Originally posted by: BrianC
Well, regardless of how it actually went, that was by far the public understanding of the events that unfolded and Anandtech did nothing to dispel that. Actually, if I recall, Anand himself made the decree and sited legal problems as the justification. For those curious as to how things started, I'll give a brief history!
Several years ago someone posted about a price mistake on Buy.com in the Anandtech technical forums. This spread like wildfire and overnight Anandtech became the hub of this "deal". Well, Buy.com didn't handle the situation very well and there was a lot of ill will towards the general public. There were so many off topic posts in the technical forums that a new forum was created called "Hot Deals" so that the Wounded Monitor Children can botch and moan to themselves (I was one ).
The Hot Deals forum took off as the central site for deals. For a few years, every single deal site revolved around the Anandtech Hot Deals world. There were no other deal forums with 1/10th the traffic of the Anandtech Hot Deals forum. Then came the [disputed] issue with the coupon codes and they became banned. There was public unhappiness and essentially a revolt occurred. For the next month, several sites popped up out of nowhere to try to take the unhappy traffic. It wasn't until Tim of FW created a site with the same FuseTalk forum software did the revolters find a home. Tim took a fight till the end attitude towards legal challenges and won out at the end.
In terms of Hot Deals, Anandtech was the pinnacle at its time. The exodus literally created multiple other sites that are now popular today. A number of these other sites wouldn't even exist if the coupon codes were never pulled at Anandtech to begin with.