Forum Wars, Competition, & Drama

Do any of you guys have trouble with "competing" forums out there?

I am an extremely non-confrontational person, so I try as hard as possible not to get involved in drama. But lately, we've been dragged into a few things that I just couldn't ignore anymore:

When we first started out, our community was really small. There are two other large forums in our niche, and we always happily linked to their articles, and even had a blogroll called "Our Friends", in which we shared their URLs.

One year later, we had a huge boost in activity. We just passed 7 million hits / month, so we're now the biggest in the field. This seems to have set off some bad blood.

One of the other forums began plagiarizing my articles. I thought it had to be a mistake, so I registered on their site to introduce myself and credit my work. I was immediately banned and my posts were deleted. The moderators on that site continued to steal our content. And if their members ever posted a link to our site, the link would be removed (but they'd keep the article text).

I tried to ignore this for so long, but I think it finally bubbled over when a "survivor" of their site joined ours, to complain about being bullied/harassed for trying to cite my work. I flipped out, wrote a really nasty response to her thread (about them), and it quickly blew up into a 20+ page flame war, where dozens of our members chimed in about how they had been mistreated over there.

And then, they had their moderators registering under fake identities to defend themselves (but we already knew their IP addresses).

It was just a huge mess. I ended up closing the thread and tossing it in our "Trash" forum (invisible to guests and forum listing).

It just felt so crappy, being treated like that. Especially when I thought we were all cyber friends. I also ended up feeling bad that I stooped to their level, since my little revenge hissy fit wasn't helpful in any way to our forum's main mission.

What about you? Are there any similar forums in your niche? Are you friendly with them?

 

We did at one stage have a site stealing posts and claiming them as their own. We put the following on our site.

First of all you need to cover yourself in a similar manner.

We asked them several times to desist but they continued. As we have several lawyers as staff members, we then advised the offending party of what they were doing.

In your case you may need to contact their host to stop this, as is your right to do so.
Of course they will probably falsely accuse you of lying to try to cover them selves and their unethical actions, so it is a good idea to prepare adequately and have everything to hand.

Some unscrupulous people think it is ok for them to steal others posts and copy them without permission. We see quite a lot of this recently.

 

Thank you so much for your response Big Al! We have since added a fair us notice - although I doubt that'll stop them. My book is copyright protected too, and they've pulled content from that as well. We have a lawyer on our admin team who wrote a legal document, which seemed to help.

That's a great idea to contact the host, I hadn't thought of that! Off to play with the whois database

I'm sorry you've been struggling with the same thing. It's a huge pain in the butt, and really exhausting after a while. I couldn't care less about random people copying/pasting my work and forgetting to cite it. Happens every day. What drives me nuts is people in positions of power stealing that content, and blatantly removing the source. And worst of all (as you have experienced), taking it as their own.

There really are some jerks out there. Thanks again, I appreciate your advice.

 

@Peace, it is my pleasure and if I have helped you then I am happy. Thank you for your kind words.

 

In the admin forum niche, I have to say the majority of them are very kind and respectful I really have no issues with this sort of thing. Even the few admin forums that are primitive, they tend to stay to themselves.

The most dramatic niche I have experience in the weather/meteorology niches. I have had my life threatened, someone attempted to get me fired from my job and someone spread a bunch of lies about me online. All this because I wanted to talk about the weather, lol.

Did it stop me? Nope... I have the largest and most active forum in a particular weather niche I kept my cool and rose to the top in the process.

 

There used to be other forums in my niche, but they died down a few months after we re-launched. Users just ended up coming back to our site and our community grew. Those forums never rarely stood a chance though because all my staff members worked out and our members were posting machines and we surpassed their numbers pretty fast.

Wasn't our fault that our content was better than theirs and our drama wasn't us discussing their site on our forum. They used to always talk about us and link to our content.

 

Indeed, I think the more passionate niche forum owners like us will do better in the long run

 

I've never had any forum wars issues. To me that is very immature and childish. It's sort of like the fanboys who stan a certain gaming console and go out of their way to abuse people who support the other popular console. I've been on boards that run troll trains on certain forums and that kind of cracked me up. It's just a short term prank that is fairly immature but comical at the same time. That's the only "war" that I've witnessed and I was a passive observer.

 

I suggest sending them a DMCA notice for the plagiarized content. If they choose to ignore it, send the notice to their hosting company and the major search engines. DMCA's tend to be very effective without the forum drama.

 

I know of a forum that did this before and its owner told them to chill out and that they weren't beefing or having other problems with any other community, and I understand fully why he said this.

 

I'm making a forum, which will be similar to a lot, but trying my best to be unique.
However, of course, there will be some 'drama' or competition going on when it starts to get well know, since people don't like more competition of course. So it's possible that they create some accounts to spam or troll on your forums just to make it look bad.
But as long as you don't retaliate then it's fine.

 

I had forum drama of my own for the first year of my site's existence, which originated from an unjust ban of me and it became pretty tumultous...it became us vs them and looking back on it, it truly is petty, immature and classless now that i reflect lol

Glad i have grown up a bit and leanred to stop taking everything a person on the internet says about me so seriously.

 

@Sehun, When drama occurs on our forum, we usually only step in if there's personal insults being thrown around. If users are being civil about the topic at hand, then we usually allow it to run its course. We usually have a fair bit of drama in the summer when a lot of our users are off from school, but other than that, we're a pretty friendly community.

 

Yeah we are in a "Everyone likes/loves everyone mode" right now....we haven't had any trolls or drama in awhile(I kind of miss it xD)

Though several of my users annoy the crap out of me

 

I'm ready to just grab the popcorn and watch the pageviews rise. The only thread right now that is getting a lot of attention on my community is the neopets sold to jumpstart thread. Because it was once owned by Viacom, but they sold it to them. So, a lot of users are talking about what they want the new company to do to the game and all that. I just know that drama will break out eventually because it can happen at any given moment. It's just about a user creating a controversial topic and the other users following suit and replying, but its been about a month or two since any drama has occurred. I know that a hip-hop/rap community that I'm apart of called the coli always has its fair share of drama because users talk back and forth about their favorite artists and who's better, etc., but its a really quality/good community. A lot of users just enjoy arguring there. They have almost 8 million posts. They've been opened since April 2012.

 

oh wow 8 million in just 2 years? that's amazing.

 

@Sehun

It really is, they have insane growth over there. I have no idea how many posts/thread that receive on a daily basis though, but its well over 5k to 30k per day. Their members are always coming up with new content and replying to threads. Music debates break out all the time too along with debates about relationships.

I've never seen a community grow as fast as they have in the past two years though. They have some nice features as well.

 

I have an issue with every forum that competes with mine. I want them all destroyed!

lol but being serious. I never had any forum wars problems. I did try challenging a competitor forum to a poker tournament though.