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General Fakirs
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YAHOO AND MSN GROUPS After the explosion of The Newsgroups in the mid 1990's the next big thing to hit online fakery was the "groups", mainly from MSN and Yahoo!. These groups started to make big impressions in the late 1990's after the two groups from Yahoo, "clubs" and "groups" merged into one super community. With this change and the MSN groups also becoming popular as communities it was a natural route for the fakirs to create their own communities there. The groups made it easy for fakirs who had no experience with HTML to found a community. The fakirs could post their fakes and the owners could regulate their members without any problems giving the fakirs and collectors the opportunity to get together for the first time. With these groups also came traded links which was not done often on newsgroups. With this new feature it gave fakirs and collectors the opportunity to go to all fakes groups, bringing with it bigger competition for active fakirs and bigger communities. At the height of these groups strenth there was as many as 300 Yahoo groups and just as many MSN groups. Most were run by collectors who traded fakes but many were also run as active fakirs communities by fakirs themselfs. One of these groups (and perhaps one of the biggest Yahoo groups) was Astons group. Aston was a British fakir who started his own fake group as a place to post his own fakes and give other fakirs the opportunity to post theirs. One of the larger groups on MSN was The Charlatans group. Once again he was British and started the group to get fakirs and fake together. One of the biggest draws for these groups after the initial ease of set-up was their sense of community. Before the groups came along it was only newsgroups where there was zero sense of community. The groups gave the fakirs a place to meet, discuss fakes, faking secrets and essentially laid the ground work for future faking communities. It was however not all rosey for the fake groups. At the time (late 1990's) fakirs were widely considered to be an illegal group of cyber criminals by continusly breaking international copyright law. This meant Yahoo and MSN closed fake groups as and when they were discovered. This drove many fakirs to return to the newsgroups, which essentially saved the newsgroups from becoming obsolete. After a new clause was found in US law which meant it was difficult to see fakirs as criminals Yahoo decided to leave the faking communities be. However by this time many fakirs had went to seek new ways to be a community and found the forum. Adding to this Yahoo and MSN making size restrictions on pictures posted on groups it meant high quality fakes were no longer possable on groups. With these new problems and an even better community in the forum being widely accepted the days of the groups were coming to an end. The few groups who stayed active and the fakirs who stuck with them only proofed to fall further behind the mainstream faking community. This was most noticeable when fakirs finally did cross over from groups to forums years later and could only work with poor quality material and had little knowledge of 21st century faking. Today there are only a hand full of active faking groups still active in Yahoo and MSN. These groups are now usally only used by newbies who do not yet know about forum communities.
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