IMPORTANT: You will want to read this.

[Pagan]

Dear Forum members, I have a rather large bit of bad news to share.

Oct 17, 2014 18:56:38 GMT -5 Hadoken said:

Hi gang. Yes, I'm still alive.

Got an email and message from Proboards:

ProBoards does not permit the buying, selling, or trading of weapons on our service. This includes non lethal weapons such as airsoft. Your forum appears to be in violation of this policy. We ask that you please remove all offending content from your forum within 48 hours.

Examples of offending content includes but may not be limited to:

miairsoft.proboards.com/board/46/commerce

Please take the time to familiarize yourself with our policies so that there are no issues in the future.
Terms of Service: www.proboards.com/tos
Community Guidelines: www.proboards.com/community_guidelines

If you have any questions, please contact our Abuse Department at [e-mail].

ProBoards Abuse Department
[e-mail]

Seems rather ridiculous to mention TOS violations now, considering MiAirsoft along with the "commerce" forum have been with Proboards for so many years (10 or more?), but I fear they may delete the forum, and destroy the community you all have maintained if their demands are not met.

Since I'm no longer an active admin or forum member I'll leave it up to you guys to decide how you'd like to handle the matter. (lock or delete commerce board?)

Cheers,
Hado

In order to not have the entire forum deleted, we are currently locking all commerce threads until we are able to determine what our options are.

[Combat Junkies Airsoft]

Fight the machine!

[Elvis]

This is kinda ridiculous, espically considering how many proboards airsoft related forums there are out there who also have commerce sections. I notice it says weapons, not gear. Could we possibly just not allow airsoft replicas to be sold here and just gear or parts instead? Assuming they are not willing to negotiate

[Pagan]

That's the hope.

The admin staff is looking into what we can and can not do.

This is an extreme measure, but it's better than taking a chance and having them remove the board and all of it's contents.

There is a wealth of information here that would be a bummer to lose.

[Puma1]

Well, that's dumb.
To Elvis's comment, it's kind of a waste to even bother. There are other sites we can use. Even if we need to buy a domain, 1$ per active person on the forum would cover it and then some. It wouldn't be quite as good as proboards, but the commerce section is one of the main reasons I joined here in the first place.

Lets hope they'll reconsider. Please keep us posted.

[Pagan]

Sadly for this to have come up, someone would have had to report the forum.


So, someone out there was butt hurt enough to report a forum of over 10 years.

[M.S.-ARC]

Well that sucks. I'm sure we can figure out a Temporary alternative for now until we can get something more concrete in place outside of pro-boards.

[Simon]

My Google-Fu skills aren't top notch, but as far as I can tell most of Proboards competitors don't ban the sale or trade of any legal weapons including real steel firearms. If that information can't get them to budge, I'm sure you've probably considered moving just the commerce section to another forum and keeping everything else here. I understand it's not really as simple as it sounds and I'm more than willing to help with any heavy lifting that you guys want to give me.

[Stache]

Oct 18, 2014 10:25:35 GMT -5 Pagan said:

Sadly for this to have come up, someone would have had to report the forum.


So, someone out there was butt hurt enough to report a forum of over 10 years.

So this is thanks to a member!?

[Coussens5]

Most likely it was probably someone who got banned and was upset. I agree with Wraith though you could bring up every other forum that allows it. Also I know you guys are probably suck of hearing everyone's opinion but I feel that if it comes down to it most of us would rather have the whole forum without commerce vs no forum at all. Maybe we can set up a specific alternative site for commerce.

[Alex-(BM_5)]

We have quite a few other boards we could use. They used to be listed as related sites, dunno if they were integrated into the new proboards design though.

[Blaze (Biggie)]

Wow that's just... Not having a commerce section would kill our community. I agree with Couseens, having an alternate site for a commerce section. The commerce button could be a link to a trade/buy/sale permitted page that we could advertise on.

[Pagan]

There's two issues we're dealing with at the moment.

#1: The forum is registered in Hado's name, so we're not sure if correspondence from others will be answered or even considered.
#2: Even though other sites have it, they weren't the one who received the abuse complaint and they aren't under scrutiny, we are.

If it boils down to it, we'll just run the forum without a commerce section.

PS: Look at Arc's post carefully.

[Infantry]

Did anyone go through the TOS? I did not find that on the mobile app Terms but I will admit I scanned parts of it.

I work for an online hotel company/Customer Service and our Terms and Conditions are clear and to the point.

I was just askng if someone saw it as there has been a lot of phishing snd scams going around.

[Stache]

Would the people who have reviews for commerce get there reviews erased or would it only be the commerce?