[TheForge] Anyone know why IForgeIron dot com is down?

[Jerry Frost]

iforge is back online but with a limited message saying what's going on. 
This is it as a FWD.

There's been a lot of baseless speculation being posted in other Fora 
and it's doing nobody any good. I understand folks and how speculation 
builds into sometimes huge avalanches of posts. There's nothing to them 
but it's falling into the maliscious law suits being filed by someone 
with more money than whatever. Basically Iforge is shut down for the 
foreseeable future by one person with an axe to grind.

I don't know who is filing the maliscious lawsuits and Glenn ain't 
telling. The IFI legal team is on it. Please be patient, unsupported 
speculation ain't doing anybody any good except the dingk brain who's 
spending money to shut IFI down out of spit.

Just imagine what it'd do to a legitimate site like ABANA if I go cranky 
enough to get myself banned from theforge list and decided to sew ABANA 
for copyright infringement for every post of mine they ever posted here 
and had the money to pay a lawyer to file under DMCA laws.

That's what I know
  Jer


  I Forge Iron

We're a site about blacksmithing that servers over 2 million pages and 
serves over 80,000 people a month.


    Where is the site?

We ban users a lot. In fact, we've banned over 15,000 users (mostly 
spam) in our 10+ years. This usually goes unnoticed. However, a recently 
banned demanded we reinstate his account or he'd take legal action. He did.


    An Abusive DMCA Was Filed;

The banned user filed an abusive DMCA with our webhost claiming broad 
copyright violations on thousands of pages and gave us 48 hours to take 
it down. We filed a counter notice, but the DMCA reads that the material 
must be kept offline for 10-12 days. Our host, disabled the website (by 
mistake I might add) until that time passes.


    Wait! Doesn't the Terms of Service Help?

No. It doesn't prevent abuses like this. :(


    When will this be over?

Our lawyers are handling it at this point.

We are looking into other options.


    What can you do you help?

I could use a cup of coffee.
So the site is down for the forseeable future.  Some of the guys are 
communicating through Metal Artists Forum.
All the best.  Hope to see you this summer, hope all are well.
Bryan



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