Just to give everyone a head's up, and in an effort to have transparency - hopefully in a way that will engage the offender productively - i've received the following PM (and my subsequent response): 

removedfornow wrote on 05-04-2021 at 10:29 AM

Hello,

Love your map designs!

I'm the admin over at http://removedfornow.com and we're always looking for new maps for our game.

If you'd be interested please reach out to info@removedfornow.com

Also if you'd like to share any current maps, we'd give you a lifetime premium membership.

 

At some point I think we'll reach out to the admins here and suggest some cross promotion and tournaments. This site is awesome!

Thanks!

my response

i appreciate the reach out, and i think this is a much more appropriate way to do so (assuming you're not spam PMing everyone with the same message) than we've been seeing you do thus far. And with those existing entries into the site, you're already on the owner's radar - and not in a good way. i'd expect he'll reach out to you soon. hopefully it can be resolved to everyone's benefit.  

that being said, had you come at me via this avenue in the first place; i (and many others) would probably check you out and maybe even take you up on your offer. but the first impression of: a) blasting designers' creations as a rip-off of something that you have, when it's clear that they were here well before you were established; b) denigrating things here while at the same time promoting your own site; is just bad form.

I just received the same e-mail. To his credit, he is doing his research and actually playing a variety of boards here.

I'd vote hard against any 'cross promotion'. I checked out the forums at removedfornow.com and it's mostly people complaining about the slow death of the site. Plus this guy's a dick.

asm wrote:

I'd vote hard against any 'cross promotion'. I checked out the forums at removedfornow.com and it's mostly people complaining about the slow death of the site. Plus this guy's a dick.

Just to clarify - 'cause I think I read this wrong the first time - When you say "mostly people complaining about the slow death of the site" you mean the removedfornow.com site. 

Initially with all this I thought the guy was building a new site -- but the narrative really is that he is desperate to save his site. oh well - I guess the cross-promotion is his players should come over here.

go tom!

UPDATE: 

his response to my response, to which i did not respond.

Thanks for getting back to me. I did reach out to a couple other map designers. Maybe it was too much?

I would like to speak with the owners at some point to see if we could cross promote. If you know a direct way, please let me know.

Honestly i just came upon this site about 2 weeks ago. It never seems to come up on searches for Risk type gaming sites, but I'm glad I found it as the maps seems to offer many customized options.

i will if someone feels the desire to. i don't. 

Amidon37 wrote:

When you say "mostly people complaining about the slow death of the site" you mean the removedfornow.com site. 

Yeah, sorry for any confusion. My read of the situation is that removedfornow.com is in a death spiral. Players complaining about servers crashing and turns getting skipped. The admin's solution to games getting ruined by skipped turns due to the site being down was to change a global setting so your turn could get skipped up to 20 times in a row before you got booted from a game. Yikes.

weathertop wrote:

i will if someone feels the desire to. i don't. 

you could tell him to contact [email protected]

LOL

Oof.  This all reminds me that we are lucky Tom still give a shit about wargear.  warfish & this new place both seem to be in much worse shape. 

I ran across a subreddit for WF a while ago. Its main use seems to be so that every 2-3 months someone can post "I guess WF must be down again, I haven't been able to get on for a few days".

>a subreddit for WF

I joined!   I hope it's not in bad taste if I reply to most of the threads telling people they'd be happier here.

yeah apparently at that time I decided NOT to go that far - I did PM a few people that had posted semi-recently, and I posted a post saying "you can do better than WF" hoping that people would reply asking for a recommendation, but it doesn't look like anyone ever did.

it is kinda weird that i'd never heard of removedfornow even tho it was started in '11.

altho there's only been a site or two places that ever did a semi-comprehensive review/mention of online risk sites (WG was on one - as #1 - and not even on the other). i think only 3 or 4 other sites seem to be up and worthy of looking at (at least ones I found and tried) - one was WAY too restrictive, another looked like it had some interesting boards, another didn't and another didn't have much activity.

BTW, i TOTALLY agree that we've been lucky with Tom. altho he doesn't communicate or update near as often as he did the first 5? years, things still get done and keep going.