> The threat of a banned troll DDoSing your forum has been a risk for 30 years, yet the flourishing golden age of forums was before anyone had heard of cloudflare.
Private forums in my experience stopped being a thing around 2010-2015-ish. The first deathknell was metasploit which made 0wning a target so much more easy than it was before, the second and final blow were "ddos for hire" services, running on cryptocurrencies that promised (and delivered) true anonymity, and using mass hacked consumer devices as a botnet that was much harder to defeat against than an STRO in some datacenter where you (or your DC) could just block the IP address.
Private forums in my experience stopped being a thing around 2010-2015-ish. The first deathknell was metasploit which made 0wning a target so much more easy than it was before, the second and final blow were "ddos for hire" services, running on cryptocurrencies that promised (and delivered) true anonymity, and using mass hacked consumer devices as a botnet that was much harder to defeat against than an STRO in some datacenter where you (or your DC) could just block the IP address.