[deanhills]

There are a lot of expectations this type of community has and they are severely out of the norm. I see a lot of you hopping around to different communities and posting the bare minimum for your containers. This is to be expected, but its a little worse with this crowd. When a community loses any type of sponsorship, or a big poster like Ignis stops posting, members lose their mind and go flock somewhere else. Lots of this community is usually all on board when the forum maintainers ask members to step up and help, also known as "becoming staff", until there is actual work to be done with the community and then it's like crickets. You all like to blame someone else for your communities problems but the problem lies with the members. You shouldn't have to see regular staff postings in the forums to be interested or to help your community, that's not how these online communities have ever worked since the beginning of the internet. You all want your staff title and containers with no effort on your end, and that is why these niche communities will eventually die. /peace

With respect @coreyman  When last have you posted at FreeVPS?  And here at post4vps?  And you're an expert on Ignis's posts at FreeVPS?  And also an expert on the membership?  I was posting my heart out at FreeVPS and was online a number of times day and night.  I was completely dedicated to FreeVPS way beyond the number of posts that were needed for my container.  I really liked the community there. They were very special.  Like there were some amazing characters posting there. I wasn't the only one feeling that way - there were a very large number of regular members who were logging in all the time however not posting as there were no threads to post to.  I had to battle to find materials to post to myself. I made suggestions to the staff how we could get some activity going, but there was no response to the suggestions - they must have already given up on FreeVPS and they weren't really interested in the members' views.  SLC and Monad (Hidden Refuge) were trying to get traffic going, but they were the only ones. 

I can't understand what you mean about Ignis not making a large number of posts any longer - like can you explain that to me.  I've never seen him as a high quality or a volume poster.  Maybe average and occasionally above average if he put his mind to it but since he became Mod mostly moderator type posts and when he became Admin only staff related posts with the odd contribution now and then. I've never seen him as a main player in making posts in the Forum.  Hidden Refuge and SLC were.  They posted right to the very end. 

When Ignis became a Giveaway Manager FreeVPS suffered for it  Right from the very beginning we heard excuse after excuse why he couldn't do this that and the other - not as an exception but as the rule.  You weren't there.  I was there. I marvelled at how understanding the membership were when he was slow to respond to their support requests.  And the staff were even protective of him.  But for me it showed lack of integrity.  If you say you're going to do a job, you have to have the time to do it.  If you don't, you should give someone else the opportunity to do it. SLC would have been a much better candidate for the Giveaway Manager.  For me he was completely wasted as a Moderator. His technical contribution to the Forum testifies to that.  As well as his level of energy.  He'd have blown us away I know.

What irks me the most is that I was still posting when the staff must have known what they were going to do. They knew a long time before the Announcement what they were going to do - the Announcement was just a mere formality on a to-do list.  You can't imagine how much it hurt when I realized FreeVPS is no more. I invested hours of my time and so did many of the other members who had been part of the community many more years than I'd been.   I personally don't see any good reason why the Forum should have closed.  Maybe FreeVPS could have worked out a different way of posting for hosting - it was a great opportunity to reinvent everything instead of just giving up.  A good start would have been for the staff to come down from their Ivory Tower and bond with the membership for a change. They could have posted an announcement for assistance to help them with the theme of the Forum, another announcement to donate to the upkeep of the Forum, they could have put up an announcement about sponsors - they could have talked to us.  They never did.  They only talked to one another and never asked us for our feedback. We weren't included in the decision to pull the plug on FreeVPS.  We didn't count.

[coreyman]

With respect @coreyman  When last have you posted at FreeVPS?  And here at post4vps?  And you're an expert on Ignis's posts at FreeVPS?  And also an expert on the membership?  I was posting my heart out at FreeVPS and was online a number of times day and night.  I was completely dedicated to FreeVPS way beyond the number of posts that were needed for my container.  I really liked the community there. They were very special.  Like there were some amazing characters posting there. I wasn't the only one feeling that way - there were a very large number of regular members who were logging in all the time however not posting as there were no threads to post to.  I had to battle to find materials to post to myself. I made suggestions to the staff how we could get some activity going, but there was no response to the suggestions - they must have already given up on FreeVPS and they weren't really interested in the members' views.  SLC and Monad (Hidden Refuge) were trying to get traffic going, but they were the only ones. 

I can't understand what you mean about Ignis not making a large number of posts any longer - like can you explain that to me.  I've never seen him as a high quality or a volume poster.  Maybe average and occasionally above average if he put his mind to it but since he became Mod mostly moderator type posts and when he became Admin only staff related posts with the odd contribution now and then. I've never seen him as a main player in making posts in the Forum.  Hidden Refuge and SLC were.  They posted right to the very end. 

When Ignis became a Giveaway Manager FreeVPS suffered for it  Right from the very beginning we heard excuse after excuse why he couldn't do this that and the other - not as an exception but as the rule.  You weren't there.  I was there. I marvelled at how understanding the membership were when he was slow to respond to their support requests.  And the staff were even protective of him.  But for me it showed lack of integrity.  If you say you're going to do a job, you have to have the time to do it.  If you don't, you should give someone else the opportunity to do it. SLC would have been a much better candidate for the Giveaway Manager.  For me he was completely wasted as a Moderator. His technical contribution to the Forum testifies to that.  As well as his level of energy.  He'd have blown us away I know.

What irks me the most is that I was still posting when the staff must have known what they were going to do. They knew a long time before the Announcement what they were going to do - the Announcement was just a mere formality on a to-do list.  You can't imagine how much it hurt when I realized FreeVPS is no more. I invested hours of my time and so did many of the other members who had been part of the community many more years than I'd been.   I personally don't see any good reason why the Forum should have closed.  Maybe FreeVPS could have worked out a different way of posting for hosting - it was a great opportunity to reinvent everything instead of just giving up.  A good start would have been for the staff to come down from their Ivory Tower and bond with the membership for a change. They could have posted an announcement for assistance to help them with the theme of the Forum, another announcement to donate to the upkeep of the Forum, they could have put up an announcement about sponsors - they could have talked to us.  They never did.  They only talked to one another and never asked us for our feedback. We weren't included in the decision to pull the plug on FreeVPS.  We didn't count.

You are a rare beast. I'm speaking from my general knowldege of running http://freevps.club, and lurking all the other forums, the normal member that pops up there or at any of these communities is exactly how I described. I don't care about getting a free vps, but I do enjoy helping people out to get their own. Not every member of a community is obligated to post. I have been around lurking. I have my own obligations and do not have to defend myself for not posting at freevps.us. Back to Ignis. Ignis had several different screen names that you may or may not know about.... and used to post TONS when his screen name was different, and he was also more active in communities too. I've done my fair share of posting in these communities. Do you think this is the first iteration of post4vps.com or any of the other 50 that popped up? This site has yoyo'd up and down a lot, whatever posts I had here in the old days is long gone by now, as well as all the other deadpooled communities. 

"- there were a very large number of regular members who were logging in all the time however not posting as there were no threads to post to".

There is always something to post about, so if there are no threads to post to, you create your own thread about something you are interested in. This is part of the issue with this niche, everyone always thinks that someone else (staff or moderators) should be starting the interesting threads that get responded to. Interesting threads should happen organically, not forced. The staff shouldn't be required to make any bonds with community members for the members to make up the community that they so desperately desire. You do count, the members of the forum a big part of the decision to pull the plug on FreeVPS.us whether you knew it or not. I've thought about shutting down http://freevps.club before because it was a lot of work for me alone and the members spoke up and said 'oh we will take care of the site and containers we dont want this to go away'. None of those people did jack shit (excuse my language as I'm not really familiar with the forum rules here) to help one time with much(with the exception of a single person that still helps today). One member even attempted to take down freevps.club by exploiting his administrator credentials and deleting all members to funnel people into his own site. 

TLDR it's a lot of work to find trustworthy people to manage a site that big. I'm sure the admins had all been tired for some time and didn't want to spend sleepless and frustrated nights recovering backups and fixing things because a new guy they thought they could trust did something stupid. They have graphs on their end of traffic statistics and new post counts over time and even post quality over time. They knew exactly what they were doing when they announced the shut down.

As I may have mentioned before: Members need to speak with their actions and words in these communities and make the communities a better place for everyone involved.

[deanhills]

@coreyman Thank you for the detailed feedback. I've always had a high regard for you helping out people with VPSs. Most of all I still remember you from Frihost days.

The mention about your lack of posting was meant more along the lines of not being as involved - but OK you were lurking - @coreyman is always around And in the final analysis you're right about it and that was my response at FreeVPS as well, essentially the staff lost interest in the Forum. It became too hard for them to do. RIP FreeVPS.

[perry]

I just want to paste this here its a story from monad @FreeVPS.us.
disclaimer: I don't own this or wrote. this story belongs to monad. I purely post it here as I find it informative in this thread.
an awesome recap how freevps was in monads experience.
------
The 14th January of 2012 was the day I joined this beautiful forum after a company that sponsored me a VPS has shutdown and I was looking for a replacement to host game servers for a community I have been operating. That day was the beginning of my story here and honestly the start was very rough. When I joined the forum it was already taking a bath in misfortune that at frist no one knew about.

Anyone still remembers my original nickname?


FreeVPS Directory & Discussion was being infiltrated by the well known Australian fraudster "IT30/Grant Peter Lambden/Grant/Grant Bolt/Grant Lambden". This person was already in the administrative ranks and had their own categories and forums here. They offered free VPS en masse, domains, shared hosting and even dedicated servers.

When I joined I got a VPS from Grant and at this point no one knew he was actually a fraudster. A few days later the VPS and other services provided by the fraudster all went offline. He made up excuses and etc... promising everything would get fixed and so on.

Some days passed and we've been contacted by hosting providers and a domain registrar with the bad news that Grant has scammed us and the providers. All services were bought with stolen credit cards and eventually the owners blocked them later and did chargebacks. So of course the hosting providers suspended all service due to fraud. In addition to that a private person has contacted us and told us about their encounter with Grant Lambden.

Grant was busted and kicked out of here. He attacked this forum even with DDoS attacks from servers that he bought with more stolen credit carts. I believe this was the time when David moved the forum over to a DDoS protected server and the attacks stopped instantly. For a while it has been quiet. The forum returned to a normal state.


A statement was published about all the horror brought up with this Grant person. This was the time when the former moderator KitKat left the forum. The reasons were simple according to KitKat. KitKat has invited Grant to the forum after he got to know him and Grant gave him some services for free. KitKat didn't knew that Grant was a fraudster either. He however was still blaming himself and therefore left the staff. After that he was active here a little bit until he unfortunately disappeared. He was a fine fella.

I was still a normal member at this time. Doing my posts, creating some of my first tutorials here and etc. I got a VPS from a normal sponsor back then after my Grant VPS went boom and away. It was my first real FreeVPS VPS here. A VPS 18 from the long defunct host Breathost. I mentioned "long defunct". Unfortunately BreatHost didn't last long and went out of business quickly due to some problems that the owners had. How ironic but I told you the start was very rough. The owners had been arrested. Unfortunately the news articles about the arrest that existed back then are mostly no longer available.

From that point on it didn't take much longer until there was more trouble. Grant opened his own forum that he hosted on a server bought with stolen credit cards/PayPal accounts and with a IP.Board license he bought with the same dirty/stolen money. He just pulled off what he did here. Members from here even joined his forum and left FreeVPS Directory & Discussion to follow the fraudster. That was really pathetic if you ask me. The fun started when Grant threatened this forum with a lawsuit and tried to register the name of the forum as a trademark (he failed in both counts). So his threats were nothing but hot air.


Around the same time I was promoted to Super Moderator ranks. How did I get this chance? Well, I simply reported a lot of content that was against the rules back then. And the other thing was that I tried to help everyone as best as I could and published good content here. Was trying to find the announcement about me being introduced into the staff but I can't. I believe there was none. As far as I can remember I just woke up one day and logged in to see that I was an super moderator. I thought something went wrong and contacted David and he explained me everything. I obviously don't have these PMs anymore.

Time passed and Grant was gone. Our sponsors changed over time. Some went out of business and new ones joined us. The amount of resources increased. Activity was well. I was doing a good job and have been deleting a lot of spam back then and helped out a lot with support tickets. One day I offered to help with VPS giveaways and to my surprise I was accepted into the Administrator ranks after doing one giveaway well enough I guess. From that point on I was helping about with giveaways all the time.

Later on I was the one doing giveaways alone, giving support and also doing moderation. It's sad but this was the point where activity by David and Humza went down a lot. So I was really the only Administrator for years doing all administrative tasks by myself and also tanking up a lot of moderation with the help of the other moderators we had at this time. The moderator team has become small back then because many of the former staff left to do other things.

Anyone still remembers our run-ins with luis12345... and his constant begging to give him VPSs and other servers for free without nothing in return, OP/admin rights on game servers, money and etc?
And our very own KVM node from which we provided over 50 KVM VPSs but had to shutdown later due too much abuse and constant DDoS attacks towards the node/VPSs.


Years passed and we promoted new moderators to handle moderation and also a new Administrator at that. Our old good friend Joseph. Somewhere around this time I took a break from being an Administrator for a bit. Joseph was running the place but unfortunately he couldn't even nearly deal with the load I had to deal with for years. I jumped back in to help and had to fix quite a mess.

A bit later on Joseph didn't want to be an Administrator anymore. He left the ranks and the forum for a while. We hired more staff at this point. Chris become an Super Moderator and later on Khevin also joined the Super Moderator ranks. I did administrative tasks and they did the moderation very good. We even operated a official Minecraft server maintained by Chris on a FuzzyHosts VPS that was lot of fun and very popular actually. Joseph did return and offered help as an Super Moderator. We gladly accepted his help.

Forward more and Chris was promoted to an Administrator and later on Khevin was promoted, too. New Super Moderators were hired, too. And this is where we are almost at the point where we are now. Some of the new hired staff left without any kind of notice. So new staff was required. This is where Ignis came in as an Super Moderator. At the end of 2016 I left the team. Ignis was promoted. New staff was hired. Chris left a bit later after me due to studies and work.


Here we are now. Many of us left due to studies, jobs, family and other reasons. Those who are still here are also busy with their jobs, studies, university, family and etc. There is obviously lack of time here to maintain this place properly. More bad news hit us when some of our main and biggest sponsors stopped their sponsorship due to company issues. The financial situation has changed from one day to another and we had to drop paid VPSs that we gave away for free to the members.

Post quality has been going down since maybe start/mid of 2016. I personally won't judge why or how it went down. I don't blame the community and nor the staff. Every staff gets the ability to apply their own moderation style as long as it doesn't get out of hand too much. Members of course always try the best but it doesn't always mix well with how staff deals with the posts made and how hard they enforce the rules. There were however still people that joined and spammed the forum with the thoughts about making quick posts and grabbing a VPS and never look at the forum again. Every forum and community has such members though. So nothing to blame the community for. Normal run-ins with spammers.

Many say (not going to call names or mention/link to the posts) that we were doing nothing to improve this situation. This simply isn't true. The people who say such things have absolutely zero insight into the background of this forum and what we were trying to do. We made letters to get new sponsors on board, expanded our sponsorship programme by trying to offer more to the sponsors and much more. We tried to make the place nicer with a new theme that replaces the old themes and unifies a desktop and mobile theme into one. That didn't work out. MyBB updates broke a lot. One theme that many loved had to be disabled because it stopped working after updates in our setup. Newer updates still keep breaking even more.

The new sponsorship programme wasn't taken seriously by existing sponsors. This is very unfortunate! Not a single sponsors went back to us and our request to provide us banners so we could place advertising directly for them on the forum for free as a return for their sponsorship. One provider replied to our ticket weeks later and until now has still not replied to our last reply to the ticket. Quite interesting how these companies basically declined free advertising for them. I don't know if it was too hard to provide a banner or if they simply were not interested. At this point we didn't even went to stage 2 of our relaunched sponsorship programme: exclusive and dedicated advertising areas for different rules only for sponsors on the forum for a better promotion.

Have you already noticed that it is a bit too late? The forum has been in a vicious circle for a while now. All attempts to break out failed. Many reasons have been playing important roles. Remember that staff is doing this all for free. No one is getting paid. Even when the forum was making money from ads no one paid, too. The money was used to pay the domain, hosting, SSL (until we got LE) and the VPSs that we gave out.

The staff decided to end this because the lack of time, the issues with 8 years of MyBB updates through several major versions, incompatible themes and plugins, the sponsors leaving due to business issues and etc means that this place can't be fixed by us quickly... the vicious circle doesn't stop... it keeps going. Some said to hire new staff or give this forum into the hands of new owners. This cannot be done so easily. There is private information here that is something that should be handled with a lot of care and with respect to your privacy.

Corey is absolutely (unfortunately) right about the situation that he mentioned in his post. In such a state we have no one we can really trust with to give them over such private information and etc. Since we don't have time we can no longer run this place. So this is the final farewell.


If you find errors and mistakes in the post above you may keep them. It is past 11PM here and I've not really slept well this or the other weeks. Yet I'm still up because I have things to do. Atleast the exam period at my professional college is finally over for this college year. Some rest maybe but the job obviously won't get easy on me. My story may also not be complete. It's rather a summary then the fully detailed version. There is too much to write.

[xdude]

@Conan

Yes loosing zxplay was a big eye opener about sponsor crisis. Yes , Lack of quality posts or theme problems were not the solo reason for this. This is what i was telling from start. I was telling these problems started when freevps.us had started loosing sponsors and also those old active staff members.

No I was not saying Ignis is incompetent. I was saying he was arrogant the way he handle things. Yes Staff work for free and that's how it works for almost all forums out there. But free or not it is a responsibility you need to take seriously. Yes Old staff had to retire because they had no time. then what's the point having new staff if they have no time in first place. Incompetent part was for some new mods you wouldn't even see around forum after couple of weeks. Yes there were wholesale post deletions happened. It even happened to me couple of times and I did talk about it to then give away manager, Chris. After that even I didn't want to post more than I should.

@coreyman

I thought to address your post too plus since you posted in freevps.us that its all happened because of members and members taking advantage of staff's kindness. Also what happened at your old forum and freevps.us are not same at all. You were giving those vps your own. So that system had no long term sustainability. If 100 people had taken vps then you would had to pay at least 100 usd monthy for ips alone. You your self told this in ending days and even threaten to close the forum if members wont donate money. Freevps.us was based on sponsors and it was handled better Loosing sponsors and Staff lacking time to manage led to the unfortunate chain reaction. IEpicDestroyer has tried to reboot freevps.club but lack of sponsors is the reason inactively there. It's a POST TO HOST forum. Member join there so they can get a vps in return for their activity. People are not going to be active or come and join if it doesn't offer what they advertise.

Anyway it's a fruitless discussion since the great forum is already gone. We might not agree on the reasons why it had to be shutdown but we all agree on it's the best free vps provider while it lasted and had lots of good memories and enjoy some great servers from sponsors.

[Golden]

I think FreeVPS expected high standards for its current community. People were expected to post very high quality posts. I remember that I had to post paragraphs just to get a post count. The community would be fine if they were not too harsh on people posting. They were deleting posts for random reasons and when you ask "why?" they just say "spam" and nothing else.

When I first joined their forum like three years or so I remember making my signature around 150px. The limit was 100px. I was having exams at that time and apparently they sent me a warning mail and they gave me 24 hours to change it (because I didn't reduce it to 100px) I got 10% warning. I sent them an email explaining I wasn't online and I didn't go on forums regularly and they just said "There is always a next time". I missed my giveaway and opportunity to get a VPS because of it. They are just too harsh. They also delete your posts when you reach the post requirement, constantly (You have to go to your profile to check). This is quite annoying and I didn't bother applying for a VPS after I lost my VPS 1 (4GB RAM) around January 2018. They are just expecting too much for a ~$1-$10 VPS and they lost sponsors because the community couldn't be bothered with this anymore.

They also deleted reputation of people because "people gave reps for no reason". They just expect too much for a virtual forum. I would understand if they deleted only hate posts and drama etc. but this is too much.

I also got many VPSs from them and many of them only lasted about three months or so. It is hard when migrating from one VPS to another VPS constantly. You have to change DNS settings etc all the time and downloading and uploading to the new server eats a lot of bandwidth and my internet is not unlimited.

I hope this kind of thing doesn't happen to Post4VPS.

[tryp4vps]

@tryp4vps
Having a higher standard is better as it helps the content to be of high quality. If you want an example of a p2h with a lower quality standard, look at the defunct swn. It’s a mess.

As for the discorx, you do know that it’s easier to be on a chat server than in a forum right? Discord has an app on phones. Moderating a forum on a phone is hard.

Guess you misunderstand what I mean.

I was not suggesting they shall relax their standard to a messily low level. That needs to be reasonable.

But nowadays people get used to chatting on phones. It is understandable that their posts on forums would be at least much shorter than (or likely lower quality than) what they did 8 years ago.

However, FVPS still wants to keep the standard the same as 8 years ago. This must be very hard. And very costly to do so.

[Conan]

@tryp4vps
imho the standard is already reasonable.

As for people getting used to chatting, the users should be the one to adjust. It’s not that hard to write down a proper reply to a post.

Anyways, it’s pointless. Fvps won’t come back.

[IEpicDestroyer]

I find the requirements acceptable, I'm not having major issues with removed posts anyway. I'm able to complete the posts on the forums but it did slightly get a bit harder on commenting on other's posts since there were less to choose from. However, their aren't any noticeable issues with their posting requirements and most users should be able to complete their posts if they tried.

[tryp4vps]

@tryp4vps
imho the standard is already reasonable.

As for people getting used to chatting, the users should be the one to adjust....

Unfortunately, your thinking their standard is reasonable or not does not matter much. People getting used to chatting is a real global trend.

The problem is that in order to maintain the standard you considered reasonable, their admins needed to pay much efforts achieving this. The post standard appears today on their forum has demanded great amount of human intervention from their admins/moderators. This is not sustainable. Particularly because the forum has been all run by volunteers.