When Potentially Good Sites go Bad!

Some People Just don't want to be Helped!

I thought long and hard about this before posting, as it actually involves a string of potential civil or criminal offences along the way, mainly the following:

• Misuse of personal information
• Defamation
• Fraudulent impersonation and deceit
• Copyright infringement
• Impersonating a business

So, readers of Frugaldom blog, I am going to quietly slip back into journalistic mode and am presenting this article to you as a factual report, rather than a factually based blog post. Seriously, we cannot take such things lightly and although I have almost dismissed any thoughts of pursuing the matter, I would very much appreciate some feedback.

Here in Frugaldom, we work from home, as you all know, witing, crafting and offering an assortmnent of art-related works, virtual admin and publishing services. We use sites like O-Desk, E-Lance and People Per Hour. So, it comes as no surprise that we occasionally get paid by others to post in forums, while having the benefit of knowing who else is involved in the set up and running of such sites. That's how we found DS and his forum site - when he was advertising to hire posters for his new forum.

Personally, I was not hired to post on the above forums, but I did offer my services free to help out a business partner, who was being paid to post. However, all was not well and things on the site just didn't appear to me to be run in a sufficiently professional manner to warrant any more of my free help. Indeed, one incidence forced me to withdraw my services completely, including removing many of my previous posts. That's when the site administrator decided to log into MY POST and rewrite it!

My typing is not great, of that I shall freely admit, but I do know the difference between 'i' and 'I'. Likewise, I know the difference between 'lose' and 'loose', so the mere fact that he chose to include the phrase, 'saw looser', which I think is supposed to mean 'sore loser', makes this all the more laughable. For the purposes of  providing police evidence, should the need arise, I have screen printed the relevant posts, which include the following proof positive of when the illegal act took place:

"Last edited by djs on Thu Sep 20, 2012 7:08 am, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Frugaldom leaving That Forum Site and removing/changing posts out of spite. The other users require an explanation to this."

I would like to let it be known, in no uncertain terms, that I did NOT leave 'That Forum Site' out of spite, nor did I write the ridiculous comments in that blog post - I left the site to dissociate myself from what I deemed to be a very unsuitable and unprofessional organisation. Nothing more, nothing less. For Mr Shackleton (I presume) to have felt the petty need to doctor one of my posts in such a despicable manner, reflecting so negatively on my character, I feel no guilt in publishing this report to alert others to the abuse they lay themselves open to when registering to use a forum. I hope DJS's mum and other associated forum members are proud of his achievements. I wish them every success with their project but people need to play be the rules, keep it fair and represent honesty.

I'm trusting the forum owner will have the good grace to remove the incriminating posts from www.thatforumsite.com but also hope he is aware of the fact that the pages are now cached by search engines and logged as evidence.

Frugaldom.

For anyone interested, here is the link to the post that alleges to be written by Frugaldom/NYK Media