well bonzi, i'm happy you asked:
i am a former member of good old overgrow.com until it got shut down by idiots who broke the rules...
then i was a member of the oaksterdam online community until IT got shut down by idiots who broke the rules...
so now when i see more idiots who are breaking the rules, i try to remind them of them so that this community (which i am a part of as well as you) DOESN'T GET SHUT DOWN LIKE THE REST...
GET IT NOW???
i respect your right to feel any way that you want to about what i write, but i insist that you respect my right as well to try to keep this place civil as well as open...
getting your servers confiscated and members arrested is a crap way to start the day...
While I agree that the community has certain responsibility to assure that the site remains unmolested I can't help but point out that the site admins have done woefully little to protect their users or servers from LEO.
TSL encryption ensures that the contents of posts cannot be read by middle men as they are being sent to the server.
Hosting content through a pseudonymous overlay network can greatly improve both the safety of the server and the privacy of the user. If outside access is necessary then hosts can be used as bridges into the pseudonymous overlay network.
These pseudonymous overlay networks do not use conventional DNS servers so they cannot be hindered by domain name seizure. Determining the actual IP and location of hosts on a pseudonymous overlay network is non-trivial (even for governments) with a properly hardened host.
Further more on these networks users do not need to reveal an IP address to the server. This makes fears of logging and linking IPs to user accounts irrelevant. Though that does not mean the host cannot take measures to lessen or defeat user anonymity.
Unfortunately things are going to be a game of grab-ass until admins of forums like this start proactively thinking about LEO harassment. I2P, Freenet, and Tor are all suitable for hosting information and facilitating communications. They provide better protection to all involved. It is almost silly that grow forums are still being hosted on the clearnet like this.