As a complete outsider to this situation, I'm trying to understand what happened and why there are such hard feelings about it
I am the person who filed the TOS reports to Forumotion that resulted in the forum being shut down.
It started with my TOS violation report filled in early March 2026.
I was a member of RDF since 2015 with ~4000 posts, I engaged in normal military talk there and in late 2025 I became more active in the non-military subforums, pushing back against racism, sexism, anti-LGBT bigotry, together with a Vietnamese user.
I tried to convince the admin (GarryB) to alter the forum rules so this kind of content (hate speech/incitement) stops being accepted. I tried to convince him on the forum and via PM and he would respond with long, philosophically sounding replies about the west, double standards and so on.
In early March 2026, I filled a Terms of Service violation report via
https://www.forumotion.com/litigation in order to convince the admin to change the rules and ban bigotry. Despite the name "litigation", this isn't a lawsuit, it's a normal platform-level complaint that the forum violates Terms of Service.
The admin published the text of the complaint in public a few days later together with my IP, ISP provider and city. I told him to remove my IP via PM and he did it but left my ISP provider and city in place. The complaint included 2 posts - a call to mass killing of Russian liberals (IIRC, it started with "Russian liberasts are hardcore traitors who deserve to be shot") and a post by another member which was a long rant calling Jews evil, demons in humans form and claiming they teach human sacrifice of non-Jews and so on.
I did not initially tell anyone that I was the reporter and the admin did not disclose that. I wrote a PM meant for the admin to convince him to change the rules and ban bigotry but since I had talked to another use the same day, I sent it to him. He demanded that I withdraw the complaint and threatened me that he'll expose my forum identity if I don't do what he says. I declined, said I cannot withdraw the complaint and he outed me on the forum.
A follow up discussion then took place. Several users accused me of baing a western agent, said the complaint is blackmail, censorship, engaged in whataboutism and so on, they blamed everyone and everything except themselves. The admin did not delete the flagged posts, he reposted Forumotion rules (which ban such things) but he tucked them into a minor "rules" subforum which nobody visits, whereas the thread about the TOS complaint was made into a Global Announcement visible from every forum and subforum.
Several weeks passed and the deadline expired. At that period I did not think I'll do anything more and thought I'll just keep participating in the forum. But new TOS-breaking posts kept appearing and I kept pushing back, including against the admin (I told him posts calling for murder of civilians are forbidden by the EU law, he said they're legit because it's a response to the west toppling the Ukrainian govt in 2014).
This ended up with me filling several more complaints in late August. The reports included racism, calls to mass killing of Ukrainian civilians and Holocaust denial among other things. I delted my account on the forum 2 days before the complaint reached the admin simply because I thought this would help me make a clean break from the forum to focus on other things. Then in early September the admin published the text of the new litigations and outed me , then another user called me vermin (2x in two separate threads) and called for a ban of my ISP range and I was called a scumbag and a snake.
I don't think I have done anything wrong. Reporting hate speech to the host is a normal thing and an open minded community shouldn't react like this. In fact, TOS violation complaints should be private and handled confidentially by the admin.