I've hesitated to make this post. Please don't flame me—I'm just describing how this new forum has impacted me.
I understand and appreciate the noble motives for splitting from KBoards, but for me, this new forum has been a bad thing.
Some of the most helpful, active, and interesting posters have been siphoned off from KBoards. If I need help with something I must either (1) post in KBoards and get fewer responses, or I must (2) post in both places. I have enough trouble remembering what posts I make and having two discrete locations just makes it worse. I have chosen option 1.
Wholesale ship abandonment of KBoards seems unlikely, and the KBoards site owners don't seem to have changed their TOS.
I understand your perspective, but, as others have said, the new forum isn't what created the problem. I would have left Kboards regardless, and I think that is probably true of most others. I just wasn't willing to stick with a site that wanted much greater rights over our intellectual property than were needed to operate the site. I hung on as long as there seemed some hope that the TOS issues would be addressed. When they weren't, I felt I had no choice.
It's true the new owners haven't done anything nefarious with people's intellectual property--yet. I'm just not willing to take the chance. By the way, I followed the directions described by Verticalscope for requesting account deletion, and I've never heard back. I was expecting a rejection and was mostly doing it just to be on the record, so Verticalscope couldn't use a "You didn't remove your posts, so we have a right to do whatever we want with them," kind of argument. What I wasn't expecting was to be ignored for months. Common courtesy would have required some kind of response.
As far as wholesale ship abandonment is concerned, that's an individual choice, and I have no quarrel with people who continue to use Kboards. I understand the appeal. However, VS has a history of caring about forums only as a space for advertising. I checked out a couple of their "forums," just to see. One hadn't been posted on for months, and the last post was a user damning VS for not really caring about the forum. Another had no forum at all, just a whole lot of automotive ads, though it still used the domain of the old forum. Kboards had a huge user base and a lot of momentum, so I wouldn't expect it to collapse overnight. What's happening in five years may be a different story. At least with this new forum, people in the future will have a viable place to go if one is needed.
