By Lee Raconteur

Two months ago RAMZPaul, the former editor of MGTOW forum on ProBoards, wrote a piece about the tendency for the critics of Men’s Rights to engage in silencing campaigns such as complaining to the hosting account of your website to have it removed. Since most hosters are busy and cannot be bothered to fight for their clients, almost all of them will instantly cave to this politically correct terror tactic. Were it true that all that the critics of Men’s Issues do is complain to the abuse department of your local server farm – they have other arrows in their quiver and they began to use them last week.

Since that article has appeared and the closure of MGTOW, three other fora at that location – Happy Bachelors, MasculistMan and the forum I moderated, Don’t Marry, have all fallen under the knife of the ‘Abuse Department’ in the past two weeks. Being the enterprising sorts that we are, two of three of those fora were reconstituted within 12 hours at new locations.

What happened next, however, was surprising and more than a bit shocking.

On Thursday, March 29th a co-ordinated attack began on several sites, including the three *new* successor sites I mentioned above. This included script attacks to seize control of email accounts, .php exploits, DDOS via serial uploading of large files to overload a server, attempts to spam forum registrations, repeated hits on the 404 Error page causing a spike in bandwidth, profile spamming of fora and, most troubling, a successful DNS redirect exploit that had those three fora and several others redirect to other random pages for the better part of two days. The targeted sites were only and exclusively Men’s Issues in nature and content – no other sites that we are aware of were targeted in this fashion by this particular collection of methods. The timing of this, of course, with the arrival of April Fool’s Day in North America is likely not coincidental, but in light of the ongoing weeks long campaign against content such as appears here on The Spearhead, these new elevations were more than an annoyance.

The writing of this article was delayed by several days after I received the go-ahead, due to further attacks on my site and the sites of others in the Men’s Issues community. There have been several ‘Eras’ within the community when many sites and fora were deleted, or experienced a “burndown”. 2000-2003 was one of them. 2007 saw a few blogs go dark, but this episode backed by skillful and willful hacking attempts is the largest and most focused to date.

It is no secret to many old guard that there are several sites that due to security exploits and the absense of their owners, have fallen in to a state of limbo and disrepair even while they still maintain a visible web presence. This technological weakness of Men’s Issues sites is something that must be addressed so that we can maintain secure sites going forward. Several forum and site owners are working on a set of guidelines tailored to those of us who have a website. While much of this is generic to basic server security there are several methods that are employed against us that are particular to the Men’s Issues community and must be addressed if we are to be successful with administering our own websites going forward.

However, a defensive strategy is just one leg of our response to such attacks. We must also respond to these continued and ongoing attacks against our sites that have, as far as I have been able to determine, been ongoing on the Internet since 1998.We must stop acting only from a defensive posture. We need to add an offensive aspect to our campaign to secure our right to free speech. This has gone on long enough.

To borrow heavily from Jean Luc Picard:

“They invade our webspace, and we fall back. They assimilate countless sites and fora, and we fall back. Not again. Not this time. The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!”

We cannot continue to construct sites, build a viewership and basically wait for someone to take them down, only to rebuild them with tighter security and more precautions over and over again. Each time this occurs we lose a bit of momentum, energy and focus. Crucially, we lose the ability to present our sites as potential money makers to advertisers; this is an essential step to self-sufficiency, a perpetual web presence, and respectability.

Some members inevitably cannot find the new site and are lost.

Content is lost, threads, ideas, arguments and insight that help to build a strong case are deleted. Many ideas posted on fora are picked up by bloggers and expanded upon. This crucial incubator of ideas must not be allowed to be removed every few years for most sites.

In addition to posting articles to blogs such as The Spearhead we must also engage in a concerted – but completely legal and legitimate – campaign to confront those who pull the plug on our sites with little or no warning, the bloggers who openly and actively plan and execute intentional TOS attacks to get a hosting account terminated, and those who campaign via forum membership to willfully violate TOS agreements. A mix of articles posted to various article aggregating sites, blog posts, site articles and forum posts must be brought to bear upon this constant, pernicious attack on our ability to say what we wish to say and think what we wish to think, and freely express ourselves without the threat of harassment.

This has gone on for 15+ years now. We must actively and aggressively take actions against those who are constantly assaulting our rights to free speech and free thought.

The Era of Reaction must end.