The Gossip Forum Closure

 This forum had run for about a year and during 2015 and suddenly closed around Christmas Eve or Day under unknown circumstances but potentially due to many controversial rumors. Some said it had something to do with the threads mentioned, which became heated, but others claimed with some unconfirmed evidence of a suicide of a member or poster that may have been pushed or pressured my a site moderator, other say it was a due to a split or dispute between moderators or administrators of both this forum and the parent forum. It is unclear whether or or all of these versions were true, though there was some evidence of each that I have seen. It was also discussed for  a time across the various related forums, such as CTC as seen in the previous post, but also LOP and some splinter forums which were smaller like CTC.

One curious element on retrospect were the presence of not only these threads, but threads and post discussing Trump for the upcoming election, some in support of him, even though it was 2015, and very out of place. The manner in which these and the other threads may have connected is how some group of posters at the parent forum had posted a strange mega-thread that may have been trying to exploit the theme of the nobody threads in terms of projecting it to an agenda with the election.

There were some curious clues and mentioning of this on the gossip forum. Since its closure, not much remained in the archives. But there are some things worth showing, even from before its closure, that should corroborate to some of these later events as well as other eyebrow raising curiosities that have to do with data collection and manipulation on a personal but mass level. Rumors of testing of spyware or other intrusion circulated in posts on these or other sites.

Much of the discussion of the gossip forum subsided by the election or not long after, but it wasn't until a bit later that the nature of that group of election posters became more apparent. Also, the nobody threads once again continued on the parent forum, and at one point there was a mass purge of older threads, I saw happen in real time the threads being deleted, including threads I was reading in the moment, some were very strange as if describing experiments with them. This would be in line with what some of the posters on CTC have said. 

I think what should be said is that what they are describing only represent a concise description of the phenomena as the volume and presentation of information was much more sophisticated than at first glance. This also leads many to believe that bots were employed or tested, or that it was even testing grounds for AI or modeling thereof. There were also descriptions of persona software that managed multiple accounts by theme and personality which may have accounted for some users at one or both sites. 

Is it going too far? Has it? I personally believe it so which is why I am writing this. Even now, some tech leaders are questioning the pursuit of AI, reading as I type this. We also have heard of invasive spyware placed on phones. Is this somehow related to complaints some of these forum users have made, were they experimented with prototype versions, etc.? Questionable use of tracking and spyware technology have been speculated about these sites, but there are those who were much more acquainted with these events, that I would be unsure of who and how to point to at the moment. What I can do is provide some images which can explain the situation and some related information, as seen and said at the time, which may take on a different meaning after events in recent years. More posts to follow.