If you haven’t kept up with the latest community news, there’s a new sheriff in town, or rather a new forum. Judging by my bold entrance to this news piece, you may receive the hint that this forum may just be a contender in the world of vaping forums. Throughout the past 7 years, the E-Cigarette Forum has become home to many vapers by dominating the discussion forum portion of the industry. E-Cigarette Forum or “ECF” as most call it, has gained more than 208 thousand members that have created more than 12 million posts.
The numbers for ECF are staggering to say the least, but it seems after the introduction of the industry’s latest forum, Vaping Underground, the forum of any given time having over 3 thousand members online, may just feel a future threat.
For many year’s community members within the vaping industry have voiced their opinion of ECF, highly frustrated due to its censorship of content and easy to ban staffers. While the forum has built quite the steady following, it has also built quite the reputation for banning its members, which has caused them to win “Forum You Are Most Likely To Be Banned From” on GuideToVaping’s Best of 2011 online event. On the other hand, ECF also won “Most Helpful Forum” that landed them more than 700 votes on GuideToVaping’s Best of 2012.
To combat the year’s of frustration, Joe Petner of the VaporJoes Network, has created Vaping Underground, a forum said to have created “fair and realistic rules” for the vaping community.
[blockquote cite=”Joe Petner” float=”left” align=”left”]Vaping Underground is a forum where it’s free for a vendor to post and have their own sub forums. A forum where members do not fear getting banned for minutiae and real debates can be heard.[/blockquote]
Before we get to the big mess, the questions on everyone’s mind is: How can such a large and very popular forum become threatened by a new forum that was created just over a week ago? Could this rather small new forum display that much potential that ECF could actually feel that its a threat to the dynasty it’s created or is there much more to this story than what appears?
My sources say there’s much more and it will soon all be revealed on Russell Wishtart’s Click, Bang! vaping radio show, which airs tonight on VPLive at 9pm EST.
Continuing, let’s get to the mess: The largest ecig forum in the world has decided to ban the words VaporJoes and VapingUnderground from the website. You may not speak it or link to it.
[blockquote cite=”Joe Petner” float=”left” align=”left”]When a “forum” censors you, they are NO LONGER a forum![/blockquote]
Too bad ‘vapers underground’ is just a forum Joe set up to fill with monetized advertisements and click bait. Look at who runs and and some of the mods he has, with questionable backgrounds in the ‘community’ out of all the moderators listed, there are only 2 that are on the up and up in my opinion.
Actually I don’t make a dime from advertising.. not one penny goes to me.
Here’s my thing though… Even if Joe has created the forum only to fill his pockets, how does that change the forum? – No matter his reasoning, we still use the forum to discuss, and those images on the forum that link to vape stores doesn’t affect us, so I don’t see how that is a problem. The ads here on GuideToVaping power this site and allow me to do what I love, which is writing about electronic cigarettes and the industry. However, just because those ads sit on this site doesn’t change the content created. Get what I’m saying?
Once e-cigarette-forum told me that I could not post answers to people’s questions because I was a vendor – even if the answers had nothing to do with anything I sold – I stopped going there. At the same time, they have their network of vendors who pay them for advertising who are somehow allowed to post wherever they want. So, although some people may see the Vaping Underground forum as filled with advertisements, at least theirs are above board. I haven’t been to ECF in at least three years and don’t believe I’ve missed much!
So Vapor Joe creates a new forum that is highly critical of ECF. Then members of the new forum go over to ECF and start advertising it trying to steal members away from ECF. Why is anyone suprised ECF added the forum & blog names to their filters?
Yes, ECF is heavily moderated. Yes, they have strict rules sometimes labeled as Draconian. So what? Go make your own forum and recruit your own members through honorable means. Don’t try to poach them from another forum.
Even Joe’s moderators are posting openly on his forum that they are going to go to ECF and stir shit so that they can get banned too. IMHO it is childish drama and now it is polluting his blog as well. If he spams my email one more time with anything to do with this drama that he himself is feeding, then I’m going to unsubscribe and filter him myself into my spam folder.
You ban the poster, not the website. ECF is free to post whatever they want in our forum.
Yeah, clearly they were doing that – banning your instigators, to the point where it was simpler to just ban your site. If I had people coming to my forum for no reason except to screw with me, I’d do the same with a clear conscience.
I also agree with the poster below also – this whole affair is full of immensely childish behavior and wording coming from the VaporJoe lackeys.
Could this be any more childish from some of the people involved?
Lulz, vaping world drama. I’ll stick with PlanetOfTheVapes, an excellent UK forum that rose from the ashes after the TW debacle.
Never mind, that was UKV, I just woke up. Failpost.