It actually escalated a little bit more than I initially posted as well. At some point they started to get pretty bold and posted comments such as: xxx sucks, you should instead use xxx. Near the end they stopped trying to conceal who they were.

But like I said before, this time we’re prepared and we’ll deal with it accordingly if they try again. It was just one company after all…

Thank you.

As for why, I was trying to be somewhat sneaky and allude to the reason. But since you ask and I’m generally pretty transparent, and because I’ve posted the full reason before I’ll post it here.

To quote a previous blog entry (and please remember this is before we started using HelpSpot which should greatly help alleviate this issue):

“There used to be a discussion board on LandlordMax, but unfortunately we had to take it down. We started to get bombarded with negative comment FROM ONE OF OUR COMPETITORS! I won’t go into details or mention names but what I’ll say is that the forum software we used tracked IP addresses as people posted. We didn’t know this until after when we wanted to investigate the source of the postings. Because of this we were easily able to pinpoint it to one location. Shame on them!!! We conferred with a lawyer who advised us to just remove the discussion board for now, that it wasn’t worth the litigation. So because of a few bad apples we had to remove it.”

What I also didn’t mention is that we did moderate it for a while but it got really frustrating. To say the least, it became more than annoying to continually (on a daily basis) have to delete postings. They kept appearing because the spam filters weren’t picking them up. Some honest people would respond to the posting, some asking for follow-up’s, etc.

Basically this one company was completely polluting our forums with bad publicity and there was nothing we could other than to daily delete their postings. This time we’re better prepared!!!

You’re welcome. I can’t say enough about how positive an experience it’s been. I’m anxiously waiting for version 2

Justin