Buying illegal content

As I continue to develop my forums, I saw a tech forum come up on Sitepoint and rushed in for a quick sale.

The aim was to merge it with Tech Watch and create a larger and better positioned tech forum for the UK market.

It took a couple of days to sort out some MySQL compatibility issues, and then I successfully uploaded and merged the forum.

And then, with horror, found myself on the end of a load of illegal content - warez, porn, and satellite TV cracks.

Luckily, a big problem with the forum merger was a huge attachments table - I removed them from the vbulletin database on the buyer’s server file system before the import on my server, and when I went back to save the attachments folder (not yet knowing what they were), the seller’s hosting account had been suspended.

There were still plenty of discussions and links to warez sites and downloads.

Oh, man, I just blew money on illegal junk…

I started to go through the boards on the purchased forum thread by thread, deleting anything that could result in a legal issue.

Turned out they were running a private club for this, which is why it wasn’t obvious that this content even existed at first.

However, the actual degree of illegal content turned out to be pretty low.

Thankfully, I found that indeed, here was a tech community, wanting to talk about home tech issues - the original reason for purchase.

The forums merger was a far bigger pain than I expected - ironically, vb to vb imports seem more messy than phpbb to vb, or smf to vb.

Anyway, looks like the dust is settling, and Tech Watch has expanded its content nicely, and brought in a core active user base.

It’s now up to me to help foster that.

In the meantime, a clear lesson learned - proper and more thorough examination of a forum before purchase is more essential than rushing in to buy a “bargain”.

I can make good from what could have been a bad situation. I may not have been so lucky,