>>>Can gunrightsmedia.com be saved?<<<

[Oleg Volk]

In its current shape, http://www.gunrightsmedia.com/ seems to be a goner. It's all spam and not much more than that. Would anybody be willing to help me rehabilitate that site and turn it into a useful forum again?

[230RN]

I enjoyed it tremendously but haven't been on there in many months, largely because of the fake "messages." and "spam."

My understanding is that the main administrator left for reasons unknown by me and apparently did not leave the "keys" (passwords, etc) necessary for the new"honcho" to properly maintain the site. Because of this, the door was left open for all kinds of robotic intrusions.  Typical was where an intruder would copy a piece of legitimate user text and insert it as its own.  I'm not sure of the motivation for this, but it must have been a strong one, because it happened a lot and legitimate posts were buried.

One long-standing gripe I had was with the name, which did not "jell" into anything meaningful.  I know your English is admirably competent, but that string of words did not seem to convey any purpose and I commented on it several times.

Another problem was with the keywords one could select to trigger search engines, but frankly I don't recall what the problem was.  I know search engines can be made to favor one site or another, but I'm not clear on that mechanism.

I do recall it being a fun and valuable site until maybe five-ish years ago, and I am still a "full member."  I don't know how much it costs to maintain, or how much it would cost to re-vamp it with a new "honcho," so i don't know how that figures into your plans or situations.

I should hit it again to see "what's up," but frankly, armedpolitesociety and The High Road, (and formerly 2ahawaii) are enough of a time sink for me.

Terry, 230RN

Edited for typo

[Hawkmoon]

In its current shape, http://www.gunrightsmedia.com/ seems to be a goner. It's all spam and not much more than that. Would anybody be willing to help me rehabilitate that site and turn it into a useful forum again?

It's a good question. I don't have a good answer.

In addition to Armed Polite Society, I'm a member of The High Road, The Firing Line, The M1911.org forum, a Colt collectors forum, and a couple of others I visit so infrequently that I have to look them up each time I want to drop in. My question, then, would be: What role or niche will GunRightsMedia serve that isn't already served by APS, The Firing Line, and The High Road? If it's going to be just one more forum that covers all the same discussion areas, does that serve a constructive purpose or does it fragment the discussion?

If there's a positive answer to the question of fragmentation, I would be interested in seeing GRM rehabilitated/resuscitated but I'm already a moderator on three Internet forums and I can't afford the time to volunteer for a fourth.

[Perd Hapley]

Are you looking for people with tech skills, moderator skills, nunchuck skills?

Or just somebody who wants to buy it?

[Ben]

I just popped over there for a look. The problem that I'm seeing is that there is currently no moderation fix (that wouldn't be somebody's fulltime job, and wouldn't just be a stopgap).

I'm seeing nothing but spam, and not just spam, but spam by accounts listed as "senior members" with 100s of posts. If it was just random spammer accounts posting a few times per fake member name, you could just kill off all "new user" accounts, which would have a little collateral damage, but would take care of most the spammers. These accounts however, have all made it to hundreds of posts.

There's always IP filtering, and I'm pretty sure our tech mods here have some automated filters for "known bad IP ranges", but even that might be too little too late at this point. It seems like the last few legitimate posts were back in August. A check on staff shows most of the mods haven't logged on in months and even years. I'm not sure how you recover from that without nuking the site from orbit and starting fresh.

[cordex]

Trying to rely strictly on human intervention to fight bot armies is destined to burn out moderators.  We use a self-funded iteration of CleanTalk here to help automatically reduce the spam garbage.  It requires very little in the way of manual intervention and the cost is negligible.  There is a vBulletin plugin available for that service which should make integration with GRM relatively simple:  https://cleantalk.org/help/install-vbulletin

If you plan on making a go of GRM I'd strongly recommend that or a similar service to weed out the trash.

Forums in general are shrinking.  The last new member who stuck around APS for more than a handful of posts was ConstitutionCowboy who registered more than three years ago.  Before him you'd have to go back at least a couple years to find a member who kept coming back (probably PEFarmer in 2017 and before him Andiron back in 2014).  We had 139 total members log on within the past year, and 98 in the past month (counting the lookie-loos and lurkers).  Meanwhile we've had far more members die, slowly drift away, be banned, or quit suddenly for a variety of reasons meaning that APS membership has been slowly falling off for a long time.  Most of the active members here have been here for many, many years.  Without that core 100 or so members who keep coming back regularly this forum would have died off a long time ago.

The forums that are active and growing tend to be those with geographic or subject matter focuses that bring people together outside the dominant social media platforms.  If I ask myself why I keep coming back to APS, it's because I've hung around with a lot of these people for the past 17 years or so - longer in many cases, as we were active on the same forums pre-APS too - not because APS offers something special that is easily accessible to outsiders.  Even though this is one of the few forums I'm still active on, I don't know that I'd recommend it to someone who wasn't already here.

I have rarely gone back to either GRM or THR since that blew up.  My user still exists on GRM, but doing a search I can't even find any of my old posts but I doubt I've even posted for over a decade.  I think Hawkmoon's question about niche is important.  There is an element of friction that you have to overcome to bring people into a forum.  What would drive people to use a largely declining form of social media over whatever social media platforms they already use for their non-gun stuff?

[RocketMan]

I had visited GRM a few times over the last several months without logging in and noticed the decline.  Unfortunate given the initial promise and potential of the site.
Do you have any thoughts yourself on how the site might be saved?  Any ideas on a direction to take it?  I'd also second Perd's questions.
While I have run a website or three over the years, I count myself as only somewhat skilled in that area.  I have never done technical work on a forum-only website.  I'd be willing to help in other areas as my time permits.

[French G.]

I would moderate there if there were real users and not fighting bots. Would like to see more peoples here too. Forums are old, first place I found with my AOL disc was TFL and I never left that niche. The THR theft and constant new idiots made me quit gun forums. I would like to find a way back to that.

[Oleg Volk]

Are you looking for people with tech skills, moderator skills, nunchuck skills?

Or just somebody who wants to buy it?

Looking for tech and moderating help to remove spammers and make it viable again.

The goal of the site is to figure out media-centered ways to promote RKBA to the population at large.

[Oleg Volk]

"I'm not sure how you recover from that without nuking the site from orbit and starting fresh."

That IS an option.

[JTHunter]

Like 230RN, I'm still a registered member at GRM, unless they have somehow wiped the rolls.  I haven't logged in for over a year now as I frequent here, Gunsnet.net, Illinoiscarry.com, THR, and OpenCarry.org.  Unfortunately, Open Carry is going down a similar road as GRM.
While I took some web design classes 20 years ago (got a "2 year" degree) but wasn't that good at JAVA or JavaScript.

I'm currently using a Windows 7 machine so I don't know how good it would be for testing code.  But I would be willing to help clean up the site any way I could.

[Hawkmoon]

The goal of the site is to figure out media-centered ways to promote RKBA to the population at large.

I like that. Not just another wall in the echo chamber of us loonie "gun guys," but a site that reaches out and advocates for the 2A and the RKBA among the general public. I think that's a very positive and important role. I'm not a techno-nerd so I can't be of help with doing stuff in the corner behind the curtain, but if there is any way I can help, I'll be happy to give it a try.

[RocketMan]

Looking for tech and moderating help to remove spammers and make it viable again.

The goal of the site is to figure out media-centered ways to promote RKBA to the population at large.

A lofty and worthwhile goal, I think.  I'd be willing to help out.

[cordex]

I don't really want to play moderator, but if you need tech help I'm happy to contribute in that way.

From a technical perspective I think the forum is salvageable.  Before we incorporated the CleanTalk integration I wrote some API routines to simplify running new users through that service.  If I had database access, a little tweaking on those routines and I could probably automatically flag emails and IP addresses on the CleanTalk blacklist and delete offending posts/users.

[Ben]

Oleg, I'm a certified boomer and weirdo that prefers the forum environment to other social media, as I find the signal to noise ratio better. I like Twitchy but abhor twitter. That said, Cordex brings up valid points regarding forums and drawing in new, non-weirdos.

Your description of what you want suggests something more than a forum. While it would require much more moderator / site administrator time investment (I think?) than a forum, it's sounding to me like you want something similar to bearingarms.com.

Something like a site that similarly goes to a bearingarms style main page, with news and articles about gun rights, but then perhaps has a ribbon menu at the top that includes "forum" and then takes you to the forum at a secondary layer. Or else again similar to bearingarms, having most of the news and article links with a comments section like Disqus, where people can discuss the particular article. You might even have people onsite writing articles vs just linking to outside articles. I'm sure plenty of the bucketmouths here and at our other "family of forums" would even want to contribute articles/essays.

I'm just not sure that as the main URL, a forum would attract the variety of people you probably want to engage. JMHO.

[230RN]

^ JPFO <jpfo dot org> has a flavor almost identical to that but is not a forum.  They do send out frequent longish semi-professional alerts on particular subject matters.

I'm surprised you didn't mention them, Ben.

[MillCreek]

Forums in general are shrinking.  The last new member who stuck around APS for more than a handful of posts was ConstitutionCowboy who registered more than three years ago.  Before him you'd have to go back at least a couple years to find a member who kept coming back (probably PEFarmer in 2017 and before him Andiron back in 2014).  We had 139 total members log on within the past year, and 98 in the past month (counting the lookie-loos and lurkers).  Meanwhile we've had far more members die, slowly drift away, be banned, or quit suddenly for a variety of reasons meaning that APS membership has been slowly falling off for a long time.  Most of the active members here have been here for many, many years.  Without that core 100 or so members who keep coming back regularly this forum would have died off a long time ago.

Holy moly, I had no idea that we were hanging by such a thread.

[Bogie]

People don't hear about it. So it essentially does not exist.
 
Can GRM be monetized to the extent that it can pay someone to mod and hunt articles, etc? Podcasts, etc., etc?
 
Political niche media no longer runs itself. And it needs to be curated by someone who will actively avoid the fluff _and_ - I hate using the term - misinformation.

[230RN]

Holy moly, I had no idea that we were hanging by such a thread.

I'm not sure about that, either, but I don't keep tabs on posting and new member rates over the years. We are kind of dominated by old-timers, some from the original High Road, though.  But that's off Oleg's topic.

[230RN]

I went back there to poke around and remembered I helped a guy on THR get reinstated as a member of GRM by Dr.Zinn.

Dr. Zinn said there was a purge of flaky members a while before that and this guy somehow got purged as well.  Huh!  My logging on there is still OK!

Left a kind of "HELLO WORLD" message in General.

Boy, that thing is just packed with ads.

Joke, sort of:  Y'know, Oleg,maybe you ought to leave it alone but just start charging advertising fees. Joke over, start laughing.

[RocketMan]

Ben made some good points.  GRM could, and really should, be rejiggered to better live up to the "Media" part of its name.  And media is a broad enough term that opens the door to some worthwhile and valuable content.
The forum would remain as a major part of the site, but not the main part as it is now.

[Bogie]

Regarding _this_ forum - can we tell people about it?
 
I know a few interesting folks...

[HeroHog]

YES, PLEASE! Just don't mention "It that must be named..."

[230RN]

Ben made some good points.  GRM could, and really should, be rejiggered to better live up to the "Media" part of its name.  And media is a broad enough term that opens the door to some worthwhile and valuable content.
The forum would remain as a major part of the site, but not the main part as it is now.

Ben just about described JPFO dot ORG, as I mentioned.

Bogie, yes you can "tout" the GRM board, there's no secret, it's just been sort of inert because of the excessive commercial and irksome nonsense posts. You might want to wait until a decision is made by Oleg Volk on it "to avoid disappointment and future regret" on the part of your invitees.

As I said, when it was running well, it was a very enjoyable site and personally, I hope it can avoid the fate of the old Packing dot org site.  That one got to be a mess because of the poor "like" and "dislike" voting structure and the three or four dogpack cliques. And the owner had other matters to tend to, so shut it down.

Terry "Not a historian, but I was there, Charlie," 230RN

[Ben]

^ JPFO <jpfo dot org> has a flavor almost identical to that but is not a forum.  They do send out frequent longish semi-professional alerts on particular subject matters.

I'm surprised you didn't mention them, Ben.

Well, you mentioned them, then you removed the text of your post, then you edited again, putting them back in and added asking why I didn't mention them. You edit your posts too many times for people to keep track without getting dizzy.

I had no reason to mention them. Bearingarms made my point as an example, as would have dozens of other sites.