The forum has not seen much activity for quite a while, which is a fate that is shared with probably all specialist forums. By and large, Internet usage patterns have simply changed, and Google suppressing niche content surely did not help either. I will remove the forum at the end of June 2023. If you are a member, you have a little over five months left to save your favorite threads and articles. Thanks for your contributions over the years.
Aaron,
Is the forum any different compared to this current blog you have or you old blog on dating?
Does the blog have any topics besides dating?
Have you thought about selling some of those articles?
The content of the forum and the current blog are quite similar. It is more closely related to my old blog, which had a much stronger focus on pickup as well as making fun of the seduction industry. Selling articles is not easy. There is also the problem that editing for publication is a very time-consuming process.
Why don’t you make an export available for your blog’s userbase? I recall many great topics when I was young enough to remember my old credentials. ?
If its possible,please consider making an archive of the entire blog,then perhaps sell access it for a reasonable price (or make it freely access if that’s perfectly ok with you and the members.) to those who didn’t register in the forum.
Would be a real shame to lose all the info in it. I’ve only read archived posts of the forum and there’s definitely some interesting discussions there that would be such a shame to lose.
I’d have paid for access to it years ago,but other priorities always got in the way.
Providing an archive of the forum would be a security nightmare. There is also the issue of content theft. Some years ago I ran a blog, under different name, in which I wrote about a much more mainstream topic. That was when you could still use Google Alerts effectively. Almost all my articles back then were plagiarized by others, normally verbatim. Granted, this was when online hucksters, er, information marketers were pushing the idea of making six figures with blogging. However, there is still a niche online that would be quite interested in the content as it is of an infinitely higher quality than what you get from a bunch of Indians who get paid a few bucks to write articles.
A bit of an idea I just suddenly got,but maybe you could sell the contents of the forum as one big e-book. I can’t remember who it is,but I could have sworn there was someone else who did that before deciding to close his forum.
I’m not sure how to properly go about that though. Maybe Alek or someone else can chime in. I imagine that keeping the forum up probably has its costs,so I understand why you’d want to take it down if the activity has gone dry. All I can think of to preserve the content on it while also relieving you of the cost for upkeep is to compile all of it into a big e-book if you feel it’d be worth your while. (perhaps registered forum members should get it on a discount though,if not free.) Also,I imagine there’s less chance you’d get someone randomly plagarizing the info since its all going to be in an e-book one has to purchase and not something freely available on the net.
I have read your forums many times and noticed that many contents related to your personal life at the time were revealed. Luckily, you were wise enough to remove of some of them. But a thorough search and found operation would be needed to cleanse the forum of these details.
I think 5 months is enough to archive many important posts and threads in the forum.
I think you still have an archive of your forum, nevertheless. In that respect, you should have more control of information related to your personal identity and protect yourself from future retribution from who knows who.
Hi all,
Just a quick question re forum closure..
I’d like to save a number of threads and articles for future reference etc ..any ideas on the easiest and quickest way to do this ?? Is there some way to ‘bulk save’ a whole page of threads as a pdf ? Or better to save as HTML format or something like that..? Great info on there I don’t want to lose it ???? thanks
Well, I have just saved all of my favorite threads. I just clicked “save” the page and thats it
I dont know why it would not be possible to just leave it up? Are you paying for it in any way, Aaron?
Do you really need to close it down? It may be dead as far as interaction gors, but there is a lot of pickup wisdom to be gathered there for future guys who have no clue.
Anyway, reading those threads again brought back a lot of memories. 😉
I personally had a close friend (I dunno how proficient he is in the grand scheme of things,but he knows how to code,and he knew how to get the job done) save the contents of the website via some coding software he concocted. Unfortunately,its far from perfect. It saved the written contents (which is what matters the most for if I need to dig in for some of the lessons later on),but its a major downgrade in terms of reading leisure compared to reading directly on the forum. I was hoping it would be like “saving a page” but done on a grander scale all at once. (that was probably too much to ask for,lol)
Still hoping Aaron changes his mind about taking it down! I do think your future readers would benefit from having access to it. Your books contain the fundamental information to get started,but there’s some niche stuff in there that would definitely help.
The conversation about “mood” for example was interesting. Also how I found this Oldie Goldie that I linked in the other blog:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120415111623/http://www.cliffslist.com/content/spotting-greedy-women-aaron-sleazy
There is a popular command line utility for downloading entire websites.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/downloading-entire-web-site-wget
It works for WordPress sites and should also work for forums as long as they are statically rendered.
I thought about this some more. It should be fine to keep up the forum. I just will not mention it on the main page but anybody who is registered can still access it. There big risk is that some bot will be able to register an account with posting privileges and flood the forum with endless garbage. There are countless spam posts in the moderation queue, i.e. too many to manually go through. The question is simply when this dam will break.
Glad to read that you’ve changed your mind,Aaron! 😀
Well, maybe you just dont approve any new posts? Unless prompted by us, exceptionally perhaps.
I did learn a lot (or confirm things i intuitively knew) over time. It has no more value to me more than nostalghia. I could update my field reports with another 40 girls at least, but i dont think anyone would read me.
However, new guys might find most of their questions already answered there.