Now that it's all over... can someone explain what happened to Boris?

At one point about 3-4 years ago, Boris was thriving and really put a dent into NWP's forum activity level.

I used to lurk there a lot when there was constant talk about Micon/me/NWP, but that eventually died down. Once that occurred, I found that the site was mostly inside jokes and levels, so I found it boring and stopped lurking for the most part.

One thing I found annoying about Boris was the fact that there were so many levels that it was impossible to tell who was actually arguing or feuding there. When the eventual dissatisfaction with neverstop occurred and people left the site, I didn't realize it until after it was all over. I had read a little about it during my occasioal lurks, but I assumed it was more leveling, so I disregarded it. Turned out it was real, and neverstop really did somehow alienate most of the active users there.

I took a look at boris tonight and it's embarrassing. The front page still has threads from September.

So what happened? Why did everyone get so mad at neverstop?

I realize that some of the more active posters went to Skatz (which seems to be even more centered around inside jokes), but I'm more interested in the "why" of the whole thing.

No reason for this, just curious.

Heavy hands and lots of hurt butts.

Boris, in it's prime, was untouchable. We didn't have faggots like Limitles, the_pha, and 408Mike posting.

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Originally Posted by Muck Ficon

Boris, in it's prime, was untouchable. We didn't have faggots like Limitles, the_pha, and 408Mike posting.

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Les came over towards the end and Bob banned him in record time.
:lol3

Somewhere, in some way, Dakota is rotting in hell.

Ian had this very particular vision for the future of the site, in terms of culture and personality, and became increasingly overt in his pursuit of that vision (heavy hands, :octopus, so on). And that rubbed people wrong. And when people confronted him on it he seemed to never know when to back down, which was a hilarious and perfect force multiplier for trolling. Also he was making a huge effort to monetize the site and started to super-care about SEO and people were like seriously? Youre going to ban someone for 3 days for bumping an old thread because it might impact your SEO and youll make $17 this month instead of $17.10?

But ultimately what really sank the ship was when we found out he was trying to sell Boris on some porn site forum. Apparently that was why he wanted to smooth out the rough edges so to speak, so he could appeal to a larger number of new posters (his theory, not ours), which would translate into a better market price.

And aint nobody got time for that. Id say within a month of someone digging up the post he made, easily 90% of the daily posters walked away, and the remaining posters went from making 5 posts a day to like 3 posts a week.

The demise of boris still breaks my little heart. When it was firing on all cylinders it was the funnest forum to be on. I held out a long time and really wanted to get it back on track but in the end neverstops terrible was too much.

Also i was doing ok in online tournies back then and nigstop was trying to get me to buy 49% of the site for like 5k promising of huge things lined up for the site

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Originally Posted by Muck Ficon

Boris, in it's prime, was untouchable. We didn't have faggots like Limitles, the_pha, and 408Mike posting.

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Originally Posted by sonatine

Ian had this very particular vision for the future of the site, in terms of culture and personality, and became increasingly overt in his pursuit of that vision (heavy hands, :octopus, so on). And that rubbed people wrong. And when people confronted him on it he seemed to never know when to back down, which was a hilarious and perfect force multiplier for trolling. Also he was making a huge effort to monetize the site and started to super-care about SEO and people were like seriously? Youre going to ban someone for 3 days for bumping an old thread because it might impact your SEO and youll make $17 this month instead of $17.10?

But ultimately what really sank the ship was when we found out he was trying to sell Boris on some porn site forum. Apparently that was why he wanted to smooth out the rough edges so to speak, so he could appeal to a larger number of new posters (his theory, not ours), which would translate into a better market price.

And aint nobody got time for that. Id say within a month of someone digging up the post he made, easily 90% of the daily posters walked away, and the remaining posters went from making 5 posts a day to like 3 posts a week.

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so, in 200 words you said:

boris posters were men of principal. and that you wanted to stick to neverstop before he turned it into a porn type site...did you ever stop to think if he hired serial fail in some sort of advisory position......lol

I bailed on that site before the porn stuff came up I guess. Neverstop was terrible in almost every way

that and he deleted the social groups which at the time were thriving forums in and of themselves. that really pissed off a bunch people. IST and NAWC never forget.

rofl i just remembered the absurd amount that i was willing to pay to buy the site so i could keep it from changing, ie getting ruined. but neverstop, bless his icicle heart, wouldn't give up majority control. god did that place rock at its heyday.

I never had a problem with neverstop, but I did feel that he was running boris to make money, rather than "for the love of the game".

That's never a good recipe for forums, but it's especially bad when you prettty much have a closed community with a niche group of people. That is, boris was never going to get much new traffic, aside from former NWP regulars. Nobody involved with it was a recognizable figure in poker or the poker media, so that pretty much prevented non-NWP-related outsiders from joining. The inside-joke environment also wasn't particularly welcoming to new users.

For these reasons, it was foolish of neverstop to think he was going to monetize the site beyond what it already was. He was stupid to change so many things against the will of the people, and LOL @ trying to sell it to a porn company. I didn't even know about that part.

Even though I was just a 2.5% owner of NWP, I still loved the site itself and I didn't like seeing so many people defecting to boris. I understood the reasoning behind the defections, but I still didn't like it. At one point I was legitimately concerned that boris would become the "new NWP" and NWP would become a ghost town, but then I realized that NWP had a constant stream of new users coming in, while boris would never have that. If we waited long enough, the activity would recover, and time would probably heal enough wounds to where some of the old regulars would come back. Truth be told, like everyone else I generally preferred the old regulars over the n00bs we were getting at the time, but I was at least glad that NWP had enough of a new traffic and lurker base to where we could recover from that mass defection.

If nigstop left everything alone I don't think there would be a pfa. Everyone would be at Boris

His rational for getting rid of social groups made sense. It was also hilarious in that it tilted Gamble to no end when he couldn't get his Baby Makers group.

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Originally Posted by LLL

His rational for getting rid of social groups made sense. It was also hilarious in that it tilted Gamble to no end when he couldn't get his Baby Makers group.

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I was surprised to see that this place has groups, but are either unknown to everyone or just not popular, i'm going with just unknown.

http://pokerfraudalert.com/forum/group.php

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Originally Posted by LLL

His rational for getting rid of social groups made sense. It was also hilarious in that it tilted Gamble to no end when he couldn't get his Baby Makers group.

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No it didn't make sense. It was idiotic

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Originally Posted by Suicide King

If nigstop left everything alone I don't think there would be a pfa. Everyone would be at Boris

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I disagree.

Did the ghost-towning of boris indirectly help PFA? Yes, because certain boris regulars are now regulars here, and perhaps that wouldn't have happened if boris were still thriving.

However, boris was never going to be another NWP, for reasons I explained in an earlier post. It was a collection of longtime NWP regulars who were generally tight-knit and preferred inside jokes over general discussions that would appeal to the masses. Boris also never really had a way to get new traffic, and it had relatively few lurkers (and almost no lurkers who weren't already active NWP members). There was always a portion of NWP that wasn't tight-knit with the longtime regs, didn't like and/or understand the inside jokes, and just wanted a good 2+2-alternative to have general discussion. That's how NWP (and later DD) managed to survive the boris exodus, and that's why this site has a fair amount of activity.

Skatz is the site that would be a complete ghost town if boris were still active.

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Originally Posted by Dan Druff

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Originally Posted by Suicide King

If nigstop left everything alone I don't think there would be a pfa. Everyone would be at Boris

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I disagree.

Did the ghost-towning of boris indirectly help PFA? Yes, because certain boris regulars are now regulars here, and perhaps that wouldn't have happened if boris were still thriving.

However, boris was never going to be another NWP, for reasons I explained in an earlier post. It was a collection of longtime NWP regulars who were generally tight-knit and preferred inside jokes over general discussions that would appeal to the masses. Boris also never really had a way to get new traffic, and it had relatively few lurkers (and almost no lurkers who weren't already active NWP members). There was always a portion of NWP that wasn't tight-knit with the longtime regs, didn't like and/or understand the inside jokes, and just wanted a good 2+2-alternative to have general discussion. That's how NWP (and later DD) managed to survive the boris exodus, and that's why this site has a fair amount of activity.

Skatz is the site that would be a complete ghost town if boris were still active.

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translation: i have a huge contingent of people waiting in line to sniff my balls.