/ java

java-forum.org - Riding a dead horse - Or how fast you can kill a community

Today I want to coder a bit of a different topic so please read the following text and I appreciate ideas and opinions.

Not yet 60 hours ago a bad time for the german Java community started. A new owner took over the java-forum.org - the best reputated and best valued Java forum / community in Germany and the german speaking areas (and partly over these borders too).

In general there is no problem about changing the ownership, this often happens interference or problems but not in this case.

Shortly (just few hours) after his first message the new owner paved the forum with lots of different kinds of commercials / advertisments. It wasn't just what you would expect to see in a Java forum like some really great java products, it was way more like automobile commercials (mobile.de) or even pornographic stuff (like hot blonde polish girls).

What was to be expected most people were not as happy as he may thought and a big shitstorm started and he totally got lost. In the last not yet 60 hours he deleted / banned nearly all longtime, string experienced users and moderators, took the rights of the old co-admin (even without any comment) and finally (this night) temporarily closed the forum.

According to his current profile he claims himself as a "professional forum hoster" and has lots of different topic forums. Most of them are paved with commercials and partly they forbid to enter the forum with an adblocker as well. He's a typical forum grabber and has absolutely no experience in Java or any technical topic.
And that's his problem, for now he never took over a highly technical forum and so he could phrase all his standard sentences like "commercials need to clearing the costs" and the people may believed him. That was different for us. Many of us have servers on their own, many have big communities and most of us know prices of hosted servers and what revenue of advertisments can have for a big, active community with good reputation. So most of us just doesn't believed him.

Many of the deleted / banned people for now found a new / temporary home at www.byte-welt.de but there's still a bad taste in all that.

We'll keep up finding a solution about what will happen next.

PS: If you want to know who is the new owner: https://www.xing.com/companies/forenbrands