Don Von Alpha Dom wrote:

I started in 2006, after I saw an ad on porn hub, advertising IMVU as a sex simulator "beyond reality". Back then, IMVU was much more open to sex products. They did not ban sex from IMVU till July of 2007; the same year the IMVU Mafias graduated from an IMVU group to our own website. It was actually an IMVU staff members who told us to make our own website, because our group had gotten too large and too difficult to moderate via the limited functionality offered by IMVU's groups system.

Don Von Alpha Dom wrote:

@sadecatgirlYeah, the group had around 2,500 members after only a few months, and then during it's last couple weeks of existence it jumped to 4,000 members. With great popularity came critiques though. A group of nutzo creators / developers made a thread on the IMVU forums accusing us of harming them via our tutorials on how to get free credits / products (the same tutorials you can find on our site here: viewforum.php?f=64 ). The accusations were that we were somehow lowering the profits of all developers. Anyways, these developers were really pissed off and started creating dummy accounts, which they used to raid the group ... filling our threads with pictures of dead children hanging from trees, with the message "this is what happens to kids who want free stuff". At the same time, our moderators started getting h4c|<7d and disabled. The spam attacks were happening too fast / too often for our remaining moderators to keep up with, and IMVU staff couldn't have a group full of dead child pictures, so they contacted us, told us they needed to shut the group down, and recommended we create our own site ... gave us their full blessing, even recommended phpbb as a system with good moderation features. I agreed, and asked for a bit of time. They said that they would give us a week to move everything to our own website before they would shut the group down. I spent the next week coding like crazy and getting our members moved over. That's how The IMVU Mafias was born.