[Wayne Luke]

Originally Posted by Spank

You can't buy users, you can only tell them about your place, which is advertising, which is done all the time. You can't stop them members from not going visiting the place you bought them from and keep them at your place. You could buy the board with members then shut the board down and offer the existing members your place to visit, but that would be buying the board rather than just buying the members

Mailing lists are bought and sold every day. Some companies like Publisher's Clearinghouse actually make their money selling their mailing lists, including emails. Why do you think when you order something from one company, you start getting catalogs from a dozen different companies?

This would be no different. Forum A with 10,000 users sells those users including username, password and email address to Forum B for 35 cents per user. They just made $3,500. They can then sell it to Forum C, D and E for the same price.

Really not something that would be difficult to accomplish. Personally, I feel this is unethical and wouldn't participate in such a transaction but many people do on a daily basis. Someone can go buy a DVD with every address in the United States on it for about a $100 at Best Buy and then sell that data to others as well. You can find more specialized databases on the Internet. Most likely if you search hard enough you will find people selling their mailing lists for newsletters and forums.