Inventor website InventorSpot will shut its online forums Monday (Feb. 21), citing lack of resources to police an avalanche of spam from self-promoters.

“Without proper revenue and staffing for the forums, and the overwhelming amount of spam attacking our site daily, we have

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decided it best to temporarily shut down the forums until we can find sufficient resources and support for the forums,” said an inside InventorSpot source.

The forums will retain legacy posts, but will no longer accept new entries.

The United Inventors Association just opened its own forum “as a safe place for inventors to gather and learn,” said UIA Executive Director Mark Reyland.

Edison Nation has operated such a forum for years. Visit edisonnation.com

The practice of spamming or posting comments on sites to advance unrelated commercial interests is the bane of many online forums. Website administrators typically either deny or delete such posts. But either way, this requires manpower to sort the substantive wheat from the spam chaff.

According to internal discussions, debate has raged for months about how to manage the flood of spam to the site’s forums, which have existed since InventorSpot’s founding five years ago.

Who are these spammers?

In an e-mail interview (printed below), InventorSpot Editor Michelle Blu declined to name names.

“It has been really challenging to try to create a safe and informative community for inventors to share information with each other,” she told Inventors Digest.

However, a name that kept cropping up in InventorSpot posts as well as in interviews for this story is Stephen Key. Many complained he crossed the line in self promoting; others defended him.

Key has not returned phone or email requests for comment.

Key operates an inventor services company in California and once hosted a forum, but shut it down many months ago. He also has been promoting an upcoming book, including on InventorSpot forums (see image above).

Key is a passionate inventor advocate and has earned a reputation as being attentive to his customers – or “students” as he refers to them. He enjoys a loyal, although undetermined, number of followers.

Indeed, Key has cultivated a Captain Success persona, indicating in ads, e-mails and blog posts he’s made “millions” through licensing deals without the need of a patent or IP protection – even as he was taking a six-figure loan out on his house, public records show.

Edison Nation (a sister company of Inventors Digest) banned him from its forum more than a year ago for violating anti-spamming guidelines.

It would be no small irony if Key has helped silence one of the inventor community’s longest-running online platforms for inventor information.

Likewise, Pittsburgh-based InventHelp, an invention submission company, has been aggressive with forums, often sending strongly worded e-mails to sites demanding they remove what the company considers unflattering posts.

InventHelp, for instance, last year sued and later settled with IPWatchdog.com over posts on that site.

While such tactics are not spam, the threats and filings of lawsuits consume time and resources of staff-stretched websites. Blu of InventorSpot noted that complaints from unnamed companies to remove posts contributed to closing its forums.

InventorSpot was founded as AmericanInventorSpot.com in March 2006 as an online place to discuss the short-lived reality television show American Inventor. The site has a longstanding policy of not accepting advertising from certain invention companies.

“There is NOTHING we are trying to sell,” InventorSpot states. “All of the revenues to run the site are made solely from advertising to our visitors and voluntary donations from the inventor community.”

With regard to its forums, “… participants who actively participate on our site with relevant non-promotional information are welcome to add to their signatures a reasonable link to their company/business so that interested members can find out more about them,” the site says.

InventorSpot calls itself “the most popular invention related website in the world.”

When it comes to its forums, it may have been a victim of its own success.

E-mail interview with InventorSpot Editor Michelle Blu

ID: [Shutting the forums] It’s sorta like a death in the family, even though as a quasi competitor I never posted – I wanted to avoid the appearance of being a spammer, actually.

MB: Thanks. I would not call it a death. More like a temporary leave of absence!

InventorSpot.com has so many things we are working on and we are excited about sharing them with our inventors. We had to make a strategic decision to focus our resources to those things that we believe will help InventorSpot continue to grow and provide more value to inventors in the future.

ID: We also can relate to the (problem of) spam. It’s relentless and consumes an increasing amount of our company’s resources to police.

MB: Yes, it requires someone being around on the site 24 by 7 and the volume of spammers is unbelievable.

ID: Are you at liberty to name those who were causing a lot of the headache?

MB: We will not name names. 🙂

It has been really challenging to try to create a safe and informative community for inventors to share information with each other.

Many businesses focused on taking advantage of inventors do not appreciate the type of critical information provided in our forums. They are quick to approach us whenever anything negative about them is posted by a user. So way too much of our time and energy has been spent responding to complaints and threats of litigation.

And of course, any successful site needs proper care and supervision. We simply do not have the manpower at this time to continue building on our other initiatives at InventorSpot.com and also support the InventorSpot.com forums adequately. We think it important that we focus on building on what we do well and better than anyone else.

ID: What were some of the most satisfying aspects of the InventorSpot forums?

MB: I think the forums by most measures have been a great success and an invaluable resource for inventors. The most satisfying aspect of the InventorSpot.com forums has been the unique community of inventors that we have built.

We had some amazing supporters on our site who spent endless hours volunteering their time and sharing their knowledge with other inventors. We are really proud of the fact that we built a uniquely safe place for inventors to gather. It was a place with absolutely no agenda other than inspiring inventors and helping them be successful and I know that our inventors really appreciated that.

ID: What would have to happen for InventorSpot to switch the forums back on?

MB: Our management team has decided it is better to temporarily close the InventorSpot forum rather than to continue something that we are not supporting properly with our current level of staffing. We really want to do a great job on everything we do and, frankly, we were struggling to put in the necessary resources into the forum that the inventor community deserved.

We ban almost all of the invention companies that are interested in advertising in our forum. So it is challenging to support the forums without donations from the inventor community.

But we do not want to ask our inventors for donations. Nor do we want to trim back on the other initiatives we are working on. So we have decided to focus our energy and resources to making our main site InventorSpot.com more successful. As InventorSpot.com continues to grow, it will be easier for us to make the necessary investments to the inventor forum in the future.

It is also possible that perhaps we will find a suitable partner someday who shares our commitment to providing a completely safe and informative forum for inventors who can help in supporting the forum.

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