HollandDoc abandons community site because of costs

HollandDoc, one of the themed channels of Dutch public broadcaster VPRO abandons the Privacy Project, an online information portal and Ning-based community site. HollandDoc, that created the Privacy Project together with several art schools, hasn’t contributed to the site since the start of 2009, but kept the site online as a service to users.

On the community site, users could communicate on forums and blogs, as well as share pictures and videos. Last April, the number of users appeared to rise rapidly. However, it turned out that the forum was being showered with spam. To make matters worse, Ning announced to stop offering free use of their community platform.

At the end of August, HollandDoc gets a new web site, where community tools are included. However, the new site arrives too late for the Privacy Project. HollandDoc had not foreseen that Ning would further commercialise their services. The expectations about free services on the Internet do not always come true, unfortunately. All content on the community pages will now be lost.