
petervandijck
There are plenty of volunteer moderators, that's not the problem. The problem
is that there are a few people that will go through great (!) efforts to drag
certain members through the mud (using other websites) and even threaten them
physically, which in Colombia (I live in Colombia) is something that I take
more seriously than if I were to live somewhere else.

So yes, I feel responsible for that, and don't want to run a website that
somehow produces a result like that... Crap.

~~~
imp
Well, that does seem out of the ordinary for a normal website. Then whatever
you feel comfortable doing is probably the best thing. Keep it going, make it
a read-only archive, sell it, or just delete the whole thing completely.
You're probably the only one who can really decide.

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bgnm2000
I had a forum which was literally 90% spammers (I didn't even realize it - I
had built the site, never actually launched it - then a few years visited to
find hundreds of thousands of posts, which seemed to all be bots.) the traffic
was insane though. That said I figured I could just sell the domain on
sedo.com. So I listed it, and even though it didn't get any bids, it did make
money through their landing page program.

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petervandijck
I won't re-open it because it's too much hassle in my life. I could probably
sell it, although I am attached to it (been running it for 10 years!). Not
sure if it'd be worth it..

