ArkRoyal
Administrator
In October 2012 there was a major upheaval between the two owners at UKBT and there were concerns that UKBT could disappear from the net.
UKBT was definitely THE betting website but in recent times, due mainly to greed, it had lost its direction and was no longer the place it once was.
Myself, Bob and Dave had become more and more disillusioned with what was happening and when members started to voice their fears decided to start The UK Betting Forum (TUBF).
Initially it was envisaged that TUBF would be a ready made bolthole should UKBT be pulled. We started as an invite only forum running on ProBoards as they offered a free forum and hosting.
A core group of members who had voiced similar concerns to us were invited and these members invited others that they respected.
Our hope was that every member would take an active part on the forum by joining in the discussions but this wasn't to be and a minority were happy to read everything but rarely posted.
We therefore took the decision to have an Inner Sanctum, which was an area of the forum that was only available to those members that were contributing and in fact this included the vast majority of members.
For the first 3 months everything went great, TUBF was buzzing and seemed to be a little oasis of calm away from the storms at UKBT.
Then on December 27 2012 we got notification from ProBoards that they were shutting us down. Why? Well their terms of service do not allow gambling based sites so they were within their rights to do so. But there are many many other gambling forums on ProBoards out there still running! In all likelihood 'someone' probably complained to ProBoards and they had no alternative but to pull the plug.
Panic ensued, we only had 7 days to find a new home!
I had already registered http://www.theukbettingforum.co.uk previously but had no idea where to host it. Step forward Scruffula who offered us free use of his hosting service - top man Scruff.
ProBoards do not offer anyway to transfer the content from their forums, so we had to copy and paste individual posts from the old forum to here, step forward Bob who was a star in sorting out the Inner Sanctum.
When we were on Proboards we were almost invisible to the likes of Google but after moving we were suddenly popping up on search engines and we realised that we would start to have new members joining that we did not know.
We felt as a community that this would not be a bad thing as all forums need 'new blood' and ideas but it strengthend our resolve to keep the Inner Sanctum. I then tried contacting a number of posters who used to be very active on UKBT but had not been posting in recent times in the hope that they may decide that this is a forum they would like to post on and I am pleased to say that some have signed up.
This brings us pretty much up to date and in closing I would like to welcome any new members reading this and thank the existing members for making this forum what it is.
All the Best
AR
UKBT was definitely THE betting website but in recent times, due mainly to greed, it had lost its direction and was no longer the place it once was.
Myself, Bob and Dave had become more and more disillusioned with what was happening and when members started to voice their fears decided to start The UK Betting Forum (TUBF).
Initially it was envisaged that TUBF would be a ready made bolthole should UKBT be pulled. We started as an invite only forum running on ProBoards as they offered a free forum and hosting.
A core group of members who had voiced similar concerns to us were invited and these members invited others that they respected.
Our hope was that every member would take an active part on the forum by joining in the discussions but this wasn't to be and a minority were happy to read everything but rarely posted.
We therefore took the decision to have an Inner Sanctum, which was an area of the forum that was only available to those members that were contributing and in fact this included the vast majority of members.
For the first 3 months everything went great, TUBF was buzzing and seemed to be a little oasis of calm away from the storms at UKBT.
Then on December 27 2012 we got notification from ProBoards that they were shutting us down. Why? Well their terms of service do not allow gambling based sites so they were within their rights to do so. But there are many many other gambling forums on ProBoards out there still running! In all likelihood 'someone' probably complained to ProBoards and they had no alternative but to pull the plug.
Panic ensued, we only had 7 days to find a new home!
I had already registered http://www.theukbettingforum.co.uk previously but had no idea where to host it. Step forward Scruffula who offered us free use of his hosting service - top man Scruff.
ProBoards do not offer anyway to transfer the content from their forums, so we had to copy and paste individual posts from the old forum to here, step forward Bob who was a star in sorting out the Inner Sanctum.
When we were on Proboards we were almost invisible to the likes of Google but after moving we were suddenly popping up on search engines and we realised that we would start to have new members joining that we did not know.
We felt as a community that this would not be a bad thing as all forums need 'new blood' and ideas but it strengthend our resolve to keep the Inner Sanctum. I then tried contacting a number of posters who used to be very active on UKBT but had not been posting in recent times in the hope that they may decide that this is a forum they would like to post on and I am pleased to say that some have signed up.
This brings us pretty much up to date and in closing I would like to welcome any new members reading this and thank the existing members for making this forum what it is.
All the Best
AR
