So what happened to Zoints?

As someone mentioned in the Admin Talk being sold topic, Zoints is now just an abandoned ghost town filled with spam and low quality junk members at this point. But how did it get there? What made this once great social networking add on turn into a useless relic that the current owners are thinking of shutting down?

Cause it was pretty popular at one point:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=130946

So what all went wrong?

 

Is this guy Doug Porter still the owner? He's the one that bought it from David Chapman, made a lot of promises, nothing came to fruition. Looks like he tried to bring in his own "coders", and development stalled.

Can't imagine the cost of keeping those servers running this long, unless he's making a killing on adsense?

http://doug.zoints.com

Sale Announcement
http://network.zoints.com/showthread.php?t=3350

Sale Discussion
http://network.zoints.com/showthread.php?t=3362

 

How long have you owned it DaiTengu? You were a part of the team that took over after Chapman left, weren't you? Or were you part of the original team too?

 

I've owned it for about a year.

I was on the original team with David, and I continued to maintain & operate the site when Doug bought it. I think everyone just eventually lost interest in it. The coders became busy with other projects, the community people wandered off to do other things and the site started to slowly fill up with spam. There are no tools to deal with the spam developed into the site. I honestly don't know what happened with Doug, he tried to re-start the team once or twice, but the last year or so nothing really became of it.

Doug passed it off to me, after a long debate over whether or not he was just going to shut it down, or sell it.

I wanted to slowly start developing on the site again. I know just enough PHP to hurt myself (and maybe others!), and wanted to work on Zoints as a way to expand that skillset and possibly keep it active. Unfortunately, a few months after I took over, I picked up a new, very large client and my spare time went right out the window.

Believe it or not,t here's still about a half dozen forums that use the system, and they're kind of active. That's about the only thing stopping me from shooting it in the head right now to put it out of its misery (that, and nostalgia) .

 

Bumping this, because I finally pulled the plug a month or so ago.

I redirected the domain to my (mostly dead) forum. So long Zoints, I barely knew ye!

 

What was Zoints anyways? And why do you call your forum "mostly dead"?

 

Maybe he was dead?(