Stormfront is struggling! Perhaps they’ll die!
Stormfront founder and former Klansman Don Black announced on Tuesday that the white supremacist movement’s first major hate forum is temporarily restricting access to “sustaining members” — users who donate at least five dollars a month — and will be archiving and shuttering its main server on April 6 due to a “financial crisis.”
Black is well-known among white supremacists for perennially complaining about the costs of maintaining the site, which he has threatened to close before. This time, his threats appear to be real.
“I appreciate everybody’s support. But it’s that time of month again, when the big, scary bills hit,” Black wrote to current sustaining members. “Our contributions have once again totaled less than $2000, which is not enough to cover our basic server and radio bills, and this month we no longer have enough personal money to make up the difference.”
I’ll take every sign that our current hideous condition is transient that I can.
I know they’ve got rich fans who are just a skosh too shy to have their name show up on a public payment, but there has to be ways to make truly anonymous donations. Come on, Bannon. Pony up. This is penny ante for you.
What? Have swastikas gone up in price again?
@ 1 Great American Satan
there has to be ways to make truly anonymous donations.
Well, it may depend on Stormfront’s tax status with the IRA (assuming it is still based in the USA) but the Donors Capital foundation or Donors Trust seems a good way to keep donations anonymous in the USA. I doubt it will work if the IRA or the US Justice Dep’t gets aggressive but for normal anonymity, it seems useful.
There is the old “suitcase full of cash” approach allegedly favoured by Nicolas Sarkozy. As long as the donor wears gloves and uses old bills it is likely fairly anonymous.
I believe that back in the 1980’s Pampers’ boxes full of cash were popular in Greece.
PZ:
I think it’s a sign that nazis are tight-fisted with their pennies, and I’d bet most of them don’t want any sort of money trail between them and nazis. Stormfront has been around for half of forever, and that it’s still going is a bad sign. I expect enough nazis will pony up to keep it all alive.
I thought their web host had already shut them down? Or was that the Daily Stormer? It’s so had to keep tabs on all the storm themed racist websites.
They’re probably just going to hang out on reddit and twitter and other platforms for free. But, good fucking riddance to SF.
Both were shutdown by their previous hosting providers (different providers). Both later reappeared, with at least daily stormer using a new hosting provider (in the .ru (Russia) domain); not too sure if stormfront moved or not (but they were definitely shut down for awhile). Daily stormer were kicked off again, and again and again, and apparently are currently up with somewhat different name in an obscure domain apparently owned by one of the hosting providers who’d previously kicked them off.
They might be shutting down to protect their donors, as lawyers are trying to identify their donors.
gijoel@8, Your link is to a report about daily stormer. The OP is about stormfront. Despite the similar names and content-of-hate, they are two different sites founded by two different people. There is presumably some overlap, but the financing is different: As per your link, daily stormer’s financial support (donors) is unknown; in contrast, stormfront is financed mostly by its various levels of paid membership, and some of those members are known (and in April-2014 the SPLC reported “usually less than a dozen donors provide more than half of the income Stormfront takes in each month”).
@blf damn, didn’t read both articles properly. Still any news that makes Nazis sad is good news.
How can it be costing over 2 grand a month to run a server? Something odd there.
Please let it come out that the people running the site are embezzling the money.
I misread the last word in the phrase:
“…archiving and shuttering its main server”
as *sewer*. I am all in favour of the sewer backing up on those alleged “humans”
Thought and prayers
A 48-core, 192GB RAM AWS EC2 instance only costs about $1700/month on my spot check. I threw in a terabyte of monthly data transfer too. Now, they probably can’t actually run on AWS because Amazon only permits governments use their infrastructure for genocide, but there is absolutely no way that you could not run a text forum for a few thousand or tens of thousands of users off of far less infrastructure than that. You could probably run it on a moldy 8-core Xeon with a 100Mbit connection hosted in Cambodia. You could buy that whole computer and a year of colo for that $2k. There must be something else running up their costs than just hosting the Stormfront forum.