sanjay wrote:
I am not sure if those of you who are attacking this site understand the facts?
This is Niketalk.yuku.com along with all the posts and history. Yesterday, the owner of the Niketalk.com domain name pointed it to another forum company called Huddler. We found out that this individual and individuals from Huddler had been illegally scraping this site to make a copy. The owner of the Niketalk.com domain had previously threatened to leave and point his domain name elsewhere if we did not make him a copy of this site. This threat made no sense to us so we ignored it. He was well aware that there was no legitimate way to take the content of this site so he used an unethical route. I understand his frustrations with the previous owners of Yuku, but we committed to working with him if he stayed. We honored our end of the bargain and sent over $40000 to various charities as per his request. We had no legal obligation to pay even on cent, but we did. Our hope was that he would not risk destroying the history of the site, but Huddler offered a very compelling financial proposition to him and he took it.
Our choice yesterday was to either wipe out this site or preserve it. It made no sense to delete what thousands of members have posted here. They were never consulted about having their posts and user accounts copied, but this is what happened. Our terms of service are clear. If an admin attempts to hurt a Yuku community then we will intercede and take over until new volunteers can be found.
Right now I understand that some of you are upset and also confused. We changed the name of the forum to SneakerTalk in order to not mislead people. If you are comfortable with copies of your posts and accounts being made on a massive scale then you are free to post on Huddler. If on the other hand you want to keep posting here where your account and posts have always ethically been then that is your choice too. There have been accusations that Yuku has made this transition difficult. This is correct. We did not want to give an entire community over to one admin, especially since we never even heard from the founder of this community, Nelson. We tried to discuss moving this site to vBulletin and having a revenue partnership, but that discussion fell apart as have many others with this admin. We suggested that we might be open to gifting the entire site to a non-profit since that would not have set a bad precedent for forum admins who would all ask for copies of their site of we allowed it in this instance. We are not cooperating with individuals who are copying member content and private a count information from within the admin panel. We are also working hard to prevent them from using our database to validate their member accounts over there. We are OK with not helping out those who seek to harm Yuku.
Some of you may feel loyalty to this admin and that is your choice. I would just appreciate it if you would not post porn here or recruitment messages for the other site. It is not hard to figure out how to get to Niketalk.com.
tl;dr
Forum admins asks for copy of everyone's posts and passwords in order to leave in express violation of our terms of service. We refuse. Huddler helps them take your posts and email account information. There is now Niketalk.com which is the rebuilt copy with a lot of original members and admins. There is also SneakerTalk.com which has the original NT posts. Right now SneakerTalk is for existing and new members who want to post here. There are some members who have reached out to me personally and they are a bit shocked that their posts and accounts have been copied. We have told them that we will speak to our lawyers to see what we can do about this disruption and the damage it is causing.
Please try to understand the facts and feel free to ask questions. If your posts are insults, solicitations, and porn then I have no choice but to delete those posts and ban individuals, I really don't want to do this because some members may want to keep their history here and hang out with friends over there.
at donating 40 stacks.
dudes is actually wanting to jump ship and be mods on that site though :x
thanks guys
