Membership Poaching

[AmberE 2]

Poaching, to me, is malicious. It's not "Hey, come see this!" it's more like "Leave here and join me here!"

 

That being said, I've never had any issues. My members talk in generalities about other sites. It doesn't bother me. I'm on another site myself, so...

 

Granted, it's easier if it's a different genre/fandom, but hey, as long as they're active on mine too, who am I to complain?

[xexes 108]

My site was once poached maliciously.

 

We had three brand new members who had put in minimum-effort applications, were accepted, but were just uninspiredly hanging about.  One day, we had a guest who needed a lot of help and it was obvious she just wasn't that into our site. She used our cbox to start talking about her own ideas and created her own forum as she talked to the three members specifically (who were coincidentally just as uninspired and with her site). She continued to use our cbox as her own all night as she worked on it with them. Come morning, I temp-banned the poacher after explaining that what she did was bad. The three members never joined her site, never came back to ours, and disappeared back to where they'd come from

 

This story cemented in my mind that at the end of the day, people are people and can't be convinced to do anything against their will. She never stole 3 members because we don't own people, and because even though they applied and accepted, were never going to get into the game anyways. They were on their way out.

[Honorem 219]

They can also do it maliciously but try to be sly about it, had a few of those recently. Constantly bringing up 'their site' at every given opportunity, until someone takes the bait and asks. Then it's links a plenty and 'you guys should come join me there'. The act itself, rather than the potential of losing people, bothers me. One because I have a local core group who I'm not concerned would ditch. And two, well because I pay for premium cbox and I'm sure as hell not paying for the topic of discussion to be about a different site. xD

[Cyn 52]

I've had almost an entire member base stolen, years back, and it's made it very hard for me to trust ever since. That said, I don't mind people talking about other sites if they don't put a link to it in my cbox. My members are pretty loyal anyway, and we recently had someone join the site and start sending private messages to people, asking them to go join their site. Said person was promptly banned as soon as members let me know this was happening.

[TMTC 0]

I never realized that poaching was an issue. It's not something I've ever encountered. Then again, I've stayed away from large games and tried to focus on the smaller active ones. It's kind of baffling that people would do such a thing.