17th February 2013
After careful consideration I have decided to take down the horror forum. When I first created Dark Discussions it was my hope that the forum would be a useful resource for those with an interest in the horror genre. Sadly the forum never really caught on; 77 members are not enough to keep a horror forum alive, especially when most of them are inactive.
I did consider leaving the forum up, even though it was dead, but it still presented me with some problems. The first problem was that spammers and spambots became aware of the forum and began to target it. Removing their profiles and the posts that they made took up a considerable amount of my time, so I installed some software that blocked the spambots. This made things a lot easier, but I still had a problem with flesh and blood spammers. Finally, as the spammers seemed to be the only ones who were interested in the forum, I disabled new user registrations and would have been happy to leave things at that—problem solved as far as I was concerned.
Sadly another problem emerged due to the new cookie law. I have been busy trying to make all of my websites compliant with the new legislations and the forum was one of the last sites I needed to bring up to date. When I did an audit of the cookies running on Dark Discussions I was surprised to see how many there were. A few of them were third party cookies related to the onsite advertising. These were not a problem. The rest of them were a complete mystery to me and I can only presume that they were part and parcel of the forum software I was using. All in all it there would have been far too much work involved with bringing the horror forum up to par and I was left with no other choice than to remove the forum from my server.
Sorry for any inconvenience that this may have caused.
If you are a horror fan looking for horror movie and book reviews, my main site is the place to go. The site also has many public domain texts, you can listen to old horror radio shows and stream a few movies.
Steve Calvert