Postings in the “Misc” category usually announce new features or other positive stuff, this time it’s different though as there’s some bad news – The VirtualR community section will be closed by the end of the week.
Launched last November, the section was meant to expand on the comment area, providing users with a forum and a place to share screenshots and videos. Hosted by a third-party service called Ning, the system quickly began to suffer from serious spamming problems as the site was plagued by bots posting advertisements for all kinds of questionable services. The Ning staff wasn’t willing or able to deal with the problem, causing this issue to get worse as time passed by.
Furthermore, I quickly realised that such a section only makes sense if it can be combined with the main site. That wasn’t possible with the Ning system, causing quite low activity in the community section as less than 5% of all readers have ever used the service.
Ning is ending their free service at the end of the week, making this the right time to close the community section for good – A step I??ve been postponing for quite a while.There will be new, more carefully-planned, community-features somewhere down the road as I??ve learned my lesson from this failed attempt.
