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Give it this guy and have him write scathing insults 🤣
No. Mastodon users know what Mastadon is. If they have something that looks and feels exactly the same, but is actually some competing product, but it's being promoted as if it is actually Mastadon, that's the absolute clearest case of infringement possible.
It doesn't matter if they look like any other domains or not, it's the fact that it's used a trademarked name in the same business area.
Another example - Apple was sued by Apple Music (originally set up for the Beatles), but Apple won the suit because they sold computers and not music. As soon as Apple started making the ipod (even before they started selling music themselves), Apple Music sued them again for trademark infringement and won, because it was then the same business area (music in general). It wasn't until about 20 years later that Apple finally managed to convince Apple Music to sell them the trademark, until that point they paid massive yearly royalties just to use the name Apple in a music context.
He can. Anything in the broad area which Mastodon operates in will be covered.
No, because they would just be using the software as intended. Remember OP is using competing software, publicly bad-mouthing Mastadon but still using the brand recognition to attract people to his service.
Is there a TLDR for that article? I skim read it and couldn't see any evidence that whatshisface had trademarked "cyber space" (and such a trademark should be easy to overturn if issued because it was a term already in common use before Mastadon existed and in the same area) and whether he's trying to sue these other guys.
In short, this article seems to be unrelated to the OP's issue, unless I'm mistaken.
Not sure if your joking but this is the quote we're referring to:
The label "Mentally ill" should not be thrown around recklessly on people Raindog doesn't like/know. Mental illness & its possible consequences like suicide & self-harm are real & should never be a joking matter.
@raindog308 is one of (3?) Admins here & more should be expected from an Admin as an example of acceptable behavior. As a paid Admin at LET, his employer @jbiloh, is legally liable for his words.
Raindog neither knows me, nor is he likely a mental health professional. I'm not mentally ill & he doesn't have a right to slander me like that.
Publicly declaring someone "mentally ill" based on a few posts on a forum is, at best a bridge too far, and at worst, libel & doxing.
Just for "fun-sies" I've searched his (raindog's) history. He doesn't "throw" the term around. I honestly feel he is being serious. Nothing of the above statement from rain seems like a joke.
It really seems like a guy on the internet looking out for another person that may or may not know they could be suffering from something.
But, that's my $0.02, I'm done. Best of luck with your adventures.
Don't take it personal. He or She probably didn't meant it.
I don't usually participate in these threads that are controversial kind of outside of the LET realm, it shouldn't even be here in my super humble opinion.
But let's think about this thread for a moment:
-You know you are doing something wrong, I think you realize this, you know this , but I could be wrong. If I'm wrong, I apologize, respectfully.
-You registered a domain called mastodon with the .tech TLD and host a competitor software of Mastodon on it. If I recall correctly that's kind of malicious intent and there are some rules to it that could result in you losing the domain.
What do you gain of this? A few shrugs/smiles and legal issues?
That's the part that doesn't make sense which is why somebody might think you got issues.
In my opinion, put mastodon on it again. Who cares if it runs like shit, after all you purposely bought that domain to run mastodon.
Use the money you were going to use to defend yourself to take vacation, enjoy life with your family.
Since you apparently don't know the difference between these two words, or what "doxing" means, I am not too worried about your legal analysis.
I do think it's interesting that you keep coming back to it and write these long posts...while at the same time ignoring the obvious questions asked of you.
You're never going to answer those questions because it would force you to admit that your attempted sale of HostBoards was dishonest, right?
Do you not have a bit of something that might benefit from some treatment though? Is it not compassionate to offer that advice specifically because of the possible consequences that you listed? Those consequences tend to be more closely related to a lack of treatment.
I have some mild mental hangups that best benefit from treatment. ADHD is a real thing in adults, you could easily get away with calling it a mental illness. Untreated, it's fairly devastating for me.
I don't know much about your law, on my side of the pond, a lawyer's letter only costs about 50USD, cheaper if you buy it as bulk or subscribe monthly. However, once it comes into real lawsuit, 5000USD will be the minimum cost, for both side lawyer fee excluded. The most ridiculous thing is that even if you lose the case, the court is not obliged to ask for your money. He need to do it himself by paying someone. So, why they are doing that?
It is just a weapon of the rich, 5000USD or 50000USD is just a little cost for them, but not for me. They don't expect to win, they just want to force you to pay, because the value of 5000usd is different for different people
he's just being an edgy internet kid and you're giving him the reaction he craves with your responses. let it go, get back to selling your wife and kids to fight mastodon over a fuckin domain name [edit: or whatever idiocy this thread was about].
Just saying...
You're 100% wrong. My sale of Hostboards isn't dishonest. Once I made my statement I never read that thread again and never will.
As I stated in my last statement in that thread, I would have to be dumber than a rock to try to sell my forum at LET if I had even suspected it had scraped LET usernames incorporated in the database.
My opinion is still that the database doesn't have scraped usernames from LET. One of the forums I had purchased & paid someone to integrate was from a kid who this week I started suspecting used a scraped WHT username list from between 2012 -2016 because of new information I've gathered this week.
I believe this because no new LET members past about 2016 are on that list meaning it was old. I did some digging and found such a username list from WHT. If the usernames from LET in the database had used the same usernames here they did at WHT prior to around 2016, that explains why it only has some LET members.
This is only my opinion that the kid had incorporated an old WHT usernames list but it is my best guess. You can ask any which way you desire, and believe anything you like, but I never scraped LET and never asked anyone to scrap LET.
Unless I discover new information, I won't make any further comments on the database.
No I really don't. But some people do suffer from mental illness because one of my jobs is to work with the mentally ill. I have nothing but compassion for them and I take mental illness as a very serious, sometimes life-threatening situation.
@raindog308 was not being compassionate, it was his way of trolling me. I strongly believe he's crossing a redline when he recklessly calls people "mentally ill." I do believe he's putting his Employer Jon into possible liability.
...because you don't want to answer the most obvious questions.
You still are avoiding them now.
No one cares about all this history and your internal narrative. Why can't you answer the questions asked?
You know the answers to these questions, yet you refuse to share them and instead posted a lot of other data to try to distract because you know that the answers to these questions will immediately show that your forum has no value.
That is what is dishonest.
I think that's actually an elephant. Not that a mastodon would be any easier.
OP does seem a bit preoccupied with megafauna.
Sounds like something a person with an untreated mental illness would say.
So, can't you become your own attorney ?
Well said.
Since you have zero interest in buying HostBoards it's likely you're asking for analytics to troll me some more so my motivation to help you troll me is low. The way you recklessly call me "mentally ill" is proof to me what you are.
If someone is a serious potential buyer instead of a troll, please private message me, sign the NDA, and I'll find you answers or pay my Server Admin to find the analytics that I can't.
No offence, but you didn't want anyone to sign an NDA when you were throwing round obviously fraudulent metrics.
Interesting that you have to "pay your Server Admin" to do basic tasks. If he's your normal staff, you're already paying him to do the work you're asking. If he's not staff, then that raises other interesting questions given how you've already passed the buck over questions about where the user data came from ("I paid someone who imported a load of data from somewhere, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯ if it's all fake data").
Anyone halfway competent should be able to knock up an SQL query to answer basic things like "how many users logged in over the last 30 days" and "how many of out 3.7 million users have ever logged on, even once" in a matter of minutes.
And more importantly, if you don't already know that data, you need to find out anyway if you're serious about selling this to anyone. Given that you've already admitted that a decent chunk of your users are fake and imported from a "dump from WHT", you know that 3.7M users is a lie, and it's clear that you can't provide any assurances at all about your data. And the data is literally the only asset you own that's worth anything (as evidenced by the 4 different name changes since it started and the thread from a month ago asking people to suggest a better domain name). Also, did you even obtain this WHT dump legally? Do they know you stole their data? Did they agree to it? What else was stolen at the same time?
Oh, where is @jar's Mastodon instance? Would love to join, perhaps there are related topics to hosting/mailing?
Dude, just listen to yourself. Here's what happened:
You post a bunch of fake data publicly in an attempt to distract buyers from the truth, but you offer to share the truth if people promise not to tell anyone else.
Does this sound like an honest, above-board way of doing business?
This is normal, consultant/contractor language. If a small business needs a minor website tweak once a year, they still contact their webmaster and pay for hourly work. Same for IT, et all. It's mostly just redundant to say he'll pay the admin. That's actually just more desperation language.
It's pretty clear this guy is small potatoes and not anything with a few employees.
It's freesocial.co. I don't really moderate it, but I look at complaints.
Ah, you're taking the Elon Musk approach.
That's the Musk approach.
I'm not signing an NDA but I'd be seriously interested in buying it.
150 dollars. I am serious. But if you don't want to sell it for that then I understand. I'm not trying to be the dick but I am definitely not paying 5k for it. I'm going to be very blunt with you here, just to show you the perspective I have on it (and if you can counter or show proof that I'm wrong then I'll shut up or offer more).
I really don't see value in these metrics. 29.6k is decent, but stating "online since April 2004" and having 3.7 million users with only 29.6k posts. Even the front page is littered with 0 comments threads with the ones that DO have comments not even breaking 10... This tells me the following things:
I'm not trying to be a dick here bud. But I don't see the website's primary job, to be an active forum about hosting, to be very well executed here. Instead, I see a website artificially grown through M&A, which has netted you 3.7 million inactive users with only 3 million views with a total of 29.6k posts. Usually, for active (and healthy) sites, you'll see the post counts higher than the user count.
Some might say "the posts are useful though! So much knowledge!" For me anyways, none of the posts shows up on SEO. So what's the point in that then? The content is supposed to help drive traffic through SEO and help it grow organically through discovery, and it's not even doing that! You're literally leaving money (and users) on the table here.
Even when I google (or other search engines/aggregators/etc.) across multiple platforms for "Hosting Forum" or "webhosting", host boards doesn't even come up on the first page (using various sampling methods to try and keep this as unbiased as possible).
So the forum doesn't have active userbase (or mostly driven by hosting providers who just drop their ad and leave) and is operating in a saturated market with various competitors (some younger and yet still stronger than yours (vpsBoard, what you call a "dead forum" in your offer post, still has decent SEO game, as in has stronger discoverability than that site).
To summarize this bluntly, only thing I see is a website you sunk way too much money in and has a higher opinion on it's valuation. I don't see this site worth 5000 dollars. Honestly, I don't see this site worth more than 500 dollars. The only remotely useful asset of the site is probably it's domain name.
If you really want to grow this site, I'd suggest focusing on discoverability (SEO) and reducing the size of the forum significantly (by that I mean the categories on the left). Scale it back to the size it needs to be right now, which my take would be very small, and try to grow it organically. You have a few good things there, you already have a foundation (better than no foundation, which is what a new website will need), which means you have an avenue to grow. At least hosting providers know you're a thing/around, so they'll drop their ad in there. You don't have anyone who will probably buy them through your forum but hey, it means at least a little regular traffic to help you start off.
My 10 cents. I'm being frank here. This is the real reason I turned down your offer to help run the site. There's nothing to run. If I were you, I'd focus on actually growing the site organically.
lol
For comparison, this is @vitobotta 's personal blog:
What is the software you used for that analytics?