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     | Thursday, May 03, 2001 - 01:26 pm  I can no longer deal with the administration and maintenance of the forum, see I can't back up or move the forum. As many of you know, those weren't the only problems. There are 1035 "unknown posts" when I run a log analysis. I had set up a topic with subtopics for credit cards' underwriting guidelines and credit reporting. All subtopics disappeared. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get this fixed. The final Discus advice was to upgrade to the latest service release and try fixing it again. Upgrading requires me to redo all customization - it took at least 15 hours last time. Last December I realized that the OLD disabled Matt's forum was getting thousands of search engine hits. Again, ENDLESS hours later, after converting to "noframes" format and changing the script to automatically add meta tags, I hoped the search engines would finally pick up the Discus forum. Well, I get 2 or 3 search engine hits for Discus. It's $2,500 to buy a custom program developed just to have the Discus pages submitted to search engines. Discus wore me out. I just can't deal with it anymore. I've been searching the web for other forum software for months now. I have found NOTHING I'd want to use. I really do like the Discus structure, being able to move topics and messages. If I only got it to run without constant problems and it had a date field in the search. Do a search for credit, bankruptcy or dispute and you'll see what I mean. Add to that being EXTREMELY frustrated by having absolutely NOTHING accomplished after 4 years of running the forum. While it's great to see that many people found the forum very helpful, my goal was to CHANGE the way corporate works. Instead, I merely cleaned up corporate's mess for the fortunate few who found the forum - on MY buck. My goal was NOT to provide free information and answers to people so they could dispute and waste endless hours of THEIR time without pay. Additionally, the poor, the seniors, the working parents, they don't have the time/money/education to find BayHouse, and they are worse off now than 4 years ago. We just added MORE scores in addition to Fair Isaac's credit scores, people are being bombarded with ads and spam for credit reports, monitoring, credit repair ... the scams and downright fraud is rampant. Equifax advertises that you need to PURCHASE their credit monitoring service to prevent identity theft - when all they'd have to do is issue a PIN as any bank and almost all businesses with sensitive data now do. Capital One and others stopped reporting the credit limit, often dramatically lowering the scores. The FTC does NOTHING. Now more than ever I am convinced that only massive law suits will change anything. If I can't change how corrupt America is today, and the rest of the world will be tomorrow, at the very least I want corporate to have to PAY. If thousands of people sued the CRAs and creditors, even if only in Small Claims, I think there'd be an impact. Not ONE reader posted about their law suit. Right now I feel like the village idiot. I've spent many thousands of hours on this forum and I accomplished nothing. ZERO. Absolutely nothing. I love to help people in trouble, and there is so much to be done. I admire people who go to hospices and help the dying. People get terminally ill, and there is nothing one can do about it. We'll all die some day, and can only hope we won't be alone and scared in some hospital bed. When people have creditors report incorrect/incomplete data on credit reports, when collection agencies violate the FCRA, it is NOT an act of God. The corporations SHOULD be held RESPONSIBLE. When Fair Isaac causes mortgage declines and a lot of misery, it also is NOT an act of God. Charity is NOT what is called for. NACA is a typical example of the expectations so many people have. They want to buy a house, have little income, no down payment, yet nobody responded to this fantastic program. Why? I know why. The NACA program comes with the obligation to stand up and fight for your rights. You'll be called on to demonstrate against corporate, to put in YOUR hours. That's too much work .... you just want your house, drink beer in your new yard and watch TV. And that's understandable too, after all, most people are busy as it is. But so am I. So from now on, people are just going to have to pay me to work for them, just like they pay their plumber and auto mechanic. It's YOUR choice to sue for your money back. I will REFUND my fee if I advise clients to sue and they lose or don't get my fee awarded by the judge -- in exchange for the right to publish the case summary, the decision, the court, the judge's name. I really want people to sue. I'll even work a few hours at no charge if I find someone has a very good case against a CRA, Fair Isaac or a creditor/collection agency and just can't pay me. Hopefully I'll have some more time to finally update the FICO pages. There is so much material in the forum to be consolidated on the web. Nobody can read 7000 postings! I'll leave the forum up for reading, until it disintegrates completely and I don't have a backup, or Interland closes my account. I don't even know how long I'm prepaid, but I really don't feel like sending Interland more money as reward for their awful service. I'll try to organize the forum a bit more and I'll continue to post my own struggles in Small Claims Court (mediation with Qwest, fka US West, May 10) and whatever else I want to share with the rest of the world. I'll be happy to provide free web space to anyone who wants to publish their own legal battle with CRAs or creditors or Fair Isaac. If anyone knows of a moderated forum please post. If there's something really good, I'll definitely put a link here. Maybe E-loan would like to pick up the ball? Anyone?
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| | Wednesday, May 09, 2001 - 02:53 pm I guess there's really nothing out there. I looked at the about.com forum today, it's awful. The software makes Discus look good. I was reading a posting that clearly was a response to a question, but I was unable to find the question. A good percentage of the postings are spams and scams, they don't even delete them. And then there are those annoying blinking ads ... totally pathetic. I posted there that I'd be happy to pay $20/month for an ad free forum, and I mean that.
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| | Wednesday, June 13, 2001 - 12:03 pm You didn't look at the ultimate bulletin board? (ubb). I don't know the link, but I participate on many forums, and this is my favorite.
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| | Friday, July 06, 2001 - 01:16 pm Dan, I did look at it. It's been so long I can't remember what the problem with ubb was. Recently checked out vbulletin, and it looks like it would do everything I want. I'll have to learn about php and mysql, not anything I do for fun. I've been very busy, but I'll probably give it a try whenever I got a few hours. Just finally moved the site and forum to Cedant.com, never got the Discus backup working at Interland and had to move the files manually. The backup works at Cedant and considering the 48mb file size, all the postings *should* be there, with the exception of the postings lost by Discus as addressed in previous postings. I haven't been able to find anyone who is willing to actually DO something about credit reporting and credit scoring problems. I don't feel like devoting a lot of time and energy to giving free advice and administering a forum to talk about how things suck and how to beat the system. I want to CHANGE the system - so that EVERYBODY gets a fair chance at getting credit, housing and insurance. There's so much to DO, but my day has only 24 hours. I'll see how things go ...
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