Backstory: There was a forum for Mount & Blade: Warband that got shut down and all of the most popular users migrated to a more recently created one, but it quickly lost members. I was one of the remaining active members, but it was starting to get stale, and didn't have the variety that the old Mount & Blade forum did. Okay, so recently a forum (name not going to be mentioned) I used to frequent shut down because of "unsatisfied users". Basically, the site was dead. A bit of drama flared up between me and the site owner over things I won't say here, but it basically ended up getting me banned. The owner proceeded to start whining on Twitter, and I responded with all of the flaws in the forum and why people weren't coming (as much as I could in the short amount of characters). I was the only person to give actual criticism to the site, because I didn't give a shit about it. About a day after that, the site shut down. This is an extremely simplified version of the full events. If I were to go into detail about every event, this could have been a novel. Here's the message given to the remaining users when the site went offline.
What is mount and blade?? Is that when a girl mounts you with a blade to your heart? That would be so cool. Obviously a forum like that would flourish.
Long story short, I was a staff member and when I quit, I revealed all the shady and illegal shit that was going on behind the scenes (too bad to mention here) and a lot of people left the site. Extremely retarded people attacked me for leaking the shady stuff and I got banned because of that. The owner then felt really exposed, the start was becoming more vacant (3-4 people online at once max) and he decided it was too much to deal with and is shutting it down. Mount & Blade: Warband is a medieval-style game where your goal is to make the most powerful army and take over the land, all the while being a good leader. Its a fairly good game except from some flaws.
I brought down my own forum, by accident. I let this guy advertise his forum, which was the same kind of forum about the same topic, all over my site because he asked. So everybody left my site and went over to his, lol. Darn.
see? this is why @skrinkle has her rules in place. everybody should take a lesson from this. also sorry for calling you sprinkles. i now know how much u hate it and ill never do it again.
Since you all really want to know, essentially the owner (lets call him Seth) and higher-ups (I was just a lower class forum mod at the time) dealt drugs (eg cocaine, meth, you get the gist) and laundered money to keep the site afloat. He would also buy bots to visit the site for revenue. Seth had pedophilic interests, and most of the time would spam child pornography in the NSFW channel, hence why I said "I wouldn't say that". Seth would keep flexing all of the drugs and shit he was about to sell in a moderator chat, and threatened us if we ever told others the shady shit that was going on behind closed doors. Once I got banned, I snapped and spilled the beans in the public Discord server that had ~150 members in it. When I woke up the next day, I saw that the server wasn't in my server list and I assumed that I got banned from the Discord server as well. I then asked around from some of my friends who were in the server said that it wasn't in their server list either, so I guessed that Seth deleted the server. I then checked the website, and that message showed up on the site. I don't know what happened to Seth, since I haven't talked to him or the other staff members since I quit and spilled the beans. So, yeah. That's the tale of how great the staff of that forum was.
Depends on the domain and/or the forum software. From what Seth said, he said it was about $300 for the software, and he pays about $80/yr for the domain. I'm not sure though. There's free forum sites such as forumotion though.
