This is what I was thinking. Not every site that has had its url spammed across forums and in comment-spam did it themselves. The other side of black hat SEO is

This is what I was thinking. Not every site that has had its url spammed across forums and in comment-spam did it themselves. The other side of black hat SEO is destroying competitors by triggering Google penalties against them. I used to run a forum but I shut it down because of spam. It was a shame. It was well ranked on Google and I think this is why spam was such a problem. It was a nice before it was overwhelmed. I did moderator approved sign up but I was getting several hundred sign ups a day. It wasn't possible to determine who was human and who wasn't. Captchas and security questions decreased spam for a couple of days but it would soon come up again. I added 10 posts before you can post a link.. but then the forum was filled with non-link spam posts. Stuff like "I agree." "I appreciate your post, it was very helpful." I added moderator approved first posts but it meant there was a queue of a 250+ posts a day. People stuck in this queue, especially on weekends would often give up on the site. In the end people started losing interest as moderators were struggling with the battle against spam.. During this time I actually got a few requests for links to be taken down. I refused them all. It wasn't out of anger. It simply wasn't worth my time. I would need to look at each url requested. Determine if it was spam or if it added value to the site. Then choose whether to delete it or not. Each request would take 5-10 minutes to process. Perhaps I should have started charging. I could then have given beer money to the brave moderators who for 18 months tirelessly swept for the forum. I see nothing wrong with sites charging say $5-10 to permanently remove a link from a website and make it impossible for it to be posted again.