ProBoards took down my forum and kept the imposter site

[auggie]

Forum URL: wikipediareview.proboards.com

I run Wikipedia Review, a forum which has been here for years.  We are at wikipediareview.proboards.com

A few weeks ago a banned member opened up an imposter site at wikipediareview.boards.net.

He stole our format and forum rules, and some of our content.

He made bogus reports in an attempt to get ProBoards to shut us down.

Now my forum is down, with a Section 25(a) notice.

I am dismayed.

Please help.

[Brian]

Hi, auggie.

Terms of Service deletions are not handled by the staff of ProBoards Support. You'll need to email [e-mail] if you wish to have this resolved as we cannot assist you.

[auggie]

Thank you for the quick reply. I did email the abuse address and I have not heard back yet.

I alerted them to the problem of the imposter site last week and did not get a reply. Now my site is down.  I emailed them again today as soon as I saw it was down.

[auggie]

Hi Brian. Is there another email I can try besides [e-mail]? I'm not getting a response.

[Brian]

That's the only means of contact available for the abuse department. Sorry.

[auggie]

ok I'll keep at it.

[sashi]

Aug 23, 2017 15:09:34 GMT -8 auggie said:

ok I'll keep at it.

Good luck, Auggie.  This is really surprising that both proboards.com and boards.net are under the same umbrella and that a second forum could be created to siphon content from the original. 

It's very strange to see that posts can be copied from one proboards site to another and remixed without permission of the authors and yet the original site and the authors who contributed the content may not be able to recover their own original posts.  What a headache!

I'm sorry this has happened to you Auggie.

[auggie]

Thanks Sashi. Yes it's a bummer. Several of us have years of work invested in this forum. ProBoards never sent a warning. I'm still waiting for a reply email.

[billybounder]

Aug 23, 2017 15:41:00 GMT -8 sashi said:

Aug 23, 2017 15:09:34 GMT -8 auggie said:

ok I'll keep at it.

Good luck, Auggie.  This is really surprising that both proboards.com and boards.net are under the same umbrella and that a second forum could be created to siphon content from the original. 

It's very strange to see that posts can be copied from one proboards site to another and remixed without permission of the authors and yet the original site and the authors who contributed the content may not be able to recover their own original posts.  What a headache!

I'm sorry this has happened to you Auggie.

We're sorry that this happened, but its always a problem when banned members from Wikipedia join a review/critism forum solely to continue their battles on these proboard fora and the warm hearted / sympathetic forum mods are not sufficiently alert in nipping it at the bud to comply with ToS.

As you have correctly observed, copyright subsists in the author and not in the forum. An argument can be made that because the authors give Proboards Inc. licencee rights to republish their content (s.15 of ToS), sharing (with attribution) one Proboards forum's content on another Proboards forum is acceptable (like Tumblr or Wordpress reblogging), because otherwise everytime a forum member "quotes" a work while replying, that would conceivably be deemed as a ToS contravention too. The term "Website" used in the ToS refers to the entireity of Proboards websites and not a particular forum.

[The Devil's Advocate]

Understanding that TOS deletions can't be resolved here, I do feel this warrants being noted publicly and I encourage support staff to forward this to staff handling abuse complaints as well as any other relevant parties. This also concerns an abuse issue of its own.

This is the second Wikipedia criticism forum removed by ProBoards on a 25a claim. A previous thread on the other forum, Wikipedia Sucks, can be seen here. One common element in both cases is an individual or individuals connected to a supposed group called India Against Corruption (IAC) claims to have knowledge of a legal complaint filed by an associate. In this case it is "Moira" a member of the impersonation Wikipedia Review Auggie mentions who posted the claims on the Wikipedia Sucks forum, now hosted on another site. The previous case it was claimed to be a "Toby Dollman" who is supposedly an associate of a poster on the old Wikipedia Sucks forums connected to IAC.

Another common element in both cases is that figures connected to IAC had set up impersonation sites soon after these now-deleted forums were created. Here is the site that used the Wikipedia Sucks moniker. Site registration information indicates it was created on March 26, 2016. The earliest archive of the Wikipedia Sucks Proboards forum can be found here in January the same year. Obviously, the one impersonating Wikipedia Review can be found in the opening post. An HRA account announced the site in a thread on the now-removed Wikipedia Review. There it is noted to be a new forum (Auggie's has been around since 2013).

Both cases also were soon followed by efforts at the IAC-linked impersonation sites to repost content from the since removed board. You can see where threads from the Wikipedia Sucks forum were copied over to the IAC-linked impersonation site in this link. Note the apparent claims of "infringement" despite the IAC Wikipedia Sucks being created after the one on ProBoards, something noted at Wikipedia Review by Auggie. Many examples can be found on the IAC Wikipedia Review of them reposting content since this successful takedown request. There too legalistic copyright claims accompany the repostings, though they at least seem to not be claiming infringement.

Incidentally, these people (person?) are known to many Wikipedians and observers of the site for these exact tactics. At the Wikipedia article for India Against Corruption, a political movement from earlier this decade, socks show up claiming their "India Against Corruption" group own the name and efforts are made to rewrite it in a way that seems to assert claim to the movement. You can see the Long-Term Abuse report on Wikipedia for further details on their antics over at that site. Note their tactics have included demands for the identities of users and attempts at doxing.

Honestly, much of what was happening on Wikipedia Review prior to its takedown today closely mirrors that same approach and I presume a legal threat is what prompted the 25a removal. I keep using plural nouns, but many, if not all, of the socks are likely the same person as, I believe, is the case with the many socks that showed up at WR prior to its removal and appear to be the sole members of its impersonator board.

Sad to say, but it appears to me as if ProBoards staff are being played like a fiddle here by a malicious sock farm making nonsense complaints.

[singora]

Aug 23, 2017 15:41:00 GMT -8 sashi said:

Aug 23, 2017 15:09:34 GMT -8 auggie said:

ok I'll keep at it.

Good luck, Auggie.  This is really surprising that both proboards.com and boards.net are under the same umbrella and that a second forum could be created to siphon content from the original. 

It's very strange to see that posts can be copied from one proboards site to another and remixed without permission of the authors and yet the original site and the authors who contributed the content may not be able to recover their own original posts.  What a headache!

I'm sorry this has happened to you Auggie.

All I'll say is that there's sufficient material here to keep a psychiatrist engrossed for weeks. Oh -- did I ever mention that friend of mine at ArbCom? Wasn't he a psychiatrist?

This: 

1. www.phpbb.com/
+
2. www.bluehost.com/
+
3. Content creators
=
Success. 

Losers will always lose. Winners sometimes go astray, but when they get back on track, they win. There are certain software solutions in this world that simply don't work. Go figure. 

[singora]

Aug 23, 2017 20:55:07 GMT -8 The Devil's Advocate said:

Sad to say, but it appears to me as if ProBoards staff are being played like a fiddle here by a malicious sock farm making nonsense complaints.

Fantastic post, TDA.

Did you notice the sock's recent attempt to troll your forum? He presented himself as a Doctor at Yale University. When I exposed his stupidity he promptly vandalized one of my Featured Articles on Wikipedia and addressed me as "Bitch". Elsewhere in this Proboards support section I reported a thread on his forum in which he described me as a "terrorist". Interesting that he seems not to understand libel!

At the heart of this little matter lie envy and deep-rooted inferiority issues. A very revealing post of his on your forum talked about "white supremacists" at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco and discussed what he considered their Ku Klux Klan (KKK) mentality.  

PS. He was reported to the WMF late last night. 

[billybounder]

Aug 23, 2017 20:55:07 GMT -8 The Devil's Advocate said:

Both cases also were soon followed by efforts at the IAC-linked impersonation sites to repost content from the since removed board. You can see where threads from the Wikipedia Sucks forum were copied over to the IAC-linked impersonation site in this link. Note the apparent claims of "infringement" despite the IAC Wikipedia Sucks being created after the one on ProBoards, something noted at Wikipedia Review by Auggie. Many examples can be found on the IAC Wikipedia Review of them reposting content since this successful takedown request. There too legalistic copyright claims accompany the repostings, though they at least seem to not be claiming infringement.

While clicking through to the first link you provided, archive.is/B0cOU to a ToS deleted Proboards forum archive, there is a public admission there by the previously deleted forum's "wikipediasucks.boards.net" administrator "Eric Barbour" that they were running a malicious forum for doxxing Wikipedia editors /administrators and harassing them in real life. No wonder that forum was correctly deleted by PB in the same way the present one with the same members was.

ericbarbour
Administrator
*****
Oct 13, 2016 6:00:21 GMT

Oct 12, 2016 20:16:27 GMT The Dark Knight said:
No, section 230 gives WMF immunity from being sued, and the legal risk lies solely with the editors who produce any offending content. If you can identify the person behind the account, and they have done something illegal under US law, and you have the money of course, then you can absolutely go to town on their butt.

Which is why WP insiders absolutely despise this forum, and all other fora that have "outed" their little friends in the past. And why they despise me.

FYI the deletion of forum wikipediareview.proboards.com is unconnected to "India Against Corruption", you are barking up the wrong tree. Also, IAC registered the domain name "wikipediasucks" with ICANN to protect their tradename immediately on coming to known of its infringement on a Proboards forum by some anonymous people. As a trademark holder IAC can legitimiately pursue their rights and claims against infringers and save the online evidence to their own servers as a warning to others.

[Brian]

Please do not utilize our support forum to air any dirty laundry.

Any reports submitted to the abuse department have been handled with the utmost professionalism. Forums are only deleted under extreme circumstances where deletion is deemed justifiable as it's not in our best interest to lose part of our user base.