About a year ago, I did a forum post swap with another forum owner. And, for the most part, the members on the forum were really nice people. Or, at least it seemed that way at first. I felt very welcomed to the site. There was a friendly, close knit vibe going on. But, as time went on, I became a regular member of the site, even after our post swap ended. And, I started to see beneath the thin veneer of politeness on the forum. And, I could see this animosity and maliciousness they had toward other forums, even targeting the forums with troll or spam comments, with inter forum wars. And, what made it so sad was how the members delighted in posting about their big achievements. I guess this part of the forum was obscured to me when I was low post count, so I could not really see what was going on. But, as my post count increased, they let me see these troll posts and it became very disturbing. After that, I did not feel very comfortable on the site anymore and began to worry that my own forum would be targeted. So basically that was the end of that
There are definitely a lot of forums comprised of immature users that enjoy trolling and messing with other sites for entertainment... Most of the time they're younger users but there are even older users that get in on the "fun".
It's pretty stupid and like I said before, immature but there's really nothing you can do about it other then banning those users if they try to join your site.
My forum was sabotaged by a loser who couldn't keep his crap together. After giving him only so many chances to prove himself, he twisted our words around to make it seem like we were the ones "pushing" him to contribute.
On the contrary, it was his laziness that kept him from being a productive member, and he deleted a forum with 13,000+ posts. Unfortunately, the only backups that I had were partial, so we had to start all over again.
I'd only venture in to that if I knew the person quite well. then still, you can't always know. Sorry this happened to you. Very sour. Stories like these make you want to think twice about starting certain alliances. Banning is one thing you can do, but in these vases the harm was already done.
