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Another thing you should read about VS. It isn't a forum platform. It's a data-collecting agency that uses the forum as a front to generate traffic. Read the privacy policy and user agreements. Once you log in, it has permission to access your memory, HD, browser history, and scan your network for its configuration. You also have zero rights to what you publish as it instantly becomes copyrighted property of VS. Technically, if you cross post something on a VS forum, and then copy and paste it here, you have committed a federal crime. Once you agreed to that checkbox, you also gave up your right to legal recourse. If they want to take legal action against you, you have agreed that you can't use the courts, you have to use arbitration.... THEIR arbitration to settle. Clicking a checkbox on VS more or less signs away every right you have pertaining to your activity on that site.

It's a money and data farm. You log in, it scans your everythings, and populates the page with ad banners which make them money. Then later they take the data they've collected and sell it. The average human generates something like $23 worth of saleable data every day. They're not offering you a forum, they're letting you offer up your data for sale.

It should be noted that many forums do this, just not as purposefully as VS does. Back in the day, VBulletin caught on to the trick of offering a product (a forum platform) that they could monetize. VS is a from-scratch, ground-up data mining operation that later had the smart idea of making forum platforms as a way to get traffic. In the case of VB, their purpose was to offer a platform and they modestly monetized it. In the case of VS, they wanted to get in the data/ad game and they made a forum as a vehicle to do it.

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I think the idea behind buying up these forums is to optimize them such that when people search for a certain topic like YZ125 fork oil or similar, the first hit will be one of their forums, and when you visit them you'll get hammered with advertising. Regular forum users are not what they're interested in, so if people leave en masse, they don't care. As long as they get (ideally) non member visits.

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Originally posted by wtg:
I’m sorry for all of you for whom PW was such an important gathering place.

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Originally posted by piqué:

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Originally posted by wtg:
I’m sorry for all of you for whom PW was such an important gathering place.

and it never was for you? how did you end up here, then?

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Originally posted by wtg:

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Originally posted by piqué:

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Originally posted by wtg:
I’m sorry for all of you for whom PW was such an important gathering place.

and it never was for you? how did you end up here, then?

I only learned of PW and WTF when I joined TNCR in 2008 or so, several years after the OCR was shut down. I’m not a member at PW.

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By the way, SK, instead of “instructive” in your first sentence, I’m sure you meant “intrusive.”

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How on earth did you find out about TNCR???

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Originally posted by ShiroKuro:

I think they’ve finally figured out what it means to have the site run by someone who only cares about money rather than being run by someone who cares about pianos.

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Lot of that going around.