VerticalScope Inc Headed toward Bankruptcy?

ActorMike said:
Our forum is doing just fine, even index in Gemini!
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I remembered this post as something I was not expecting (at all) just occurred with Google.

Yesterday one of our community members posted a series of photos about a particular subject with an overview of the subject. I was interested in learning more about it so off to Google I went. The AI Overview result includes a handful of bullet points with links back to their sources. And.... bullet #5 was a link to our community to the post about it. (Correction: Bullets 2, 3, 4, & 5 all point back to us! Woot! 😲)

*****

I know, I know, it has no bearing on the back-and-forth some of you guys are having, but I still thought it was cool to see our little community being included in the results with a link back.
 
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15 years ago vertical scope offered me a stoopid amount of money for my forum and I didn't sell. The forum was not a business venture but a way to keep in touch with thousands of guys that I rode motorcycles with from all across the country. Fast forward and while we have been impacted by all the other social media options out there NONE of them allow people to have long detailed conversation and include pictures or build relationships like forums do. Hayabusa.oRg has been online for 25 years this year and we still have dedicated members looking for a community and a place to share a common interest free from drama and the constant hype from other outlets. Glad we didn't sell but I kinda wish we had :)
 
dking said:
15 years ago vertical scope offered me a stoopid amount of money for my forum and I didn't sell. The forum was not a business venture but a way to keep in touch with thousands of guys that I rode motorcycles with from all across the country. Fast forward and while we have been impacted by all the other social media options out there NONE of them allow people to have long detailed conversation and include pictures or build relationships like forums do. Hayabusa.oRg has been online for 25 years this year and we still have dedicated members looking for a community and a place to share a common interest free from drama and the constant hype from other outlets. Glad we didn't sell but I kinda wish we had :)
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Hopefully you are using a moderator-added "build" prefix to help highlight those threads. I've been doing that for years, great way to help feature those multi-year projects.
 
dking said:
15 years ago vertical scope offered me a stoopid amount of money for my forum and I didn't sell. The forum was not a business venture but a way to keep in touch with thousands of guys that I rode motorcycles with from all across the country. Fast forward and while we have been impacted by all the other social media options out there NONE of them allow people to have long detailed conversation and include pictures or build relationships like forums do. Hayabusa.oRg has been online for 25 years this year and we still have dedicated members looking for a community and a place to share a common interest free from drama and the constant hype from other outlets. Glad we didn't sell but I kinda wish we had :)
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I had an offer from the other guys back in the day. it wasn't enough to sell.
I have made more since.

Sure, it took many years, and the year dollar probable doesn't add up, but i got the cash AND i still hold the asset. That's finance 101.
 
Buying forums is a tricky business. .. the worst part > quite often the buyer (who has the best intentions and no desire destroying a community) gets hatred from many old members, who quite often don't wish to see that the old owner just wanted "out" and some cash.

if Vertical Scope are reading this (I suppose you are, the same as I stalk threads that mention me) > I like VS, your business model (actually, very much), and I'm happy to buy the failing IT forums from you.

Helmuts
 
Anyone know what's going on with VS? While I run my own forum, I'm a member of and monitor a few similar VS forums. Moderation and updates on them have completely stopped. It's wild west. Members posting all kinds of "against the rules" content with no action whatsoever from moderators. It's been like this for at least a couple weeks. Folks have slowly been figuring out that any kind of admin/mod work has completely stopped and things are spiraling.

Watching their stock plummet doesn't look promising either.
 
The VS forums I visit are still heavily moderated. So I'm not seeing this.

What does bother me is that all of a sudden, I've been getting daily "new post" digest emails from all of them, and I never signed up or approved of them sending my anything. This has been only over the past week.
 
Wildcat Media said:
The VS forums I visit are still heavily moderated. So I'm not seeing this.

What does bother me is that all of a sudden, I've been getting daily "new post" digest emails from all of them, and I never signed up or approved of them sending my anything. This has been only over the past week.
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Yeah I also noticed the email thing. Another friend of mine who hasn't been on a particular forum in over 10yrs (long before the VS takeover) just got one of these update emails.
 
We could all be mean and start flagging all of these as spam, but that just hurts it for members who want to receive those emails.

Oddly, a couple other sites are not sending these emails. Or maybe they just haven't gotten around to it yet...
 
Mr Lucky said:
VS relies on volunteer mods from the community, so it is bound to vary from community to community. VS staff rarely do any moderating themselves
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Have to say, on one forum I used to take part in regularly, the original moderators were nice fellows. But since they wanted more moderators and some of the "oldtimers" didn't want to do it anymore, the current batch (aside from the couple of older mods who stick around but rarely post anymore) are very testy and too authoritarian in how they deal with things. Good way to chase members away. (It's like, "Post about this topic in any other thread, aside from this sticky one, and your post will be removed and you will probably be banned!")
 
Actually, it's sad to see some of the forums I used to enjoy being sucked up by VS. A couple were very long running. I think one dated back to the 1990s.

Some smaller niche forums I used to visit were sucked up by a smaller company; I kind of wish these forum owners had reached out, as I would have gladly taken them over. This smaller group though is kind of janky. They post fundraising drives to get money to keep the servers going, and their target numbers are way higher than for my modest setup, which runs a similarly busy forum with no issues. In other words, something I can run for ~$500 in hosting and domain fees, they are asking thousands for. And because we all know that they host all of these on the same server...WTF. And this is in addition to loading up the forums with intrusive ads.

The only way I'd ever sell out is if they offered me something well into the six-digit range, which will never happen. I do have a price. Non-negotiable. But they could never afford it. So in other words, I'm never selling. 😁
 
Wildcat Media said:
Actually, it's sad to see some of the forums I used to enjoy being sucked up by VS. A couple were very long running. I think one dated back to the 1990s.

Some smaller niche forums I used to visit were sucked up by a smaller company; I kind of wish these forum owners had reached out, as I would have gladly taken them over. This smaller group though is kind of janky. They post fundraising drives to get money to keep the servers going, and their target numbers are way higher than for my modest setup, which runs a similarly busy forum with no issues. In other words, something I can run for ~$500 in hosting and domain fees, they are asking thousands for. And because we all know that they host all of these on the same server...WTF. And this is in addition to loading up the forums with intrusive ads.

The only way I'd ever sell out is if they offered me something well into the six-digit range, which will never happen. I do have a price. Non-negotiable. But they could never afford it. So in other words, I'm never selling. 😁
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The forum I own was a result of a VS takeover. A site with a strong community dating all the way back to the late 90s got sold by the original owner very suddenly. Basically, we all found out after the deal was done. Community was pretty shocked to say the least.

Literally that morning, three of us who had been very active forum members for many years took action and set up a new forum and started a PM chain that snowballed. We had essentially alerted nearly ALL the active members within a day and had a seamless transition to a new forum which is still going strong a few years later. If anything, we're doing better now than the years leading up to the VS sell out.

Maybe not the most ethical thing on our part, but neither is what happened to the original forum. It's very media and creative content-heavy, and all of that became property of VS with no heads up. People were extremely unhappy. Many of which went back and manually removed all the content they'd contributed over the years. Needless to say, the forum VS purchased is very, very dead now.
 
Evan B PNW said:
Maybe not the most ethical thing on our part, but neither is what happened to the original forum.
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Ouch, I hate when forums sell out, especially like that. Still, it worked out in the end. The old posts are part of VS now, but the community moved to the new home and resumed life. Unethical, perhaps...but at least the owner got the money for selling out, and the rest of you retained your community elsewhere. An owner can't control what their members do, so even if VS cried foul, it's not like they could actually prove something happened.
 
Wildcat Media said:
Ouch, I hate when forums sell out, especially like that. Still, it worked out in the end. The old posts are part of VS now, but the community moved to the new home and resumed life. Unethical, perhaps...but at least the owner got the money for selling out, and the rest of you retained your community elsewhere. An owner can't control what their members do, so even if VS cried foul, it's not like they could actually prove something happened.
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Owner was not part of the migration whatsoever. I'm sure he laughed about it, but we definitely made sure this was all community-driven.
 
I’ve had a contact at VS for years and they very recently stated to me they haven’t purchased any forums since January and if they do in the future, it will be very selective, at a “too good to pass up” price. Given that and their stock price, not looking so good at all. Looks like the “good ole days” are over…
 
Chris2 said:
I’ve had a contact at VS for years and they very recently stated to me they haven’t purchased any forums since January and if they do in the future, it will be very selective. Given that and their stock price, not looking so good at all. Looks like the “good ole days” are over…
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I think that there's some delusion in the upper ranks that their AI bot, ForaFrank, is somehow going to save them.
 

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