I've seen black hat first hand. I'm going to keep it short, as I currently own the site now.
Before I talk about it, you have to understand, at this point... Black Ops 2 was about to be released, their competition was BlackOps2Forum.com and their board name was "Black Ops 2 Forum", and their other on-page SEO reads "Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Community." So what this owner essentially did was put the board name as "Black Ops 2 Forum" and SEO'ed their page as "Call of Duty Forum" to fool Google and their visitors into thinking its the same BlackOps2Forum.com domain that
@Ascent launched. So, by this theory, CODForum.com vs BlackOps2Forum.com could have happened at the time, and the owner kept running the site until google penalized the site eventually.
The page should've read "CODForum | Call of Duty Forum," but the owner got greedy. He even came into my CODForums site, and tried to take advantage of my pagerank at the time - which was #1 for the keywords "Call of Duty Forums" and/or "CODForums."
It only worked for a while until it didn't. I eventually bought it, though.
😀