Why Would Someone Create A Fake Forum?

It looks to me like he's trying to start a forum without going through the work involved in starting a forum. I have seen people asking to buy dead forums, not to reopen them but to have access to their database, so that they could get some content up before opening another forum, but have always found that to be little more than getting off to a bad start.

When you start a new forum, you're faced with a big problem. No one wants to join a forum that has no members and no content so, unless a new forum owner has a lot of friends who will be willing to help him get started by joining and getting a discussion going, he has to either pay people to make the first posts or create some member accounts and have a discussion with himself until some actual forum members can kick in. There is a bit of disingenuity to either of these options, I suppose, but there are no others, and it's better than stealing content from another forum site.

When someone gains access to the database of another forum in order to incorporate member accounts or posts, I don't know that it matters whether he bought the access from the former forum owner or hacked into it, since he's still taking the content of the forum members who posted in that other forum, and I don't think that's fair to the forum members who are being taken advantage of. If he bought it, then it wouldn't be a crime but it doesn't seem ethical to me. Of course, if he didn't buy it but gained it through some other means, then it's a crime but the owner of the forum that you made the posts on would have to take that up. If he closed it down, he probably doesn't want to be bothered with it. If the forum he got the content from is still up, there are steps that the forum owner can take to have the domain banned in the search engines. Given that his content would be duplicating prior content on another forum, he probably wouldn't do well on searches anyhow.

You'd never get a forum going that way. If outsiders can't read the posts, then the search engine spiders can't index the forum, and if the forum isn't indexed by the search engines, there wouldn't be very many new members. Sure, new members might be recruited by word of mouth, but that would have to come from other members. The first time someone gets mad and takes a bunch of forum members with them elsewhere, there won't be any new ones to take their place, and the forum will die.

An established forum can get away with including a private area that isn't indexed but when forum members start posting only in the private area, that's bad news for the forum because, to any prospective new member, the forum looks dead, as it does to the search engines.

By the way, on that particular forum, it may have had to do with something else entirely, but when I clicked into that forum, it prompted me to upgrade my flash. Since there are too many potential dangers with flash these days, I use flash only on sites that I trust, and even then rarely. When I tried to leave the forum, it kept popping up the flash update prompt and wouldn't let me close the tab. I had to force quit the browser. Again, it may have been unrelated but I won't be going back there.