Dragon Hoard Update

Hey guys!

So its been a while, work and all that jazz taking priority followed by some injury when the tyre blew out on one of my cars doing a runway event at 180+ mph. (290kph for you 'mericans!).

Anyway, as you've noticed, we didn't close down, though we are running a tighter ship now days, I have trimmed off nearly 1TB in uploaded pictures/videos etc, and this has brought the hosting down to sensible levels of cost.

So moving forward, first up could use some mods to deal with the day to day running. As before, I will do it on a suggestion system, if people would like to nominate some members of staff, I'll check their history on here and if its good, and they want to help out, will make them mods.

Secondly, we will be rolling out some site upgrades shortly, if anyone has any suggestions while we are at it, am all ears!

Thanks guys!

 

Until 'recently' the site was self sustaining and I was paying hundreds of dollars a month just keeping the hosting going due to how much content people were uploading. Yes I could of been more proactive but priorities in life meant this site couldn't be at the top of the list all the time.

You will likewise note I never closed any discussions about scammers or users being called out, because to do so would not be helpful, I let them ride, where other sites would have deleted them in a heartbeat.

I would have had no issue with Bun promoting their site, as I have allowed other users to do in the past, but when the 15 most recent posts were all messages, and likewise with profile posts just spamming their link, all without a simple message to ask if its ok, it was frankly discourteous on an admin to admin level. I'm sure if I came onto her site and started spamming links for here without asking, she wouldn't put up with it either so its pretty hypocritical to suggest otherwise.

We still have a very active member base here, with hundreds of users logging in every month and many many trades going down, I will likewise start to implement some of the suggestions and send an email blast out to our 3500 users once we have made some changes to be more trade-centric.

 

Last night was the first time someone messaged me to tell me the site had been off for a few days.

It was posted in the "closing down" thread of last year, we obviously haven't closed down so bumping that thread up was pointless.

 

As you are new to the forum I will request you go look over some of my historic posts, I made it clear I run multiple businesses and at times I may not be available, or even in the country due to it. A forum I keep running for the benefit of you guys (because it certainly isnt for me?) isn't usually high on my thoughts day to day. People have ways to contact me and as soon as I was made aware I have always sorted it ASAP.

Yea I get it, you guys are pissed because the site hasn't been run flawlessly, but if you didnt care at least one little bit you would be going to the other site and slagging me off there, not posting here.

 

I'm not pissed theres another forum at all, trust me on that. I am pissed because people were taking the piss by blatantly spamming links to it without so much as a conversation asking if it would be ok.

In fact, it would simply of been easier for me to 301 the entire site to the new site, had someone sent even something basic like "hey dude, look you know the site isn't getting the love it needs, we're gonna go it alone, do you mind letting people know".

Honestly, if I had received that message id of bent over backwards to help, transferred the XenForo license, and sent over clean data so the old posts were not lost.

However the spamming followed by the hostility of a minority of members just further shows me that, actually I need to keep this place running so those who don't want to be associated with others who act in such a way have somewhere to trade.

 

Unfortunately the XenForo search system doesn't have a neat way if displaying deleted posts across multuiple threads/posts/profile posts.

This link however is a SQL query result for the other sites name within content.

https://dragon-hoard.com/threads/scammer-alert-2-for-one-special.3833/page-8#post-98201

A total of 44 results, given the site has been offline for a few days, and when they launched, gives you an idea of how spammy it was.

 

No, bun made around 6-7 posts/profile posts/posts on other users profiles, the rest came from other members such as rottsloan who did stuff like this on profiles and in posts:

 

They were all removed/unrestricted once I cleaned up the spam and censored the word.