05-05-2018, 12:41 AM
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.
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.