For those of you interested, here is the announcement from Boardnation which prompted us to 'Abandon Ship'! ;D
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Most of you with free message boards have probably noticed by now the lack of Google Ads being displayed on your board. Google has made a decision to ban Boardnation from their Adsense program, because they found one of our message board customers posting some questionable material which violated Google’s Terms of Service. It also violated Boardnation’s Terms of Service. We removed the board immediately after it was reported to us, and I asked Google to reconsider BN for their Adsense program, but they have so far refused.
Being unable to display Google ads has forced us into a position to no longer offer free message boards, at least for the undefined future. Those of you with free message boards (either with or without ads) will need to upgrade to a paid plan by June 5th.
We are offering special pricing on (2) paid plans as follows:
1) $4.49/mo Flagship Plan. This plan has all the bells and whistles of the old “Platinum” Plan. Here is a list of additional features you will see with this plan:
• Effective CAPTCHA on Registration page - to keep spam bots out of your board!!
• Disable New Registrations
• Multiple Thread Mover
• Mute User
• Quick Moderator
• Disable Changing Display Names
• Return to Post After Posting
• Users Online Coloring
• Show Today's Birthdays on Boardindex
• Enhanced Search
• Disable Private Messaging
• Allow Guests to View Memberlist
• Shoutbox
• Specify Default Personal Text
• New Post Notification
• No Google Ads!
• Payments are setup using PayPal
2) $9.99/mo Advanced Plan. This is a dedicated board with its own database, and you have full access to add mods, themes, portals, etc. You can also use your own domain name. See
smfdemo.boardnation.com if you haven’t already, to get an idea of what your board would look like.
Again, if you have a free board, you will need to upgrade by June 5th. If you do not upgrade, your board will be flagged for deletion. If you wish to leave BN, and you want us to export all of your board data for you, we will do that for a $100 flat fee.
If you want to upgrade your board, or if you want your data exported, you must email me directly at kevin@boardnation.com
We are sorry that it has come to this, but in many ways it's far better! We (and you) will no longer be at the mercy of Google's Adsense program, and you will enjoy several new features with a Flagship board, and, no more Google Ads!
Keep in mind that if Google decides to reinstate us into their Adsense program down the road, we will certainly consider offering free message board services once again, and converting your board back to an “ad” board.
I want to comment on the state of the servers, and our recent level of support. I realize there have been several server issues on and off lately that have affected many of you. I am working directly with the engineers at The Planet (which is where the BN servers are hosted) to have server maintenance done on a regular basis; this will go a long way in making our servers the most reliable they can possibly be.
In addition, we are in the process of deleting boards from our databases (so far over 500 boards have been deleted), and we are continuing the purge process. We are deleting message boards that have “moved elsewhere” to another host, and also boards that have had no posting activity in (6) months or more. These boards are considered abandoned. This purge process frees up a lot of space on our servers, and makes the load time for active boards much faster.