Rank your favorite forums in order of trustworthiness

[SneakyDave]

Ok, so "trustworthiness" is a vague term. What I'm ranking the following individuals and forums on are:

1) Can I trust the admin with my email and IP information

2) Can I trust that moderation on the forum will be fair?

3) Can I trust that the forum will be around more than 2 years?

 

A lot of forums are around, and this obviously isn't a complete list, so I'm just adding ones that the small group of membership will be familiar with. Feel free to add any I forgot. I'll provide my ranks and opinions on 5 of them.

 

1) XenForo.com. XF forums have a love-hate relationship with a lot of their members. They either love the moderation style, or hate it. I think it's been pretty fair overall, and I certainly believe the administrators would do all they can to protect customer data. They run a tight ship and don't allow drama. I haven't seen too many cases of moderation getting out of hand, without an explanation on what is, and is not, acceptable.

 

2) admin-hub.com and vulpea.com. "Paul's forums" are pretty new to this list, and I don't have much of an opinion on either of them. admin-hub.com is obviously a "pro" forum as Vice would call it, so I think management there would make sure to take steps to keep member emails and IP addresses corrected. They both use SSL so that obviously helps secure things a little bit better. My only gripe is that I don't know who moderates the site. If it's just Paul, that makes things easier, and more consistent. I don't agree with Paul's choice of one of his moderators, but that's the only knock I have. Full disclosure, I think I'm banned at admin-hub.com.

 

2) www.admin-talk.com - I don't even know who owns this site anymore, but it appears to be slowly fading away. I can't even comment about moderation, because I haven't seen it lately, but I think it had favorable reviews in the past. The only knock on it is that I don't know anything about the owners, or their plans with the site.

 

3) theadminzone.com. The Admin Zone has been the target of a couple of hacks lately, but the biggest threats are the inconsistent moderation, and going overboard on staff and administrator positions. The administrator won't allow disparaging comments about forum software companies if support personnel participate on his site. Full disclosure, I'm banned at this forum.

 

4) vBulletin.com. The official vBulletin site seems to get hacked more often lately, and little to no explanation is usually given as to how the hack happens, or how much customer information, if any, is stolen. Complaints aren't allowed on the forum, and are consistently removed, not moved, without explanations.

 

5) General-Discussion.com. Gary has a history of just wiping out his forum for little to no reason over a period of years. Lately, he's posted IP address information of one of his members, and has a strange method of banning and unbanning members for no particular reason. Full disclosure, I'm banned at this forum.

[Paul]

My only gripe is that I don't know who moderates the site. If it's just Paul, that makes things easier, and more consistent. I don't agree with Paul's choice of one of his moderators, but that's the only knock I have. Full disclosure, I think I'm banned at admin-hub.com.

 

Caribe_Soy and I are the only two people who moderate Admin-Hub. Caribe_Soy is very level headed, neutral when it comes to different forum software and she is knows a little about coding (I think she's studying it in University right now). I think she is an excellent choice for a moderator and I'm glad she accepted when I asked her to become one.

 

The only reason Adam was made an admin was because he said he wanted to clean up all of the stuff about TAZ that used to exist on Admin-Hub. Adam never followed through and he no longer has any moderator/administrator permissions.

 

Besides a few spammers, GTB and Spidy are the only people banned from Admin-Hub.

[fool]

Why did you ban Spiderboy?

I didn't see him posting anything bad.

[SneakyDave]

Wasn't spiderboy imported from somewhere? Looks like he is/was on GTB's forum with one post. That won't sit well with Gary.

[fool]

Spiderboy was converted from Ammunition Forum.

[SneakyDave]

That's right, the legitimate adminammo forum, not adminflipflop, lol

[fool]

adminammo was the result of consummation between admin-hub and ammunition forum

i coined the phrase first, mark stole it from me and created a fake forum with shitty domain redirect

[Paul]

Spidy got pissed over a few things and deleted the contents of some posts that he made. He also made a comment that made it clear to me that he wasn't worth keeping around.