History lessons?

@The_gh0stm4n and @ ~ Aɳɳ ~ , has this site ever had legal troubles ... because of *you know what*?

Freezer Bunny wrote:@The_gh0stm4n and @" ~ Aɳɳ ~ ", has this site ever had legal troubles ... because of *you know what*?

I can answer part of that question; maybe ~Ann~ will fill any blanks later on. In the era of the old Admin there have been numerous 'incidents' where people filed complaints against the forum. In one of these incidents, the French Admins (I'll get to that in a minute) eventually communicated to us that everything was fine, and that we carry on. However, as per the recommendation of the French Admins, we have started running the majority of download/filesharing links through URL shorteners since then.

What most people do not comprehend, especially the ones who seem to be offended because of what we do, is this. We do not host any copyright-protected content here, as everything runs through torrent swarms and external filehosting services, which is NOT illegal. Morally dubious, maybe, and depending on which side of the political aisle you position yourself on that matter.

Now to the French Admins. The forum is hosted on the Forumotion-network based in France, and we are essentially guests that are being tolerated. We are probably one of the more active Forums on said network, and I think part of the reason that we are/were being tolerated is because Forumotion made quite a lot of money from us in the past, through AdSense and occasionally running some links through adfly. Mind you: that was a very long time ago. Nowadays you can pay Forumotion a certain amount of money, and in return you can use your own ads. Which is what we are doing in essence.

It's just a theory of course (what I said in the previous paragraph), but it's still important to keep in mind that we shouldn't lean too far out of the window. Since the days of the old Admin, strategies from the adversaries have also evolved. If I may provide a quick summary:

~ISP-warning letters,
~internet cancellations,
~copyright-report-bots against direct downloads,
~media/piracy awareness campaigns,
~paid shills/trolls,
~various other scare tactics,
~monitoring of 'classic' payment channels (in consequence of which some people started using cryptocurrencies),
~maybe some false flag events,
~et cetera.

So the focus has somewhat shifted away from the actual platforms, and more towards people who want to enjoy the content. People will have to make more of an effort to inform themselves, maybe consider investing in good VPN services. The climate is definitely getting more harsher against "pirates", and truth be told, it's not suited for everyone.

But wasn't it kind of a short-sighted idea, to start this site on Forumotion then ... ?

Freezer Bunny wrote:But wasn't it kind of a short-sighted idea, to start this site on Forumotion then ... ?

^that depends on who you ask and/or where your own 'standpoint' is.

When this Forum started in 2010, this thing wasn't even about The Sims in the first place. I believe the old Admin himself said at some point he neither intended - or rather, envisioned - that the platform would become what it is today. If you wanted to host your own forum, you have to be knowledgeable enough to know your way around technical things. And contrary to popular opinion, good hosting solutions do cost quite a bit of money. I guess it wasn't really a point of discussion at the time, to go serious with a custom-hosted Forum. Then again, I myself did not know the old Admin very well.

At the beginning, it was a relatively small Forum with basically the old Admin, a few of his friends and a bunch of other randoms. Support was given on a number of games that were popular at the time (Battlefield Bad Company 2, Mass Effect, etc). There were even cracked servers for COD: Modern Warfare 2 and Minecraft.

A little bit later these repacks for The Sims 3 came out, which was a very popular game at the time. That was when traffic started picking up, and the platform became more known generally.

But back to the original question, both self-hosted Forums and ready-to-use solutions like Forumotion have their (dis)advantages. You can't really say either of them is better than the other one, in all instances. At the end of the day it really depends on individual circumstances.