On June 30th 2022, we moved from a Proboards forum to the self-hosted site you see today. Shortly after posting the link to this new website, @smpratte and myself were IP banned from the Proboards forum.
As we found out over time, two ex-staff members were responsible for sabotaging the transition and made an intentional decision to perform a hostile take-over of the old forum. They went by the usernames DJGigabyte and Reina Sierpe.
Here I will lay out the facts of the situation.
Building the new website
Proboards is a platform built in the 2000s. It was not capable of very basic features like image upload. We had to deal with security vulnerabilities including the forum being put on literal ISPs blacklists, preventing users and staff from accessing the site for months. It was not designed to be a mobile platform despite >60% of our users accessing the site from mobile. We felt it was in the best interest of the community to move to a more modern platform that also afforded us more flexibility in what we could do with the website.
I had spent roughly 3 months working on this transition. A standard feature in forum software is the ability to export post history and account data. However, the business model of Proboards is that they host the forum for free, they receive ad revenue and they make it intentionally hard to migrate from.
Transitioning off Proboards required a very customized solution to make up for their lack of exporting features. Additionally, I produced a custom script to import the data into the new site as well as setting up the new site with plenty of original plugins and features such as the banner, navigation bar, Discord integration, sprite signatures, etc. Frankly it was the equivalent of $20,000-$50,000 worth of development time that I never asked to be remunerated for and probably haven’t seen even 2% of that since operating the new site.
As of now the new site is able to sustain itself financially. We generate a small profit at best, on the order of $100 a month. I can assure you the profit is not at all worth the work involved in maintaining the website. Maybe one day it will be but that is neither the motivating factor for this community nor will I feel any shame in making a profit from the time and energy I put into this website.
I want to clarify something about copyright. Every user owns the copyright to their own posts. This was true on Proboards and continues to be true on the new site. Moving between forum software is very standard practice and necessarily relies on moving copyrighted data from one platform to another.
Relevant section from Proboards TOS:
To clarify, You maintain full ownership of all your User Content posted to ProBoards.
More details...
- USER CONTENT
“User Content” is any content, materials or information, not including Personal Information (as defined in ProBoards’ Privacy Policy that You upload or post to, or transmit, display, perform or distribute by means of, the Website, whether in connection with Your use of Services or otherwise. To clarify, You maintain full ownership of all your User Content posted to ProBoards. Because You own Your User Content, under the law, ProBoards requires a license from You before it can allow the User Content to be posted on the Website. For these reasons, the following provision is a necessary part of this Agreement:
YOU HEREBY GRANT THE PROBOARDS PARTIES A PERPETUAL, FULLY PAID-UP, WORLDWIDE, SUBLICENSABLE, IRREVOCABLE, ASSIGNABLE LICENSE TO COPY, DISTRIBUTE, TRANSMIT, PUBLICLY DISPLAY OR PERFORM, EDIT, TRANSLATE, REFORMAT AND OTHERWISE USE USER CONTENT IN CONNECTION WITH THE OPERATION OF THE WEBSITE, SERVICES OR ANY OTHER SIMILAR OR RELATED BUSINESS, IN ANY MEDIUM NOW EXISTING OR LATER DEVISED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION IN ADVERTISING AND PUBLICITY. YOU FURTHER AGREE THAT THE PROBOARDS PARTIES MAY PUBLISH OR OTHERWISE DISCLOSE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION IN CONNECTION WITH THEIR EXERCISE OF THE LICENSE GRANTED UNDER THIS SECTION. YOU AGREE TO WAIVE, AND HEREBY WAIVE, ANY CLAIMS ARISING FROM OR RELATING TO THE EXERCISE BY THE PROBOARDS PARTIES OF THE RIGHTS GRANTED UNDER THIS SECTION, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY CLAIMS RELATING TO YOUR RIGHTS OF PERSONAL PRIVACY AND PUBLICITY. YOU WILL NOT BE COMPENSATED FOR ANY EXERCISE OF THE LICENSE GRANTED UNDER THIS SECTION.
You hereby represent and warrant that You own all rights, title and interest in and to User Content or are otherwise authorized to grant the rights provided the ProBoards Parties under this section. You further represent and warrant that all User Content fully complies with ProBoards’ Community Guidelines.
Relevant section from our Terms of Service - Elite Fourum - please note the bold part
Content you submit to the forum belongs to you, and you decide what permission to give others for it. But at a minimum, you license the company to provide content that you submit to the forum to other users of the forum. That special license allows the company to copy, publish, and analyze content you submit to the forum. By taking ownership of an existing account via password recovery or any other means, you agree to include all existing posts associated with that account under the same license.
As every user owns the copyright to their posts we are more than willing to accommodate any deletion request from anyone who does not wish to be here. We have complied with 100% of requests and will continue to do so. From the beginning we made this clear, as evidenced below in the post that we made regarding the transition:
Regarding staff members
With the new site, we (smpratte and myself) considered moving the most inactive staff members to emeritus (a special rank recognizing ex-staff members). This was done in an unbiased way based on activity.
The following shows a series of plots of the # of posts made by each staff member from 2015 to the day of transition (red line). Below are the plots for smpratte and myself
For DJGigabyte and Reina Sierpe:
You will notice the difference between retained staff and staff that would be asked to step down:
Staff we planned to ask to step down
*Milhouse had trouble accessing the site for almost a year due to the ISP blacklist
To cement this further, consider the posts made in the last 6 months and the last 2 years on the old site. Please note that DJGigabyte averaged 2 posts per month in the last 2 years of the old forum. What these plots don’t show is the actual amount of moderation performed by each staff member. I can assure you this correlates with activity.
I also want to note that no one was forced to step down. Two of the staff members recognized their lack of activity and agreed it was for the best. @milhouse asked to be retained as staff and that was all it took.
The day of the transition
As mentioned, smpratte and myself were IP banned on from the old site on the day of the transition. This was able to happen because the Proboards site was created in collaboration with multiple people, but using DJGigabyte’s account (making him the root admin). You may remember confusion on that day because the post linking to the new site was removed and a cryptic post about “new leadership” was made on the old website.
It is important to know who knew what and when regarding the creation of the new site. Around the 3 month mark when I started development, we had a conversation in the staff channel on Discord (where all pertinent staff discussions happen) about moving to a new website. Note that all the staff were in the Discord server with exception to DJGigabyte.
My recollection is that Reina Sierpe knew from that day there were plans to build a new site. I can confirm for sure that both her and DJGigabyte knew May 20th, 2022 (over a month before transition) because they were both at the New Jersey regionals and told regular E4 members in attendance about it. 2 weeks out from the transition, all staff on Discord, including Reina Sierpe, as well as some regular members were asked to test out the new site. Reina Sierpe chose to instantly leave that private group without saying anything, which I interpreted to mean she wasn’t interested in being an active member in the new website.
There is one point of regret for me. I did not loop in DJGigabyte myself. Due to his absence from Discord and near-absence from the forum I genuinely forgot he was on staff. This was not intentional. If I could go back I would change this. However, that’s not to say that he did not know it was going to happen. Consider the post below that was made more than 2 weeks before the transition:
The primary issue was that both DJGigabyte and Reina Sierpe had advanced knowledge that this site was coming and did not voice a single concern to myself or smpratte or any other staff member until the day of transition. However, they were happy to tell all their concerns to the E4 members at New Jersey and within a side Discord Reina Sierpe had made with a small group of E4 users. In fact, neither of them have directly communicated anything at all to me since months before any of this happened.
So it came as a surprise that there was any problem at all. They took complete ownership of the old site and rebranded it. If it was done for sake of community it does not make sense because the vast majority of the community was happy to move off Proboards.
The aftermath
We chose not to say anything publicly about this entire debacle because most users did not care and just wanted a place to talk about Pokemon and were happy with the new website. We didn’t want to burden their experience with behind the scenes issues.
A small group of users were convinced the new forum was created for nefarious purposes became staff/affiliated with the old site. These users intentionally fomented an intense backlash on the Discord server during the transition.
In retaliation, we did nothing.
Among other things, some of these users did the following:
- attempted to post pornography on the new site using dozens of accounts/proxies
- attempted to cause problems to the server by repeated uploading of images (aka. a DDoS attack)
- doxxing our staff, more specifically posting real name and address on social media
- sending a glitterbomb to @fourthstartcg’s address that his mom opened up
In retaliation, we did nothing.
We also received a DMCA takedown claim (Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Wikipedia) from DJGigabyte in an attempt to take down the entire website.
In retaliation, we did nothing.
Final thoughts
The TL;DR is that two ex-staff members had a serious issue with the direction of the forum, and instead of communicating this with the rest of staff they chose to privately share concerns with a small group of non-staff users and the Proboards support forum. They didn’t make their issues known until they hijacked the old site and took it as their own. As such, we had no way to address any concern, which we could have easily accommodated as we did with @milhouse.
We decided to focus on what we could do, which was continue to make this a thriving community. We chose not to fall to the level of public shaming any of these individuals in a post. We chose to move on. We chose the constructive path instead of the destructive one because we actually care about this community and whether or not it exists.
However, it has reached a point where the information vacuum on our side has become an issue. So hopefully that fills in a lot of the gaps. I am eager to move on from this event that happened over a year ago. If you have any questions please message any of the staff in DM. Should we get the same question from multiple people I’ll update this post with the answer.
Thanks for reading.
-pfm