Should've made this post yesterday, as the site went up on March 2, 2012. I registered the domain on March 1, 2012.
I'm a few hours late, though I did mention on radio yesterday that it was the 5-year anniversary.
The name PokerFraudAlert was chosen at the last minute -- the day before the site went live. It was originally planned to be called dandruffpoker.com, as explained in this blog. I changed the name because I wanted the site to be about the community and anti-fraud efforts, rather than about me. The logo was hastily thrown together by my girlfriend, who intended it to be temporary, but I never bothered updating it.
Here was the very first post, oddly enough in The Bathroom Wall forum: http://pokerfraudalert.com/forum/sho...e-posting-here
PFA has easily outlived all of the other neverwinpoker spinoff forums. By "outlived", I am referring to the forum being active, not merely accessible.
The only forum from this community to go longer was NWP itself, which lasted from May 2004 through November 2009. But we're coming up on beating that, as well.
This site never had much growth. It's a little less active now than in its first year, but not by a wide margin. It never had a big jump in activity, but also never suffered from any extended period of deadness.
The radio show began a few weeks after the site went up, and has approximately 1500 listeners per week, though most listen through the archives.
Most of the archive radio listeners do not post on or read the forum, though most of the live listeners do.
PFA has generally been a success, given my goals for it. It was never meant to replace 2+2 or make money. It was basically a combination of a continuation of the NWP community and a platform for my radio show and anti-fraud efforts in poker.
When I started PFA, Donkdown was still somewhat active (though it had declined a lot in the 6 months since I departed in September 2011), and I was not sure if there was going to be enough interest in a new forum solely run by me.
I decided I wasn't going to run a failsite. I was going to give it about 1-2 months, and if it was a ghost town, I was going to shut it down and give up. I never had to make that decision, as it instantly saw activity. At the same time, Donkdown quickly declined, and was a complete ghost town within a few months.
Some (including Micon) believed I started PFA as a "fuck you" to Donkdown, in an effort to replace it.
That honestly was not my intention. In fact, the quick demise of Donkdown was a surprise to me. I never asked anyone to leave Donkdown, and thought it was very possible that the two sites would exist simultaneously for quite some time. I just wanted a forum again, and also missed doing radio.
I will say that this site's moderate success and Donkdown's quick collapse was vindicating. During some of our fierce arguments on the phone, Micon told me that I was the reason NWP/DD failed to blow up huge. I contended that my positives very much outweighed my negatives there, and the opposite was true -- that I was a very large part of both sites doing as well as they did. He disagreed, and swore the site would become a huge success once I was gone. Well, indeed I left, and you saw what happened.
I would like to thank the active posters of this site for keeping PFA and our community alive. Without active posters, this forum would have been gone a long time ago.
I would especially like to thank those who have been extra generous with their time and money regarding PFA.
Belly Buster runs the NoFraud Online Poker room, and has also donated money to the freerolls.
simpdog has run some very generous contests for the userbase here.
cmoney has been amazingly generous with the radio freeroll, and many other things here. He's donated more money to PFA than anyone.
smiflorida has donated frequently to the freeroll.
Pooh has thrown in some large donations to the freeroll.
We have a few anonymous donors who I don't want to name, but I appreciate them, as well.
Brandon has been a great co-host for radio, and I truly enjoy the periods of time when he's an active part of the show. We really have great chemistry on the radio, and he's hilarious.
Vwls hasn't been here in awhile, but she did a great job during her time on the show in 2012 and 2013.
Daredevil was an excellent radio co-host in 2015 and early 2016, and was liked by nearly everyone.
khalwat, the current radio co-host, is also excellent, and brings a lot of really intelligent perspectives to the show, along with a great sense of humor. He's also really generous with donating to the freeroll, and was responsible for the infamous $300 offer to get Brandon to drive to a ghetto Sonic and do a live radio segment from there.
traderusky is a great guy who helped with PFA from day one. He's not only generous with his time in co-hosting radio, but he's donated to the freeroll, arranged the PFA hats, and done a bunch of other stuff behind the scenes.
If I'm leaving anyone out, I apologize, as I'm tired, and I'm doing this off the top of my head.
Here are the 10 most prolific PFA posters:
1) Dan Druff 20,077
2) sonatine 13,520
3) 4Dragons 10,625 (currently MIA)
4) BeerAndPoker 8,750
5) DRK Star 7,959 (currently MIA)
6) limitles 6,773
7) Brittney Griner's Clit 6,461
8) Hockey Guy 6,154
9) chinamaniac 6,134
10) simpdog 5,840
90 different users have 1,000 posts or more.
There have been approximately 353,000 posts on PFA in its 5-year existence, not counting the automated bot posts.
There are almost 14,000 threads on the site.
The most active thread by far is Tyde's "Time to get on the TRUMP train", which is approaching 16,000 posts and has about 452,000 views.
There have been 223 radio shows, not counting the 14 "user" shows also produced.
Well over $10,000 has been given away in the site's CASH freerolls during radio. This site is also unique in that it awards actual cash for winning its freerolls, rather than crappy poker site money.
It would take well over a month to listen to all the radio shows, even if you spent every minute doing so and never slept.
There are only a few non-spammer users currently banned on PFA. I won't bother naming them, but I think this site has done very well in its 5 years in staying away from internal drama for the most part.
The site has never had any mods or co-owners. I have done 100% of the site's technical work, as well.
Russian hackers installed a nasty web shell backdoor to the server during a hack in early 2014, but it largely sat dormant until January 2017, when it was suddenly used to fire out lots of spam e-mail. I don't believe those Russians were interested in any data on the site, but instead attacked for spamming reasons. The backdoor has since been cleared out.
The site's low point was the Jasep scam of early 2013. However, about 1/3 of the money has been recovered, and we are still recovering it (slowly) to this day.
I have no plans to take down PFA any time soon, so it may very well be here for the 10th anniversary as well.
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Originally Posted by Jasep
for everyone
